Page 9 of Just One Bite

Chapter Six

Parker

“I’m here,” I whisper into her thigh.

My lips graze warm skin, and her faint whimpers fill my head like a song.

“Oh, Parker. I need you.” She moans.

“Olivia, I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. I’ve been looking for you.”

I wake with Olivia on my mind, but I have no idea why. Suddenly, helping her and her sisters is the first thing on my to-do list. We caught the tail end of orientation, and Olivia was exhausted after her transfusion she didn’t want to do much, aside from visit the dance department booth.

My room is dark as I throw on my school uniform and grab my gym bag by the door. I’m careful not to slam it before slowly making my way into the dimness of the hall. It’s early morning and not many students are up.

“Are you stalking me?” Olivia’s pointed whisper is feet from me, so I spin to face her.

“Stalking? No. I have practice in the morning. I should be asking you that. I do this every morning. Why are you up so early?”

“The studio is open, and I have to dance consistently to stay in shape.”

She’s dressed in a leotard and tights with a bag slung over her shoulder and her hair pulled into a bun. It’s so—

Fuck. Parker, stop it. We’re just pretending we didn’t almost kiss yesterday and my hands weren’t under her shirt. Like that was a completely normal way for strangers to say hello.

“Ballet, right?”

She nods and starts down the hall, and I naturally follow.

“Let me walk you. Just in case. I’d rather not worry about you walking around campus in the dark.”

The need to protect her is still very prevalent, and the tension in my chest disintegrates when she accepts my offer.

She says nothing else, but every few seconds, I spy her looking over at me as she picks at her nail polish.

When we reach the studio, her momentum stops, and she opens her mouth to speak.

Her room key falls from her hand and lands with a clink on the floor, and we both reach to grab it.

When I step closer, her eyes shoot up to me.

Our hands touch as I relinquish it to her, then it’s just me looking down at her. Again. Something charged moves between us in the silence.

“I’ll check in later?” I offer her an out and step back.

She shakes her head, then hurries away from me like I’ve just confessed my undying love for her or something, and I resolve to let it go. Weirdo.

“Gavin, come on.”

The ice rink is one of the worst places to have this conversation because it’s so fucking loud, but I ask him to meet me there after practice since it’s important. Also, it takes me a good thirty minutes to clean up and towel off all the blood before I hit the showers.

“No. And at least try to address me as Alpha in public.”

“You can’t be fucking serious,” I spit.

Gavin leans against the wooden post while I shrug off my gear on the player’s bench and my team exits the ice.

His voice burns my skin, like my blood knows I’m taking orders from another alpha.

It’s an involuntary thing. “ A natural rejection of the bond ,” he’d said.

I’m lucky he let me join his pack, but it’s painfully obvious I can’t stay even if I wanted to. I try not to think about it.

“Rules are rules. I can’t break tradition for just any girl you want to protect. I don’t let the others do it, so I can’t let you.”

As a legacy pack leader, Gavin doesn’t make the rules in his pack. He just follows what’s been laid out before him by his father and grandfather. I understand it even if it is infuriating. But still—

“They need help. I’m supposed to just watch them get torn apart this year? I thought we protected humans.”

“We do. But we’re loyal to ourselves first. We can’t protect random humans that have no connection to our pack.”

My stick splinters and cracks in my hand, and Gavin solemnly takes a seat next to me.

“I’m sorry, Parker. I wish I could help. But I can’t play favorites.”

It’s not Gavin’s fault. He’s done nothing but risk getting his ass chewed by his father for me since we met. Alphas taking in other alphas is more than a little frowned upon.

I met Gavin and his pack my first day at Doxlothia.

They’d set up a booth at orientation looking for new pack members.

All of the packs on campus do it, but none of them wanted anything to do with me.

Gavin was the only one who greeted me with a smile.

I didn’t ask if I could join, he asked me if I wanted to.

Back then, I knew very little about what I wanted, but I did know I didn’t want to be a lone wolf anymore.

My pack is gone, so I knew the only way I’d get even a sliver of that closeness again was to join someone else’s pack or create my own.

I’d heard him on the phone with his dad when he said it made their entire pack and his legacy look like a joke. He’d disgraced his family name sticking his neck out for me.

“Maybe you can look out for them another way? I know you’ll figure it out.”

Gavin is used to me doing this. Sticking my nose into other people’s business. I had to make a stop to see Finn earlier to ensure no one was giving him a hard time.

“Okay,” I start to say the word, but it hurts to get out. “Okay, Alpha.”

Gavin flashes his perfect white teeth at me. He almost hates hearing me call him Alpha because he can feel my hesitation and rejection. I try to mean it, I really do.

“And I know this is a shit time to mention this, but now that you’re a second-year … finding a mate should be high on your priority list.”

“I know.”

All packs are different; some have old traditions, and some don’t uphold any traditions at all.

It depends on the family who founded the pack.

Gavin’s family is strict in the mating realm where it’s mandatory for everyone in their pack to find a mate by the end of their schooling term.

Gavin is one of the many in a line of his elders who has gone to Doxlothia, and all of them were mated before their third year. Gavin found his year one.

“Maybe you’ll join The Hunt this year?”

“No,” I say.

The Hunt is a werewolf exclusive ceremony. Weres come from all over to pick their mates from a pool of volunteers.

“You’re not even trying.”

“Practice keeps me busy.”

He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t need to. Gavin agreed I could stay in his pack as long as I needed to, but that meant I had to follow all their rules.

“You've got enough shit to stress about. Don’t worry about me. I’ll figure it out,” I say.

Gavin rubs the stubble on his chin. He keeps his beard and his hair buzzed during school, but he grew it out over the summer we spent together.

“You’ve got your pick of the whole school. I don’t get what the issue is.”

I don’t either. “None of them feel right. It’s like I don’t feel what I’m supposed to feel.”

My mom used to say meeting my dad was like finding out the sky was purple when you’d been told it was blue your entire life. It was like discovering a fact that had always been true but not seeing it before, and when she did, she couldn’t stop staring in awe at the thing she found.

She’d tell me their love story over and over again when I was a child.

How she was meant to marry someone else.

Her father arranged her marriage. That’s pretty common for werewolves.

But when she’d met my father at Doxlothia, the world stopped and she never thought about another man again.

Her dad wasn’t happy, but she created her own pack and married my father.

They both went on to do work in the Werewolf Council.

It wasn’t easy for him to get in as a vampire, but they were such an unstoppable force.

That’s what Mom said—she exaggerated a lot .

I haven’t felt it yet.

“I get it. You’ll find your purple sky,” he jests, nudging me in the ribs.

I smile. He’s the only one I’ve ever told that story to.

Forcing my attention back to the ice, I remind myself why I’m here. It’s never been about girls for me. The Rage team is all I have as far as a future. It’s that or my dad dragging me to work with him on the Werewolf Council, and that’s my last resort. I need to stay focused.

But there’s this strange itch in the back of my skull that makes me wonder what Olivia is doing right now.