Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 151

Chapter 151

Jaxon

I’m out for a run, hoping Skye and Nicolai will have finished breakfast and moved on with their day by the time I return, when Noah calls to check in.

He does this regularly-the check-in call, the one that is technically about Ironwood logistics but is actually about making sure I’m still okay. He’s been doing it my entire adult life, like fate appointed him my big brother when I lost my own. I’ve been failing to fool him for equally as long.

“Something happened,” he says, about four minutes into the call.

“Nothing I want to talk about.” I state firmly, a warning to drop the subject.

As usual, he ignores me completely. “Jax.”

“She’s happy, Noah.” I say it the way I might say it’s raining. Weather report. Flat and true and with no emotion. Really happy. In ways I never-” I stop.

“I know,” Noah says. Gives me time. Doesn’t push. “I’ve known for a while. But so have you, Jax. So what’s changed?”

“I didn’t know it could look like that.” I’m seeing her face in the throes of ecstasy even as I speak and I hate that I can’t stop seeing it. “Like someone really-like she knows she matters so absolutely to someone that it frees her soul.”

“She always mattered that way,” Noah says. It’s not unkind. He says it the way you say something that’s true and needs to be said directly. “She just didn’t matter that much to you.”

I don’t have a response to that.

“No,” I say eventually. “She wasn’t.”

We stay on the line for a while after that without talking, in the way of two people who’ve known each other long enough that silence is also a form of conversation.

“You’re going to be okay,” Noah says finally.

“I know.” I groan, scrubbing a hand down my face, willing away the emotional exhaustion.

“You don’t sound like you know.” He pushes.

“I know it in the way that you know things you haven’t felt yet,” I say. “I know it’s true. I’m working on feeling it.”

Noah accepts this. Says goodnight, hangs up. And I force myself to go through the motions of my day until it’s socially acceptable to retire, by which I mean go hide in my room.

I don’t just hide though. I drink.

Not to get drunk-I have the monitor on the nightstand and I’m on overnight duty and I take that seriously. I drink the way you drink when you need something to do with your hands and to not think quite so hard. Two fingers. Then another two fingers.

The evening is quiet. But despite the whiskey, my mind isn’t, Noah’s words keep circling: she always mattered that way. She just didn’t matter that much to you.

I think about the bond. I can still feel it. Have felt it for months-throughout the divorce proceedings, through the

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visits, through moving in here-as a low hum. Background noise that I’d mostly learned to ignore, the way you

earn to ignore a sound that’s always present but has nothing to say that makes a difference. The thread connecting me to Skye just is, biological and involuntary and independent of anything either of us chose.

Tonight it feels different. More present than it’s been in a while. Like my body is insisting on something that my mind is trying to let go.

I sit with the distance between those two things. The thread says: still connected. She’s still yours. The bond holds.

My mind says: she isn’t. She made choices. You made choices. Let her go.

But my body keeps insisting. The thread keeps holding. And I sit in the west wing with two empty glasses and Noah’s voice in my head and I don’t know yet how to close the distance between what I know and what I feel.

The realization doesn’t come cleanly. Nothing does, when it actually matters. Instead it hits me sideways, the way hard things tend to-when I’m thinking about something else, or think I am. I’m looking at the photo of Benji on the desk. Framed, the one Skye gave me the day I moved in. His scrunched face at six weeks, wrapped in his blanket the way newborns are.

I’m thinking about Benji. And then I’m thinking about what I saw in the office. And then I’m thinking about Skye’s face all over again.

And then I’m thinking about the bond. And it occurs to me-sideways, without warning-that the bond is the last thing I’m holding that isn’t mine to hold.

Not because she’s forced it on me. She hasn’t. She’s never once weaponized it, never used it as leverage, never even brought it up as something I owe her resolution on. It just exists. Has always just existed.

But I’ve been holding onto it whether I realized it or not.

Not pursuing her I’ve kept that promise, I know I’ve kept it. Not making demands or creating pressure. But I’ve also not fully released her. Because as long as the bond exists, my wolf has something to lean toward. Some thread that says: still connected. Not over. Something still holds.

I’ve been using it, without examining it, as a reason not to completely let go. The bond is the last argument my wolf keeps making.nAnd the thing I understand, looking at my son’s photo in the dark, is that it’s an argument that isn’t mine to make anymore.

She didn’t choose it. I didn’t choose it. We were both handed it and neither of us asked. She’s building a life without it. I’ve been standing here holding the thread.

I eventually fell asleep in the chair. Glass on the desk. Monitor quiet. Noah’s words still circling in whatever level of sleep keeps those things circling.

The monitor wakes me at 3 AM. Not crying-the stirring sound. The one that means Benji is between sleep cycles, resettling, might go back down on his own. I’m up anyway. Have learned to be.

I go to the nursery. He’s in the crib, eyes still closed. I stand at the railing and watch him and he settles without incident. I stay anyway.

This is something I’ve started doing, standing at this crib. Thinking about what Benji deserves. Not just a father he has that, he’ll always have that. But two parents who aren’t carrying something incomplete. Something unresolved that colors every room they share.

The thread is still there. I feel it even now, standing here. The low hum. What if I was the one who ended it?

Not waiting for her to find the right moment, because she must be thinking about it. Not requiring her to manage

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one more thing. Just-doing it.

go back to the west wing. Sit at the desk. Open my contacts.

Gianna Romano’s number is there-it’s been in my phone since the divorce proceedings, never deleted. The sharp, efficient woman who made the case against me in the council chamber and made it well.

She’d know what this involves. What it requires. I look at the number for a long time.

There’s one more thing I could give her, I think. One more choice I could make that isn’t about what I want and is only about what she deserves.

I don’t make the call. I’m not ready tonight. Tonight I’m two drinks in and sleep-deprived and this decision, if make it, I want to make it clearly.

But I don’t close the phone either. I just sit there in the 3 AM quiet of the west wing of Nicolai Woolf’s estate with Gianna’s number on the screen and my son sleeping down the hall and the thread still faintly humming.

And I think about what it would feel like to be the one who cuts it.

Cara Anderson

Author

Thank you for reading!

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