Pursuing My Rejected Luna by Cara Anderson novel Chapter 176

Chapter 176

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Nicolai

The report I’m reading is twelve pages long. I’ve read it four times. I couldn’t tell you what’s in it.

This is new. I retain everything-it’s not a boast, just a fact, something I developed early because the Woolf family’s business requires holding more information than most people can organize. I read things once. Sometimes twice to confirm. I do not read things four times and come away with nothing.

I set the report down and stare at my desk, trying to wrestle my mind into obedience. Something is very wrong with my usual capacity.

The kitchen yesterday morning. That’s the problem. The thing that occupies my mind so completely I can’t focus on anything else

I went back to my office afterward and sat for twenty minutes not doing anything-which is also not like me-and made myself be honest about what happened.

My wife and the father of her child doing something they’ve been doing in front of me for months. Nothing different about it and yet, everything’s different. The particular way Jaxon’s hands didn’t move away immediately would have never claimed my attention before. But knowing the bond they share changes everything.

And I walked out of the room without speaking because if I’d spoken I’d have said something I couldn’t take back. I don’t want to hurt Skye that way.

I need to be honest about what I felt. Jealousy, ugly and unwelcome. Not the jealousy of insecurity or possessiveness for its own sake but the jealousy of someone who has something precious and is watching that thing change into something else. Something I don’t know how to make sense of.

I can feel the bond they have. Not clearly-it’s not my bond, I’m not part of it. But I can feel it the way you can feel a heat source from across the room. Something warm that isn’t mine, happening in my house, between my mate and the man who I’d hoped would only be a peripheral presence in our lives.

I said I could handle this. I meant it when I said it. But I’m finding out, this morning, that meaning something and being good at it are categorically different things.

The questions rattling around in my head have been getting louder for days. I’m a man who solves problems. Identify the problem. Identify the resources. Identify the constraints. Develop a solution. Execute.

This problem doesn’t have a solution. At least not one that makes sense to me just yet.

Two Alphas with separate territories. One woman between them-or rather, one woman who has bonds with both and has been honest about what she wants and is waiting for the rest of us to figure out how to give it to her.

Jaxon is in the west wing. This worked when Jaxon was Benji’s father and nothing else. When the arrangement was: he lives here, he sees his son daily, we manage the complicated feelings of all concerned. That arrangement had clear lines.

What does the west wing become now? He can’t stay indefinitely in a room that’s described as a guest arrangement when it’s actually-something else. Something that doesn’t have language yet. And without language for it, the people around us will supply their own, which is how rumors start.

My pack already has questions. I’ve seen it in the way conversations stop when I enter rooms. The way certain pack members look at each other when Jaxon’s name comes up. Nothing hostile-my pack-is too disciplined for open hostility. But watchful. Assessing.

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An Alpha’s authority rests partly on perception. The Woolf Alpha sharing his mate. That’s the sentence my

nemies will compose. I can hear it already, in the specific register of people who use information as leverage. Not the complex reality of what we’re trying to build-just that sentence, circulating in the channels where these things circulate.

I haven’t figured out how to manage that. I’in not even sure it’s manageable. What I am sure of is that the soluțion I used to have-I manage it-doesn’t apply here. You can’t manage a person’s perception of you if the reality of your life genuinely doesn’t fit the conventional frame.

And our life doesn’t fit the frame. We’re building something that doesn’t fit the frame, At least I think we are.

But I either build it anyway, knowing what that costs publicly, or I don’t build it. That’s the actual question. The one I don’t have answers to.

Then Skye came to my office yesterday afternoon. I could tell immediately she had something to say she feared I wouldn’t like but was determined to tell me anyway. But what she said was unexpected.

She told me I’m being too careful with her.

She’s not wrong. I have been carefully polite. The version of myself I usually reserve for strangers rather than the real one–because the real version requires me to be fully present, and being fully present means feeling everything that’s happening, including the things that are difficult, and I’ve been trying to protect her from those things.

Which is, I’m hearing now, its own kind of distance.

“You’re right,” I admitted, because it was true.

“You’ve been managing me instead of just being with me even when it’s hard, the way we promised each other,” she accused. “Please stop.”

I stood, crossed to her and took her face in my hands-not carefully, not with the deliberate gentleness of someone managing an interaction. Just: her. Me. Present.

And I kissed her.

Not carefully. She made a sound-relief not quite the word-that told me exactly how much my carefulness cost her. How long she’d been waiting to have the real version of me back.

And that changed everything. Now I know I can’t go back to that other version of me, no matter what it costs me.

She needs me to be real with her even when real is complicated. Even when real includes jealousy I haven’t processed and questions I haven’t solved and the particular difficulty of watching my mate carry a bond that isn’t mine.

She needs the real version. I can give her that. I just have to keep choosing to. Choosing her.

That’s what I agreed to when I made her my wife. Bit her. Left my mark in her flesh.

There’s no going back now.

I’m just not sure I know how to go forward.

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