The Eclipsed Life of Luna Mischa (by Jennifer Francis) novel Chapter 50

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The following month passed by for her with Anthony trying to spend all his free time with her. He ate when she ate, regardless of what meal it was. If she was just in the gym to run on the treadmill, he stepped up right next to her, offered her a challenge even.
If she left her office just to stretch her legs, he was right there to walk alongside her, and by the fourth week of this he stepped into her office and closed not only the door to his office but the one that led to the foyer and always stood open for the pack to see she was in her office if they needed something.
She didn’t even close that door when knocking off for the day, she trusted the pack not to do anything in her office. The files on her computer were all password protected and not even Christy had access to Mischa’s Luna documentation. Nothing she put in a pack members file could be edited by even Anthony or his unit. Not without her approval.
As were Anthony and his unit’s files, it was a simple safeguard to make sure only the one writing the report could edit their own words, one could add things, or attach things, but nothing of another’s could be edited. And nothing could be deleted from the system without both her and Anthony being notified and approving of it. Anyone could add to a pack members file or report, but each entry was tagged with the author’s name as well as the date and time the entry was made, but seen as a distinct, separate notation, the pack files kind of looked like their hospital’s computerized running progress notes.
She looked now at Anthony as he walked back over to her desk and sat himself down to look right at her. “What?” she asked curiously. Her hostility over the past four weeks had dropped off quite a bit, and they could hold a normal conversation.
“You haven’t left the pack once in the past six weeks,” he stated.
“Hmm, nine weeks if you count back to when my heat started.” She nodded. “Is that a problem? Do you need me to leave the pack for some reason?” she asked. She was confused as to why he would bring this up.
“No, Mischa, I don’t. It’s just odd, not once have you gone out for lunch or dinner, not even a brunch with the girls of your unit. Or any others that are in your social circle. Not even done any shopping, nothing at all.” He frowned at her.
“I’m aware.” She answered. “I don’t see the problem.” She shook her head, still not understanding what the problem was.
“Everyone needs to go into the city for something at some point, even if it’s just to spend a day outside the pack,” he commented.
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“I’m the Luna, my job entails that I am here, inside the pack, not out there in the human world. Hence, my office is right here in the packhouse. Even my accounting office is here in the packhouse, so even when I’m not in this office, I’m in that office.” She explained to him her lack of leaving the pack.
“It’s unhealthy, Mischa, that you don’t go out and relax… is the only thing you do now, work?” he asked her.
“Yes, I hold two titles in this pack, the Luna and the pack’s Accountant. So, I am always busy.” She told him about things he already knew. This was always how it had been, even before Christy came along. Though most of her accounting, if it crossed into after hours back in the beginning, had been done up in the Alpha Suite, because he’d prefer her be in their suite after hours, even if she had to work, because that was where he’d been.
“You need to have downtime,” he stated. “We’ve been snowed in for the past ten days but nothing has changed for you. I noticed even I have free time, but you don’t.”
“I’m not doing anything different to how it’s always been.” She shook her head. “What is the real issue here? I don’t understand what the actual problem is,” she told him.
He just sat and stared at her for a long moment before stating, “Do you need help with attending the Luna duties? I understand you’re doing both your and Christy’s duties right now, but…”
Mischa half laughed, that was a joke. “Oh, so you think having Christy in this office at her desk lightens my workload, do you?”
“Of course it would,” he nodded. “I’m not looking for her to be released early, just so you know. I just thought that if you need help, I’d go and ask May, Simone or Debbie to come down and help you. It’ll free up some of your time and maybe… we could spend that together. We’re limited to meal times for the most part, I noticed.”
“Spend it doing what exactly?” she asked as she realized what this was, his non-working days and being off in the evenings; his free time, as he called it, was normally spent with Christy, and he was likely just coming to realize this. Five weeks it had taken him to come in here and broach the topic he knew was likely to get thrown in his face.
“We could go out on a date, see a movie,” he offered.
“Bond in the evenings?” she asked. “Are you finding it lonely without Christy at your side every spare moment you’ve got!” She leaned back in her chair and looked right at him. “Because I can’t even recall the last time you took me out of the pack for anything since Christy came along.
“You do all of that with her, while I sit here in the Luna’s office and attend to all the things she
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doesn’t do while she’s in the city with you. You have what? Two or three lunches a week, depending on how many days you’re in the city yourself. Two dinners in the city each week as
well.
“It’s a 40-minute drive to the city on a good day, so an hour in peak hour traffic. Let me lay it out for you, Christy’s working week. To have lunch with you, she leaves this pack at about 10:30 in the morning, so 11:30 by the time she’s parked the car, then you spend an hour having lunch, sometimes more. Then it’s an hour to get back to the pack, if she doesn’t go shopping on the way home.
“So, 10:30 to say 2pm, that’s three and a half hours, three times a week, just to have lunch with you. Then, of course, there is dinner, that’s also outside the pack, so she leaves here at 16:30 to account for traffic and parking, but it takes her, on average, an hour sometimes more, to do her hair and make-up.
“So she leaves this office at 3pm to go and get ready for dinner with you, twice a week. Add all that time up, and you get 14 to 15 hours a week away from this desk and her Luna duties. But that’s only if she doesn’t go shopping, which she does two days a week, after lunch with you or before going to have dinner with you. So that’s another what? three or four hours away from the pack each time.
“So let’s round that all up to say six hours. Add that to say the 15 hours, and you get 21 hours that she is away from the Luna’s desk and her duties. Now she only works Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. 8 hours a day, that’s a 40-hour week, minus off that extra 2.5 hours for her one-hour lunch break she takes, when the rest of us take 30 minutes. Brings it down to 37.5
hours a week.
“Now, minus the 21 hours she’s on dates with you in the city or shopping and what do you get, a 16.5 hour working week. Two days is all she spends actually working on any given week. Who do you think picks up the slack for all her time outside the pack?” she asked him.
Though he’d been frowning at her to start with, it was now a very deep unhappy frown and Mischa shook her head, “So, no… Not having her in this office doesn’t increase my workload, because she does the bare minimum at best. You just never cared to notice, because the work still gets done… you’re also too busy, getting hot and bothered by her to think about why she’s never attending Luna duties in this office.”
He sighed as he took in all she’d stated, tallied it all up and let him see just how little Christy did when it came to the actual running of the pack.
“I just laid it all out for you. You clearly have one Luna for sating your needs and one Luna who is just here to run your pack.” she informed him of how she saw it.
“That is not true, you are both equal…” He stated right back, and she raised an eyebrow at
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him, and he sighed heavily as he realized he couldn’t fight her words. “But I guess, when you put it like that… I can see she doesn’t spend much time inside this pack.”
“Hmm, perhaps she and I should have different days off. Maybe that would see her work three days a week, because you’d be here inside the pack for one of her days off… I could work Tuesday through Saturday and take Sunday and Monday off,” she offered.
“That way you two can still go out dancing and have dinner every Friday night, and spend all day Saturday together, as you normally do, and she, nor you can say I’ve interfered with your normal dating schedule.” She wasn’t so stupid as to do that, Christy would jump on it so fast her head would spin.
“And you and I, I have Alpha training on Sunday mornings, and the unit and I train the Elite on Sunday afternoon, I’ll be in the office on Mondays,” he stated.
“I’m aware, but that’s how it’s always been.” She shrugged.
“Mischa, you’re not leaving room for us to spend time together.” He shook his head.
“Hmm, well, I’ve not worked weekends for the past two years, and you spend every Saturday with Christy. Sunday is my allocated day,” she shrugged. “So… nothing changes on that front.”
He was just staring at her now. He hadn’t realized that’s how it had turned out or forgotten the original agreement. “Mm, you alternating days between Christy and I,” she shook her head. “That stopped six months into her being your Mate. When I brought it up, you told me to let it go for a few months. Christy felt like you spent more quality time with me, so you changed it to suit Christy’s wants.”
A heavy sigh came from him now, “You can’t always blame me, Mischa, for us not spending time together. You could come into the city and have lunch with me, like Christy does. Any time you like,” he told her.
“Could I? And just how would that be seen by the humans, you, dating two women at the same time? Not only doesn’t it work, but you’re forgetting something very important in all this … Do you recall when she became your Mate, and you two were seen together, what happened, considering I was registered as your wife to the human world…
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