Chapter 167
Luna Demetra.
“Emris.”
I say his name into the pillow like it’s a prayer and I mean it as one because whatever my body went through last night feft me hollowed out. I need Emris but he’s three states away in Georgia running a pack and definitely not in this room.
So….why his scent?
It fills my nose the way it fills every room he walks into… cedar and woodsmoke. The notes that my wolf catalogued the first time she recognized him as mine and has never once stopped reaching for since. It’s so complete, so present, so him that I actually pull the pillow tighter because I think I’m imagining it.
The scent gets stronger as I turn my head.
My eyes part and there is a mountain of an Alpha on the couch in
my
bedroom.
He’s enormous on the couch in the way he’s enormous on our bed at home… too much of him for the furniture, filling every available dimension, one arm along the back but his legs are man spread. I think I can see the sharp line of his jaw in the lamp glow and the familiar breadth of his shoulders and-
I pout. I want to cry because now I really miss Emris. I’m hallucinating him. That’s how pathetic I’ve become.
“I miss you,” I say out loud.
“Mmh?”
That Mmh.
I hear his voice across the couch. Just like he would say it in the morning when he asks if I’m up for morning sex…. which I’m essentially always waiting for. It’s never a no from me. Unless he’s on blacklist. I close my eyes again because if this is a hallucination, I need another thirty seconds of it before I wake up properly and find an empty couch.
“I said I miss you.” I whisper.
“Well, I’m here.”
The gruff. It’s definitely Emris’s exact specific morning gruff that lives at the bottom of his voice before he’s fully awake.
It’s obviously a hallucination! My wolf misses him so much that she’s making him up in my room. Or maybe it’s the painkillers. Or the exhaustion. Or the trauma. Probably everything working together.
“Come here.”
“Come here,” he says.
And I decide I don’t
care.
Real or constructed
or
somewhere in between… I don’t care! I push the sheet back and cross the room toward the couch.
Now that I’m closer, it looks like him. He’s wearing a black t–shirt and dark jeans.
Emris taps his thigh for me to sit and I go. I sink one knee into the cushion beside him and then the other and I settle onto his lap facing him with my knees tucked near his sides and my hands finding his shoulders-
They’re hard.
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20:24 Mon, Jun 1 MO
Chapter 107
f
Wait. When I left, he had some stubble. I can feel the heat coming off his skin. Even the way I sit on him and his hands settle on my waist and the way his fingers dig into my hips cannot be a dream.
A hallucination gives you the approximate. This gives me the exact geography of him. the last of the sleep clears from my eyes all at once!
“Sleep cleared from your eyes yet?” he asks.
It’s Emris. In the flesh!!!
“Hi, baby.”
“You…YOU’RE REAL!?”
I try to pull myself away from him, but his hand are clamped around my hips.
“Of course I am.”
“How…how are you in Rocksville?”
“Took the jet.”
“But–but–but… This dorm is for females! Males are not allowed-
“Are you looking for reasons to find it hard to believe that you are seated on my cock right now?” He raises an eyebrow. “I’ll answer your question. There is no place on this earth where you are that I cannot reach you.”
I just look at him in complete shock.
Emris is here.
Why is he here? There’s no way he found out what I did yesterday. There’s no damn way. I already told him goodnight before I went to the White Omega pack. I was careful. I was so careful.
But why is he here-
“Are you okay?” His voice softens.
“Why wouldn’t I be okay?” I laugh…a little too high, a little too fast. But I know he can read my heartbeat this close
“Why are you here? No one is supposed to know you’re my mate. What do you think you being here does to me? Emris, I warned you. You came here to spy on me, didn’t you!” I glare and he looks/relaxed.
“Hmm. If nothing happened, then why did Lolly tell me you went to the White Omega pack and got your wolf unlocked?” My heart stops cause Lolly told him.
Lolly told him.
I’m going to end her. I’m going to find her and I’m going to-
When… when was this? I was asleep in the car. I don’t even know how I got to the dorm. But I know I saw Wren leaving the room. I know I heard Lolly’s voice somewhere in the distance, talking to someone on the phone.
I just didn’t know that someone was him.
“L…” My mouth opens and closes. Nothing comes out.
“Yes, baby. Lie to me again.”
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20:24 Mon, Jun 1 MO
Chapter 167
“Iniris
He gets up but doesn’t put me down. He just stands…lifting me like I’m a doll he’s carrying from our room to another. I’m still straddling him and our faces so close that I can see the flecks of gold in his silver eyes.
si}/Stra
He walks around the small dorm room with that look in his eye. The one that’s between pissed and angry and waiting. Waiting for me to spill another lie so he can catch me.
“Your college boyfriend picked up the call.” Emris says it like the words taste bad. His voice also spells jealous in every syllable.
“W–what?” I blink.
“Travis Crestville?”
“Emris, no, no. He’s just a student. He just helped me find a location, and you know that.”
“No. I do not know anything. Because you did not tell me anything. Everything I know, I have had to find out myself—”
“Yes, because I knew you were so protective! You wouldn’t have let me go anywhere like that! So of course I wasn’t gonna tell you!”
I shut my eyes.
He takes me into closet like he already knows the way there…which tells me he’s already walked around my small room, looked at my things and knows basically everything. But I feel so good that he knows….that I don’t have to explain the basic details-
I feel myself crumble.
Because I want to tell him what I felt. Emris is the only one I can break down in front of. The only one I can tell everything to. How it felt. How my body felt like it wasn’t my own. Like someone else was driving and I was just a passenger, screaming from the back seat.
He sets me down on the counter and the marble is cold against my thighs. But this is the point where I don’t want him to let go of me.
I throw my arms around him and bury my face in his neck.
The tears come and I feel his hands sink into my hair, massaging my scalp as he hugs me close to his chest.
“You can tell me.” His voice is softer now. “It hurt you, didn’t it?”
I sniffle but hold him tighter. I feel so lucky that he’s here… that he dropped everything, flew across states, broke into my dorm room just because he felt something was wrong.
I didn’t know how I was going to look at myself in the mirror after what happened. After I hurt that girl. After I lost control.
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