Blind Beast Mate(13)
Frantic, I hurried back up, tapping the stairs with both hands, careful not to hit the poor cat again.
“Re—”
The cat answered him with a mew.
My hand landed on a smooth oval object. “Found it!” I announced and pressed the phone against my ear with my shoulder while crawling the rest of the stairs to the top and into our bedroom.
“You all right?” Jamie asked.
“Oh, just a phone accident. Don’t worry about it. What’s your cat’s name?”
“Our cat,” he corrected. “And I haven’t named it yet.”
“Is it a girl?”
“Got big balls, so no.”
“Light,” I said, thinking about my hound, Dark. I tapped the nightstand and found the object he’d left me.
“Light it is. Are you upstairs yet?”
“Yes, mm-hm.” On the floor, I leaned my back against the bed, fingers playing with a small velvet box.
“Open it,” he said.
I did. Inside, my fingertips felt a pair of rings. One solid and the other with a large round stone pointing up. My hand flew to my mouth when a sob threatened to escape. I dropped the box with the rings. Rings were our customs, not theirs. This was for me.
“Do you like them?”
I took a few seconds to calm down, and then I said, “They’re beautiful.”
“That’s sweet, baby. Your little voice makes me very hard, so I gotta go talk with some of these fuckers here and get my boner down. But don’t worry, I’m gonna dip into your sweet peach tonight. And the night after for the rest of my life. What do you say?”
“Yes, Jamie.”
We hung up, and I placed the box back on the nightstand. Then I found my pills in the wooden box I’d brought in my pack. I took a few to get back on the bright side of life. I wasn’t one to wallow in self-pity, but I also didn’t refuse chill pills on days I knew I couldn’t find the bright side. My heart ate at me for lying, but my brain told me to hold on for a few more days, until I had a backup plan in case Jamie decided he didn’t want to be paired anymore. Despite the rings promising me forever, it could happen. Anything could happen. My great-grandparents didn’t believe in aliens, but here they were. My eyesight was fine for eighteen years. And now it wasn’t. Anything could happen, and I’d learned that lesson the hard way.
Life was a dealer. Some people got a shitty hand, but I always hoped the next hand it dealt me would hold my wild card. Maybe Jamie was my wild card, and if so, I had to use the card wisely, even if I felt like shit for doing it.
The pills helped me deal, and I napped for hours, effectively sleeping the day away.
I forgot to put the rings on my finger.
When Jamie came home, he threw the box against the wall, then closed the bedroom door. I pretended to sleep.
Around midnight, I crawled in search of my rings. I slipped them on and cried quietly, listening to the TV downstairs.
Chapter Seven
Jamie
“Da fuck you mean the hound ain’t there?” I growled into the phone, already straddling my bike. I whistled and jerked my head. Vice understood we were gonna take a little ride back to my mate’s uncle. “You better tell me you’ll find the damn thing by the time I get there.”
“Can’t do,” he said.
“You will do.”
“Can’t. Someone already took the hound. Swiped it right as you took up into the sky.”
“Who?”
“Don’t know her.”
“Her? It was a woman?”
“From Community Three.”
I put him on speaker as Vice approached. “I thought you said you didn’t know her.”
“Community Three. That’s all I know. Saw her. Dark skin, fiery-red hair to her ass. Jumped down from her car before it landed. Hydro-skater I think.”
Vice froze in place. I knew he thought it was Dewlyn, his mate. Hell, we both knew it had to be Dewlyn. Community Three’s girls had dark skin and fiery hair, and Dewlyn skated over skyscrapers. Crazy hair to match the crazy under the hair if you asked me, but I tried not to judge my sister-in-law, the girl who’d left my brother when he’d laid out his cards. Dewlyn had said ugly things to him. There was nothing he could do about it but run after her. Such was mating. One-sided. Same as mine.
I’d never tell Rey anything. A day and a half of fucking space to go. I flexed my claws as if preparing for battle. Space? My mate already got her space. She struggled with her new life, and I didn’t know what to do when she didn’t want me to do anything. Fuck forbid Rey left me the same way. I shuddered. With the rings back on the nightstand, the future smirked at us.
Hanging up the phone, I locked eyes with Vice’s red ones.