Forbidden Fruit

Chapter 10: Surprise & Uncertainty

Alex's Childhood home

Alex's POV

I finally fell into a restless sleep this morning around nine am, though of course I was back up against just after twelve. My body likes to be active during the day, despite how little sleep I've gotten the night before, so instead of forcing my body to do something it clearly doesn't want, instead I find myself just sitting on the hallway steps with a mug in hand.

The tea that's inside it has long since gone cold, but I don't mind, and takes sips from it ever now and then as I reminisce about my family in my shallow pity party.

The walls of the hallway and the stairs are covered in so many picture taken through the years of my childhood and adolescence, though you wouldn't find any recent ones of my family and I anywhere in these walls.

I don't even think my sister, Briana and I have taken a photo together since the tragic day they were stolen from us, both of us clad in black for their funeral, the only picture in the house where we aren't smiling. As I get older, I find myself thinking about my parents more and more, wondering exactly who they were beyond the super hero's that I always saw them as. Sometimes when I sit still long enough and meditate, I can swear I can sense them looking down on me, talking to me and letting me know that they've been here every step of the way.

But there's nothing to say that the magical, legendary place isn't exactly that, a legend, and there's no reason to believe that something as simple as mediating and dreaming would allow us to communicate with those we've lost. Otherwise there's people I know that would spend their entire life lost in a state of nothingness just to hear a single laugh from their loved ones much more.

But for once, I'm praying that they're not there, that they're not somewhere watching me pitifully get so utterly rejected that the other couldn't even manage to voice his discontent.

My heart breaks all the more when I think about them being witness to the lowest point in my life after working so hard to build myself up.

Because honestly, this was all that was keeping me going. I didn't have my parents, my sister was lost to grief and anger, I was trapped in a vicious cycle of feeling duty bound and utterly left behind and useless. I always told myself that while times were tough and things got hard sometimes, it was okay. It would always be worth it because one day I would meet ur someone who had been waiting for me as long as I had been waiting for them. Someone who would love me and protect me as fiercely as I, then. That I would find acceptance, peace and love in their world, even if my family was all but lost to me. It was the only dream that was keeping me moving forward. And it all came crashing down around me last night when reality sunk in and my expectation cut me and left me cold, broken, and alone.

'Maybe you're wrong. Maybe it was just surprise.' Tobias tries to offer, but it doesn't convince either of us.

But the largest killer, is the waiting. The wondering if my Mate will have the mercy to reject me, sparing me the life of being alone and lonely, and living with the pain on top of that. The wondering if I will be bound to him forever, without the opportunity to ever get a Second Chance Mate and a do over. I don't even know his name.

Much less where he's from if he's a Hybrid like Johnathan claimed.

The probability of ever seeing the fox man is all but zero.

I try to distract myself with the pictures on the wall, but they no long sooth me, only remind me of the life that it seems I won't be able to have after all. My heart breaks a little bit more, and while my eyes burn, there's no more tears to squeeze out.