Moon Child |✔|

|34|

Some say it's painful to wait for someone. 

Some say it's painful to forget someone. 

But the worst pain comes when you don't know 

whether to wait or forget. 

***

Most mornings Jay woke up clinging to a pillow. Within his sleep he had somehow mistaken it to be her.

He went through his routines.

Pack members greeted him, their eyes softly saying they were supporting him.

Jay had been startled at their love and devotion they shared to him.

They came to him, one by one after the first months since she left. Pledging themselves to him. Most hated her. He regretted that. Regretted that their ill feelings clouded over the good she had done for the pack.

None hated her more than Grace. The wolf's life she had saved.

Jay knew that each day Grace's hate lessened, but in the beginning, Jay had to avoid her so he wouldn't listen to her angry growls, eyes that shifted and questions of what he was doing to get her back. 

Nothing.

He was doing nothing.

Because he had done nothing in the first place to stop her.

The pack now fell in a line behind him, looking to their Alpha with new wonder and awe as they watched his slow battle with his own mind. His fight against his darkness.

The only thing that reminded him that it had been real, and that the monster inside him would not surface again, were the two marks upon his shoulder.

Her marks.

He touched them now, as a habit when he was thinking, wondering if she would feel him touching her bite. If he was sending shivers down her.

If she was even thinking of him.

He went back to the place of their first date. Back to the place of their first kiss.

He watched the calmness of the water as he settled in. He thought of all their moments together. All their whispered conversations.

He could only close his eyes and remember it all.

Be transported back to another time and place.

Food still didn't have taste.

No one commented on his rapid loss of weight. No one forced him to eat. Jackie was the only one he would accept food from. He ate the same meal of thin broth and crackers. The only thing really, that he was able to keep down.

He wondered if she was having difficulty eating. If she was having difficulty sleeping.

He knew one day, as he searched in his closet for one of his shirts, that Daisy did think of him.

It was her favorite shirt that he owned. She always complimented him when he wore it. Dark blue. He never understood why she loved it so much.

It was missing though.

He deluded himself into thinking that she had taken it, that she had stolen one of his shirts so that she could keep his scent.

He noted though that she had taken something.