Eclipse Child |✔|

|27|

She loved him with a messy heart,

he hugged her with fragile bones 

She touched him with scared hands

He kissed her with bruised lips

They whispered all their flaws 

and inhaled the storm together.

-Randy Mascorro

***

Time passes much like how it did within the mountains. Soon I'm unable to register if an hour really is sixty minutes or seconds. It flows through my hand, falling like water that is unable to be held. There is no way to keep it.

The days trickle by. Orion finds his place in the pack.

It's one I never expected from him, but then again, Orion was always surprising me.

I was introducing him to Henry, finally making the two meet. Orion stood silently behind me, not even bothering to make an effort in the conversation. Instead, his finger would occasionally stroke down my back, following the uneven path and making me jump at the searing sensation.

He had a habit of doing that now.

He would touch me whenever he felt like it, with no regard for who or what was watching.

I had just come back from a run, covered in sweat and still breathing hard. Orion stood in the kitchen helping Sandra like how he always did now. With no second thought to her presence, he approached me and pulled me to him, kissing me and making my already gasping lungs collapse.

I had to constantly be on guard for his sudden attacks.

Henry seemed uncomfortable with the wild presence that Orion brought. Even more so when his mate, Katie, showed up holding their half-year-old pup, Reign.

The room as a whole stiffened when Orion approached Katie and held out his arms. 

"May I?" 

I didn't blame Katie for hesitating. A savage wildness exerted out of Orion- the sight only added to the hair he rarely combed and beard he hardly trimmed.

Reluctantly she placed Reign within his hands.

And that was that.

For the rest of the time we were there, Orion ignored us completely and became absorbed in the little pup. Henry and Katie stared in awed wonder for how Orion made her calm down, how he kept her peacefully asleep. The sight of his gentle face, mixed in with his harsh appearance, did not blend, but... Orion always had a way of surprising me.

It made me remember that within the pack in the mountains, he had continuously been playing with the younger wolves. I never made the connection until I saw him carrying Reign.

My heart constricted at the sight, guilt eating away like a festering wound.

After that, whenever I left in the morning to train, Orion would walk the other way to the nursery that was near the clinic. I had never been inside the building until then.

All the females soon became used to him.

Henry and I would stare in baffled silence as the giant tan wolf growled playfully at the toddling pups.