Page 41 of Prodigy & Tybalt
Without a word, Sweetie opened the fridge, removed two bottles of beer and used the chipped opener Justice hammered into the side of a cupboard when we kept losing bottle openers on a weekly basis. Sweetie held a beer out to me as a peace offering and I took it, a little wary.
“You gonna break my nose? Make us even?”
He rolled his eyes, leaning back against the counter and taking a long drink. “And ruin that pretty face? Would the president still want you if your face was all crooked?”
“Oh, fuck you. And yes, actually. It wouldn’t be the first time someone pummelled my face.”
“You could try provoking people less,” he suggested dryly, his beard twitching with a smirk when I gave him the middle finger.
I took a drink, reading the atmosphere in the room. Not as delicate and charged as it had been lately, more like it used to be. “Do you accept my very gracious apology?”
“You never actually said the wordsI’m sorry,”he pointed out.
“They were implied.”
Sweetie snorted. “Yeah, sure. Consider your shitty apology accepted. If you’ll accept mine.”
“But you never actually said the words,” I parroted.
“Oh, fuck you.”
“If you want to, you’ll have to join the queue,” I retorted, my smirk not quite sharp enough, bleeding into a genuine smile. “Yeah, fine, apology accepted.”
He grunted, which I took to meangood.
“But if you upset my girl,” I warned, “I’ll put another bump in your nose before you can even blink, and break your cheekbone while I’m at it.”
His eyes darkened to match mine, a protectiveness and lethal violence that could only be radiated by an alpha with someone to protect, someone to love. “Likewise,” he said in a rumbling growl. “You hurt ChaCha, you fucking dick. You were supposed to be her friend, then you looked at her like she was a pariah. Like she’d doneanythingwrong, when her only crime was me loving her.”
I sighed. Heavily. “Shit.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, the growl leaving his voice. “Best of luck earning her forgiveness.”
“She’s going to gut me.”
“Probably,” Sweetie agreed, taking a swig of beer. “She might let you keep your organs, though.”
“Probably asking a little too much,” I disagreed, making him laugh. And whatever remnants of animosity we’d held onto dissolved.
“Take care of her, yeah?” Sweetie said when his laughter faded. He swallowed, not quite looking at me. I knew we weren’t talking about ChaCha anymore.
I hadn’t considered, even once, what it might do to an alpha—agoodalpha—to reject their fated mate. To push away someone their soul, body, and instincts were screaming belonged to them. I hadn’t considered it might hurt. I honestly thought he’d rejected her and that was that, no struggle, no pain, nothing like what Miraya went through. Mostly because thinking about it led to me thinking aboutmyrejection, and I shied away from that at all costs.
But I knew Sweetie; he was a good guy and he gave a shit about making the world a better place. Of course he’d be affected.
“Yeah,” I said after a while. “We will.”
His eyebrows rose. “So it’s true? I thought it was just gossip.”
I grinned. “And you justlovegossip don’t you, Sweets?”
“Changed my mind,” he muttered. “I’m killing you.”
“I’ve seen you, twitching the curtains, pressing your ear to the wall when people are arguing, taking a little too long to clear a table when people start bickering.”
He grabbed a spatula and threw it at my head. I caught it out of the air and laughed. “Thanks, I’m keeping this.”
“You’re fucking not,” he growled, stomping after me as I rolled around the doorframe and into the hallway. “Give that back you prick.”
