Page 4 of Bullied Forced Omega
And it was doing wild things to my heart.
Jace was showing me another side to him. He wasn’t the bully I’d always known. He was gentle, tender, and protective. He was kind to me, and he was the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen in my life.
Throughout the festival, we flirted with each other, teased a little, and played around. He was the first guy I ever flirtedwith. The first man I ever felt connected enough to even considerthatwith. I decided that I wanted him to be my first. It felt right. But first I had to pluck up the courage to kiss him.
It was after the festival, though, at the Silver Moon party, where it actually happened.
We were sitting on the green grass out by Devil’s Lake, away from the crowds and the chaos. Loud music was spilling across the lake's surface, and the moon was reflected on it like a rippling piece of art. Brighter than I’d ever remember seeing it. My senses were heightened.
My heart was beating a thousand miles an hour when Jace shifted closer to me and placed his hand behind me on the grass with his arm against my back, leaning his weight against his arms as though it was the most natural thing in the world. All I felt was heat. Beautiful, intense heat, spilling from him into me. My entire body became flooded with that heat, and my wolf started going crazy.
Mika was begging me to get closer to Jux. She needed to be closer to Jace’s wolf. She made my body spike with electricity that I could barely control.
It was she who pushed me to be as bold as I was.
I remember turning to face him and cupping my hand over his jaw. His eyes flared with desire. I could smell it on him. Need. Lust. An urgency so deep there was no mistaking it.
In a flash, he’d pushed me onto my back and was lying on top of me in the grass. His lips found mine, and his solid, beautiful body was moving against me.
He pushed his tongue into my mouth. I could taste him, and my senses were alive with his scent and the current of his pulse.
That moment was the most intense, heightened experience of my life.
When he pulled away and looked down at me, I couldn’t hold back the words.
“I think you’re my fated mate,” I whispered.
At first, he said nothing, but his eyes softened. Tenderness flowed into them. But almost as soon as the warmth came, it turned to fire, and he pushed away from me in a rage.
He sat up and half turned his back on me.
I sat in stunned silence, wondering why those words were so offensive to him. Surely he felt it too? Surely he knew what it meant. They always tell you that you’ll know when you meet your mate. There will be no mistaking it. I was so sure. I thought I knew. Mika thought she knew too.
Jace stood and looked down at me with that all too familiar cruelty back in his pitch black eyes.
“I, Jace Greenwood, reject you as my mate, Miranda Nelson,” he said.
My mouth dropped open. It was a double-edged sword. He agreed that he felt it too. He was agreeing that I was his mate… but he was also ripping the golden thread of fate that pulled us together right out of my chest to disconnect me from him.
Pain burned through me like a scorching fire, uncontrolled, blazing, and destroying everything inside me.
My wolf howled in agony, and I wrapped my arms around my chest to try and hold her together, to try and keep her safe.
“Why would you say that?” I gasped, pain in my voice, tears streaming down my cheeks.
Jace shook his head. He swallowed hard, and I could see the pain his wolf was in, too. Or maybe I was wrong. Maybe he felt nothing.
He turned away from me and walked back to the party.
Out of everything that has ever happened in my life, that was the moment that truly broke me. All of the bullying, all of the pain of childhood, was nothing in comparison.
It was a moment of such intense pain that I will never be able to forget it as long as I live. No matter how hard I try.
I sat alone, sobbing until I could barely breathe. Mika was shattered. She didn’t come out or speak a word to me for weeks after that. She didn’t want to run; she didn’t want to hunt. She only hid.
I think she retreated to protect me from her pain, to carry it on her own.
It took us a very, very long time to overcome what happened that night.
