The Moon Knows

That night I found out the worst part. The worst part is that a mate bond doesn't care about your feelings. It doesn't care that the boy growled at you. It doesn't care that you've known him for one (1) day and he was rude the entire time. The bond just IS, and it grows, and at night it gets so much louder. I couldn't sleep. I lay in my new room in our new house with the boxes still half unpacked and I could not sleep because every time I closed my eyes I could feel him. Not like, see him. Feel him. Like there was a string tied around my heart and the other end was somewhere out in Crescent Hollow and it kept tugging, gently, over and over, this way, this way, come this way. Around midnight I gave up and went to the window. There was a full moon. Of course there was a full moon, the universe is dramatic like that. It hung over the dark trees behind our house all big and silver, and the moment I looked at it the pull in my chest went from a tug to a YANK, and I heard myself make a little sound. "Skylar?" My mom was in the doorway in her robe. My mom always knows. It's a mom thing and a wolf thing combined and there is no hiding from it. "You felt it today," she said. It wasn't a question. "Didn't you. At the new school." I sat down on my bed because my legs didn't really want to hold me up anymore. "His eyes glowed, Mom. In biology class. And then he growled at me and left and he's been ignoring me all day and the bond won't stop and I don't know what I'm supposed to DO." My mom came and sat next to me. She didn't say anything for a minute. She just looked out the window at the moon. "I never told you much about mates," she said quietly. "I know. I kept us in human towns and I kept it all far away from you, and maybe that was wrong of me. I did it because the bond is a big thing, baby, and I wanted you to get to be a person before the bond got to be a thing. But I can't keep it away now. The moon knows. And once the moon knows, it doesn't un-know." "Briar said he doesn't want a mate," I said. "She said a mate is a weakness. For an alpha." My mom's face did something complicated. "A mate is the opposite of a weakness," she said. "But I understand why a frightened boy might think that. The bond connects two people, Skylar — it goes both ways. Whatever he feels, you'll feel it. And whatever he's running from..." She brushed my hair back. "You're going to feel that too. The bond won't let either of you hide. That's not a curse. It only feels like one at the start, when you're both still strangers holding something enormous." I looked out at the moon. The pull was still there, steady and warm and impossible to ignore, and somewhere out in the dark town Dxxon Cole was awake too. I knew he was. I could feel it the way you feel someone in a dark room. He was awake, and he was looking at the same moon, and underneath all that bad boy alpha armor he was just as scared as I was. That was the moment something changed in me. I'm not gonna lie and say I suddenly wasn't scared. I was SO scared. But I stopped being only scared. Because here's the thing nobody had said to me all day, not Briar, not even my mom. If the bond goes both ways — if he can't hide from me any more than I can hide from him — then Dxxon Cole growling and glaring and storming out of rooms wasn't him rejecting me. It was him losing. And some small new brave part of me, sitting on my bed in the moonlight, decided that if I was going to be stuck in the biggest mate bond drama Crescent Hollow High had ever seen, I was not going to spend it being the scared new girl who got growled at. I was going to figure out exactly what the future alpha was so afraid of. And then I was going to make him say it to my face.