I gasped. “Your arm.”
“I don’t care about me, Cameron.” He put his hands on my cheeks and looked into my eyes. “Are you all right?”
His reaction was the polar opposite of Rick’s. Where Rick had been more concerned about my maybe being pregnant with hisbaby, Nate was wholly and completely concerned with my well-being. His face was pale with worry and fear. The appearance of the feral and the fact that he’d almost gotten me seemed to have terrified him beyond belief.
This man was better than Rick in every way. Could I be selfish and ask him to stay with me? Would he ever forgive me if he did stay and ended up feeling miserable? I wanted him, but I didn’t know if I could live with that. He probably didn’t want to stay, anyway. No one else in my life had. No one other than my mother and brother.
“I don’t know if I’m okay,” I said, my voice trembling.
Nate’s face tensed. “Did he bite you? Are you bleeding?”
I shook my head. “That’s not it. I’m not hurt. Something else might be wrong, though.”
“What?”
“Is it always like this?”
“Like what? What do you mean?”
“This,” I said, waving my hand around, pointing at the dead feral. “Ever since he bit me, it’s been chaos.”
Was that my destiny in life? For this kind of misery to always follow me? If so, that wasn’t something Nate needed. It wasn’t anything anyone needed. He told me he was leaving, and I’d thought I wanted him to stay, but maybe it was better for him to go.
“This isn’t normal,” he said, lowering his voice to try and calm me down. “This whole thing has been a one-in-a-million chance.”
Barely hearing him, I shook my head, my adrenaline and panic making it hard to think straight.
“No,” I mumbled, talking mostly to myself. “This is a big mistake. You don’t deserve this.”
He frowned. “Deserve what? Cameron, you aren’t making any sense.”
“Me,” I said, finally looking into his eyes. “You don’t deserve me, or all this bullshit that follows me everywhere I go.”
28
Nate
Iflinched. “What do you mean?”
“You heard me,” she said miserably.
“I heard you say I don’t deserve you, but I don’t get what you mean by that. Are you saying I don’t deserve to be around you, or are you saying I’m not good enough for you?”
Her eyes snapped up to meet mine. “What? No.” She put her hands to the sides of her head as if trying to keep her skull from exploding. “Fuck! None of this is coming out right. I didn’t mean that. Of course you’re good enough. I mean, you shouldn’t have to stay here and deal with all my bullshit. Even with the feral dead, God only knows what will happen with Rick. That’s what I mean.”
“Well, I think I’ll be the one to decide that,” I said, feeling anger and bitterness well up deep inside. My inner wolf growled inside my mind. He wasn’t angry at Cameron, though. He was mad at the whole situation.
She gazed down at the corpse and shook her head. “It’s too much, Nate. Maybe this thing between us shouldn’t have happened. You’re leaving when all this is over, anyway, right?”
That was what we’d talked about the night before, wasn’t it? It’s why we fought. It had seemed like the only real possibility. I was a lone wolf and had no place in her soon-to-be pack. There was no life she could have with me. None. At least not one worth living.
“Well… yeah, that was the plan,” I said, confusion lacing my words. “We’ve already discussed this.”
“After last night… I thought you might have changed your mind,” she said, her voice tinged with sadness and hesitancy.
I heaved a sigh, trying to figure out how this had gone bad so quickly. “This is my life, Cameron. I don’t know what else to say.” I shrugged helplessly. “I’m getting mixed signals here. I can’t tell if you want me to go or stay. Either way, I don’t think that you really get it. I can’t stay. I don’t belong to this pack. If…” I trailed off, thinking hard about my next words. “If we did stay together, then there’d be no way we could stay here. You’d have to leave with me.” I let out a humorless laugh. “You talk about me being miserable with you? Well, after a year or two bouncing around, I think you’d end up miserable with me. I’m not sure that you want that.”
She let out a heavy huff of breath, shaking her head as she did. “I’m not sure, either. I don’t want your life to be miserable, but…” She glanced at me, an almost shy look on her face. “I don’t want you to go. It’s all so fucked up in my head. What if you asked to be part of the pack? Is that something you could do?”
