Every Night Forever (2 page)

“Excuse me?”  Alyssa ground out.

All four women looked at her with varying degrees of contempt.  Nina said, “Did you really think you had anything else to offer besides your body?”

Anger rioted through her as she shot back, “You’re no different than me.”

Lori laughed, “Oh really?  I’ve never taken an eighteen-year-old geek home in a drunken stupor because the pack hottie won’t give me the time of day.  At least we have standards, Alyssa.  You’ve always just been a toy and nothing more.  The sooner you accept your place in the pack and get off your high horse, the sooner things can get back to normal.”

She stared at her supposed friends in shock, their harsh truths and betrayals cutting through her like sharp blades.  She walked quickly out of the bathroom, eyes blurry with tears, and ran straight into Cody’s chest as he exited the men’s bathroom.

She stumbled backwards, but thankfully didn’t fall.

“Sorry, Cody,” she said, clenching her teeth against the sob that threatened to break free.

“No problem, uh-” he said, looking at her as if he had never seen her before.

“Alyssa,” she supplied, as her ears burned in humiliation.

“Oh, sure, Alyssa.”

Just then, one of the males she used to sleep with frequently came down the hallway.  His eyes were bright and she immediately scented alcohol on his breath and knew that he was drunk.

“Hey, there’s the female that thinks she’s too good to be a toy!”  Jenner snorted, coming to stand next to Cody.  “Too bad.  She gave the best blow jobs.”

Alyssa wanted to sink into the floor and disappear.  Worse still, recognition lit Cody’s eyes and she knew that he now knew who she was.  Not because he recognized her face her or her name, but because of Jenner’s statement. 
Too good to be a toy?

“Excuse me,” she said, walking quickly around them.  She heard Jenner say something to Cody and they both laughed.  She hadn’t heard the words, but she knew they were talking about her.  She exited the bar and stood in the warm night air, sucking in a few deep breaths before pulling out her cell and calling for a cab.

An hour later she was home in her small apartment, alone with her thoughts.  She felt small and low.  She’d known that her past behavior had set her up to be viewed in a certain light, but she also knew that she had a right to make changes in her life.  It was her body, and she wasn’t the property that the pack males seemed to think she was.

The next day, Bethany called her to go out to lunch.  “Why didn’t you stand up for me?” she blurted out.

“What are you talking about?”  Bethany asked.

“Last night in the restroom, when the girls were saying such horrible things about me.  Why didn’t you defend me?  You’re supposed to be my best friend.”

Bethany said nothing for a full minute and then her voice came out slightly bitter and angry.  “We didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.  A couple months ago you went home with that kid, and then you just decided that you were too good to help out the males.  You know they need to fuck on the full moon, and the single males rely on the single females to help them out.  There are a lot more males than females in our pack, so we each need to do our share.  You have some kind of moral crisis, decide you’re too good for the full moon fucks, and it falls on the rest of us to pick up your slack.  How do you think that makes us feel?”

She swallowed hard as Bethany’s words stung her like darts.  “I don’t want to be a toy for the rest of my life.  I want to be with a male who loves me for me
first
, not for how good I am in bed.  I want to be with a male who’s proud to be with me, who wants to take me home to meet his family.”  Tears pressed against her eyes again, but this time they were from grief, not humiliation.  She didn’t think she’d ever had a man say he had feelings for her.

“You’re a pack toy, Alyssa.  You’ll never be anything to them but that.  You want someone to love you for yourself?  You better find a new pack.”

“Aren’t you in the same boat as me?  You’re a pack toy, too.”

“So?  I love it.  When I’m ready to settle down and have kids, I’m going to leave this pack and join my cousin’s pack in West Virginia.  Now, are we going to lunch or what?”

Alyssa felt a little kernel of self-love bloom inside her.  Bethany was entirely right.  If she wanted to find a male who would love her for herself, she had to get away from the people who didn’t see her as a whole person.  “No.  You go on ahead.  I’ve got some stuff to do.”

Alyssa ended the call and let the silence in her one-bedroom apartment surround her.  She’d lived in that apartment for almost eight years.  But it hadn’t ever really felt like home.  No place had, she realized sadly.

Her mother and her sister, her only family, had both left her behind as they found new lives in other packs.  She’d spent the better part of her adult life trying to fill the void left by her family with meaningless sex and empty, unfulfilling friendships.  But if her family could start over, then she could as well.  There was nothing tying her to her pack and this life except her unwillingness to move on.

Determination filled her, and for the first time, she could see a brighter future ahead of her.  That day, she began to look for a place to make a new life.  As she searched for a job online, somewhere away from her pack and her old life, her heart lifted.

Firing off her resume to several companies that were hiring people with her limited skill set, she stood up from her small desk and began to pack up her life.  Hope filled her as she thought about making a new life, starting over, and finally being happy.  While she was pulling clothes out of her closet and folding them into one of several suitcases, her phone buzzed with a text:  an insulting message from Ben, stating he was free for a quickie before he went out with his friends to party.  The young wolf had been sending her similar texts since their one night together, sometimes begging her to be with him again, and sometimes ragging on her for being a ‘she-bitch tease’.

A sense of purpose kindled within her and she smiled as she sent a simple three-word text to Ben, taking the first step into her new life by firmly closing the door on her old one.

Go fuck yourself.

Chapter 2

Dante Stone took a drink from a bottle of water and looked out at his backyard from the sliding glass door in the kitchen.  It was early, but he’d been unable to sleep.

He worked the late shift at the gym that he and his brothers owned, from three to eleven.  Normally he came home and crashed out, but tonight, like many recent nights, he had tossed and turned and been unable to really rest.

“You’re up early,” Cairo said with a yawn as he came into the kitchen, dressed for his first shift at the gym.

Dante looked over his shoulder.  “I couldn’t sleep.”

He heard Cairo slip his shoes on and then his brother joined him at the back door.  “Something bothering you, bro?”

“Nothing new.”

“Look, D, you’re not the only one that’s lonely, okay?  We all are.  Somewhere out there is the right woman for us; she just hasn’t crossed our path yet.  And if you’re worried about finding someone to work the front desk, that’ll work itself out, too.”

Dante looked at his brother.  “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.  Now go get some sleep.  You’re a real asshole when you’re tired.”

Snorting, Dante shook his head at Cairo and said goodbye.  When he was alone again, he stood at the back door for a while longer, picturing a future with a wife and kids.  The pictures faded in his mind as the sun rose, and he turned from the back door and went to bed to get some sleep.

Later that day, Dante called his youngest brother Mason into his cramped office in Stone’s Gym.  Mason had put out an ad for a new receptionist.

“Any luck?”  Dante asked, swiveling in the desk chair.

Mason leaned his bulky body against the doorframe.  “No answers so far.”

Over the last few months they’d had a number of problems strike them one after the other, like missiles.  First, the human female that they were romancing to become their hyena clan bride had gotten snagged away at the end of the summer.  She’d gone to join a werewolf pack thirty minutes to the south.  Then, Cairo had lost an underground boxing match to a man that he should have easily beaten.  That loss had damaged Cairo’s reputation as a trainer, and that had hurt the gym’s reputation as well.  They were fairly certain that the winner had cheated somehow, but they had no proof.  Add to that their receptionist quitting and walking off with their customer list, and they were losing business hand over fist.

All of these things paled in comparison to how he felt inside.  A few months earlier, he and his brothers had tried to move things forward with a human female who had been their group fitness trainer.  He’d liked her, they all had, but she wasn’t a good fit for them.  Even when he’d pushed to take things further with her, it hadn’t ever felt entirely right.  He knew it was for the best that she’d left.  He couldn’t stand to be faced daily with a reminder of just how poorly he’d chosen.  His brothers didn’t hold it against him, but as eldest in the clan, they trusted him to choose the right mate for them.  Hyena clans always had three males and one female.  She would be their shared bride, and they would worship her and take care of her.  There were not very many hyena clans in the States, and more and more the clans took brides from humans or other were-groups, which meant their kind were pretty much going the way of the T-rex.  He didn’t necessarily care about that, but he did care about going to their underground den this winter without a bride.  Again.

“Just... run the ad again, Mase.”  He focused on the problem at hand.  “Add another grand to the salary, and moving expenses, too.  Someone will answer, I’m sure.  I’m just tired of one of us sitting out there when there’s so much else to deal with.”

Mason gave him a crooked smile.  “We’ll find our bride when the time is right, Dante.”

Sometimes, his brother could be right on about things.  Most of the time, he was an idiot.

“Yeah.  I know.”

He turned back to the computer monitor as his brother walked away, and the first thought that crossed his mind as he stared blankly at the spreadsheet on the screen was that he was thirty-one.  Thirty-one and alone.

* * * * *

Changing into cut-off sweats and carefully wrapping his hands, Cairo hit the heavy bag to work off some of his sexual frustration.  He knew that Dante thought that their former group fitness trainer had been the girl meant to be their bride, but he’d never bought it completely.  There was something about her posture whenever they were all with her at the same time — she definitely wasn’t one of those girls who harbored four-way fantasies.  Also, she was pretty, but too muscular for his tastes.  He liked natural girls with plenty of curves.  He didn’t want to be comparing abs with his bride, and he sure as hell didn’t like fake girls, either.  The bleached-blonde tramp set that pawed at them when they were out on the town did nothing for him at all.  Nothing.

“You working, Cairo?”  Denny, one of their human trainers, put his hand on the bag to stop the swing.

“I’m…thinking, I guess.”

“Ah.  Well, I’m heading out for the night then.  See you tomorrow.”

He grunted a reply and went back to working the bag.  He had another match in two weeks.  Unfortunately, the winner of the last match had declared he was retiring, which meant he wouldn’t get a rematch.  Somehow, he’d cheated.  Cairo wasn’t entirely sure how, except that he’d not been able to focus mid-way through the match, and his vision had blurred a few times.  Dante had insisted he go to the ER and get checked out, and a couple grand and enough radiation to cook his beans later, they said he was fine.  His blood test showed nothing suspicious in his system.  It just didn’t make sense, and he hated things that didn’t make sense.

At twenty-nine, he was ready to hang up the towel and focus on the future.  Dante wasn’t the only one who wanted to find a woman to balance out the softer edges of their hard lives.  He wanted someone to care when he was hurt, even if that made him the biggest pussy in the universe.  She was out there somewhere.  He just hoped to hell she showed up soon.