Sequel: Slip

What We Left Unsaid

T H I R T Y - F O U R

“How is she doing?”

“I don’t know, Johnny; how would you be doing if your mate literally just tried to kill you, almost succeeded, and then as soon as you started breathing again your alpha started harassing you to know what you did to your stupid fucking mate?!”

The bassist shrunk back from his larger friend’s shouting, averting his gaze and trying his best not to further anger the man. He knew how Brian got when he was angry, and he hadn’t seen him this angry in years... if ever at all. “I’m on her side, Man,” he stressed, lifting his palms up in front of him defensively. “I just want to know if she’s going to be okay. It’s Ava we’re talking about; she’d usually be out here cursing up a storm and plotting ways to get him back, but she hasn’t even left your room. Is she going to be okay?”

I don’t know,” the larger man answered honestly, breaking down a bit as he whispered the words. Dropping down into the seat across from his friend, he dug his palms into his tired eyes and tried to wish away everything that had happened over the last day. “I’ve never seen her like this, Johnny! Never! She was fucking crying, Man! And she doesn’t cry!”

“Woah,” Johnny whispered to himself, before narrowing his eyes and sending a wary glance in the other man’s direction. “Wait, what kind of crying are we talking, here? Like, large emotional sobs and wails, or just watery eyes?”

Though he sent a look that surely showed exactly how much he cared about the distinction, the dark-haired man grudgingly shook his head. “No dramatics, just silent tears. But that is so not the point. Dude, she told me I should’ve just let Zacky kill her!”

The shorter man blinked, having trouble processing that information even as he watched his friend struggling with it across from him. It took him a moment to speak again, and when he did, his fists were clenched at his side and he was growling a bit through his teeth. “What the fuck did he do to her?”

“That’s what I don’t know. It looked like he just choked her -- her neck was fucking purple! -- but I think it’s more than just this whole incident. She’s too fucking good at bottling things up and keeping people at a distance; I think she just reached her breaking point or something.”

Johnny blew out a sigh, leaning back in the chair and running a hand through his currently-lopsided hair. Cursing, he closed his eyes and mimicked the guitarist’s motions, his own palms pressing into his eyes as he tried to sort everything out. “Did she say what this ‘note’ thing was about?”

“She doesn’t know. Zacky tried to kill her for quoting something, and she doesn’t even fucking know what it is she apparently quoted! If that’s not the most fucked up thing in the world...” He huffed his annoyance, his fists clenching and unclenching as he struggled to contain the growing frustration within him.

“Well how can she quote something without knowing what she’s quoting?”

“Exactly!”

“No, Brian...” he trailed off, biting his lip as he reached up and scratched the side of his head, clearly trying to figure out how to best word his question. “I mean, how unlikely is that? Is there a chance she was quoting something? Not that it would in any way make what Zacky did right, of course, but... is there a chance she’s hiding something about this whole ‘note’ thing?”

Cold brown eyes narrowed into a hard glare, the longer-haired man appearing anything but appreciative of the implication. “She doesn’t know what it is, Johnny,” he repeated stonily, “and she’s got no reason to lie to me about it.” He held the glare for a moment, before shaking his head dismissively, a humorless smile appearing on his face as he did. “Besides, you want to hear the best part? She fucking told me what she said to him before he attacked her: she told him that she liked him.”

The bassist gave the desired reaction, his eyes widening and his jaw dropping slightly as he eyed the larger man with obvious surprise. That surprise quickly faded into confusion and then into anger the second he actually processed that thought, though. “He tried to kill her because she told him she liked him? Are you fucking kidding me? Wait, was she kidding?”

“No. I have no fucking idea why, but she told me that she did and she definitely wasn’t joking.”

The shorter man seemed to ponder the idea for a minute, before suddenly looking enlightened. “That’s, surprisingly, not surprising.”

His friend tossed him a look that showed exactly how stupid he thought that particular statement was. “And you’re a fucking retard. I’m her best friend, and I think it’s completely fucking unbelievable!”

There was a quiet moment before he chose to spoke again, stealing a wary glance upwards first. “Do you really, Brian?”

The guitarist let out a deflated sigh. “No,” he admitted, leaning back into the seat and letting his head flop backwards so that he could stare up at the ceiling. “That’s why I’ve been pushing her like a fucking idiot, telling her she should try and see if they could actually be happy together... and look where that pushing has put them.”

“Don’t do that to yourself! I know, believe me, because the first thing I was thinking when I heard what happened was that I shouldn’t have pressured her to talk to him today... but there’s only one person responsible for this, Bri, and it’s not either of us. Besides, she’s alright, so there’s nothing to...” he trailed off after a moment, nose scrunching upwards in distaste. “You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Good. But wait, exactly how long have you known that she liked him?”

Groaning, the guitarist grudgingly lifted up his head again and faced his friend, rolling his shoulder indecisively. “A few weeks? I don’t know. I suspected it the second I saw that she had marked him.”

“Hold on,” the bassist requested once more, confusion clear in his voice, “why then? Her marking him was just her throwing another insult in his face and showing that she wasn’t going to back down to him, wasn’t it? Why would that--”

“Because it wasn’t an insult, Johnny. It wasn’t meant to piss him off, and it wasn’t something that everyone in the pack was supposed to taunt him about, don’t you see? She left when everyone started with the mocking, when he just stood there ashamed and enraged. She wasn’t insulting him!”

The shorter man looked more confused than ever, his brow thickly furrowed and his eyes clearly questioning when his friend shook his head again and glanced at him. “We all thought... What was it, if not an insult?”

“Johnny,” the longer-haired man started exasperatedly, “think about it! It was a compliment -- a huge fucking compliment. A male marks a female because he can’t not, but also because he’s using it to show the world what’s his now, because he’s proud that it’s his. She wasn’t trying to degrade him when she marked him, she was trying to show that as much as he was claiming her, she was claiming him. She probably thought he’d take it as a sign that she didn’t think of him as ‘the mutt’, or at least that she was proud to have him as her mate.”

It took a solid moment before the male was able to come up with a response. “She... told you that, then?”

“No; she didn’t have to. What you’ve got to understand about Ava -- what everyone needs to understand about her -- is that she acts more on wolf instinct than on human instinct... probably because of her breeding, if we’re being honest. Most werewolves make major decisions as a human, she doesn’t. A wolf doesn’t mark a mate out of spite. A wolf doesn’t mate with someone unless she thinks she can respect that mate, that he’s good enough for her.”

“Shit. I-- I didn’t think about it that way... I don’t think any of us did.” The bassist couldn’t really think of anything else to say in response, his mind still too busy trying to grasp the concept in its entirety. “But it makes sense,” he had to admit, “and I don’t know why I didn’t see it that way before.”

He only rolled his shoulder again. “Because it’s absolutely ridiculous and completely illogical to think things through like a wolf and not like a person.”

And, as serious as the situation was, Johnny couldn’t help but crack a small little smile and snort once in amusement. “It is,” he agreed, “but sometimes instincts are easier to follow than logic.”

“Johnny?”

“Yeah?”

“You sound like a fucking fortune cookie.”

Again, the shorter man laughed just a little bit, but his amusement was quick to fade. A grim expression in place, he turned to his friend. “So... what do you think is the wolf reason for why she’s holed up in your room right now?”

Sobering instantly and pursing his lips in thought, the guitarist shook his head irritably, brow furrowed. It took him a moment, but he was snapping his fingers and sitting up just a bit straighter as a thought came to mind. “It’s got something to do with the packs, ours and the old one. She mentioned something about packs earlier. I think... my guess is what’s really beneath everything is that she’s feeling like she doesn’t really belong in the pack, that she won’t ever, now that all of this shit has happened.”

“She’s got to know we all love her, though; she definitely belongs here with us.”

Brian didn’t even try to argue on that, giving his head a soft nod of affirmation. Still, the frown on his lips was solemn as he glanced up at his friend. “But it sure doesn’t seem as if we all agree on that. It’s not just Zacky, Man. Kat’s been... kind of unwelcoming, and Ava’s been trying -- like, actually trying. And now there’s Matt, going off the deep end and saying that he was going to let Zacky kill her,” he explained, his voice thickening to a growl at the mere thought of his alpha’s words. He was not about to let that happen.

“And that’s, what, barely a step up from the old pack?” the other man asked, before rolling his eyes and huffing out a breath when he caught his friend’s surprised look. “Yeah, Man, I knew about that, too; I’m not an idiot. I watched her get punched right in the temple just for waving at me when she was at one of your pureblood-picnic-gathering-event-things. She wasn’t even ten. I don’t have to have seen anything else first-hand to know that if they were willing to do that to a kid for waving at a full-blood, they sure as hell were going to do worse to a teenager for refusing to take a mate and instead hanging out with half-bloods. You might know better than I, but I’m willing to bet everything I own that neither of us know the half of what went down there after we left the pack.”

Once again, the taller man was leaning forward with his head pressed into his palms, eyes squeezed tightly shut. “I know,” he responded on a shaky whisper, pulling back just far enough to exchange a look with his friend. “We shouldn’t have let her stay -- her family, her education, and her own worries be damned. They were going to mate her off to Alaric, and we weren’t there to stop it. They could have taken precautions to make sure she couldn’t get away, and we never would have seen her again!”

“I know, Bri, but--”

Jimmy argued with us over it for weeks, Johnny! I didn’t even fight about it for that long; I decided to let her make that decision, and Jimmy told me I was being an idiot for it. I was! I--”

“You did what we all did, Brian!” the shorter man snapped, tone harsher than he really meant for it to be. “Damn it, we fucked up with that, but it wasn’t just you, alright? None of us foresaw any of this, not even Jimmy. He wanted her to come with us because he was bored without her. You wanted her to be able to make her own decision. He eventually agreed, remember? We all agreed.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” the guitarist continued to argue, though his tone had softened quite a bit and he seemed much further from breaking down than he had been just a moment beforehand. “That doesn’t mean that we--”

“It doesn’t make it something we can change, either. But you want to know what we can change? The fact that our friend almost got killed today, and two of our other friends seem to have lost their damn minds. Any idea how to fix that?”

Though he lifted his head and quickly composed himself a bit more, the longer-haired man didn’t immediately jump in with suggestions. Furrowing his brow and leaning back in his seat a bit, he simply stared down at the table in concentration. His friend did the same, fingers tapping out a random beat as he tried to think of literally anything that they could do.

“Why are you both sitting there looking like envelopes without any addresses on them?”

Two heads snapped up at the sound of the voice, both of the men quickly jumping up as they turned toward the woman who stood in the doorway, one eyebrow arched pointedly and her arms crossed over her chest. Her blonde hair was pulled messily up into a sloppy bun and there was still faint bruising on her neck, but otherwise, she appeared completely normal. Hell, even that seemed almost normal.

“Ava! How’re you doing?” Brian was quick to call out, completely ignoring the little huff and the irritated look that his other friend sent in his direction. Instead, he took a tentative step toward the woman, arms extending and moving to wrap his arms around her again.

But she was quick to side-step him, eyeing him with irritation and turning her back on him as she instead focused on the cupboard. She flashed a quick smile in the shortest man’s direction before reaching up and snatching a glass, only to make her way right over to the fridge and the water filter. “I’m fine, Bri. It’s no big deal, so you can stop gossiping with Short Shit over here.”

“No big deal?”

“Ava,” Johnny tried, “I know you’re probably really upset right now, and we completely understand. You don’t have to pretend like this never happened or anything, though. You can talk to--”

“I’m pissed, you’re right,” she interrupted, pausing briefly to take a sip of her drink, “but I’m not pretending anything. It happened, now it’s over, and I’m going to kick his ass after he calms the fuck down and gets over whatever his issue is. Until then, I’ll steer clear, because I rather enjoy... you know, breathing.”

Both of the men exchanged a concerned look, which only had the woman groaning.

“I’m fine,” she insisted.

“You weren’t a half hour ago.”

She scoffed. “I almost died, Brian. Excuse me for having a momentary freak out. Blame it on the oxygen deprivation, if you’d like, or an instinctual reaction to almost fucking dying... whatever. But it doesn’t matter, because as you can clearly see, I’m not crying right now. Am I? Then there’s nothing to be concerned over. And there’s nothing to gossip with the Berrys over, either, so please leave that embarrassing detail out when you inevitably run to talk to them, will you?”

They could only stare, dumbfounded, as she gave another little smile, finished her glass, placed it in the dishwasher, and then headed right back for the door.

“Now, I’m going to go order a pizza and watch a movie, like we were planning on doing tonight. Whenever you compose yourselves, feel free to join me.”

And, with that, she disappeared, leaving the two musicians with absolutely no idea of what was going on.
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I couldn't very well leave you with that dramatic of a chapter for too long, could I? (;

Thank you so very much to all who have been reading, subscribing, and recommending! I very much appreciate each and every one of you! And, of course, I also very much appreciate all twenty-two of you who commented on the last chapter! So, a great big thank you to: Hello.Love0588, MoMo_92, Aly!, H.L.A, ScoutNikhol, CoolStory.Lynn, Ravenhair24, Heaven_syn_gates, Ailurophile, Bunny-on-Drugs, abnurmel, zackystheman4me, tipy, tony-perry, Alesha., OMFGitsBeckiie, SynysterVengeance13, mforaker, Total Nightmare, death breath;, Shylaaa, and the lovely Liera_Fufu.