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“I want to go home.”
“We’ll do that. Be home in a jiffy.” Edward had the honor of carrying me to the shuttle. I guess we were lucky it was still there. Probably for people like me.
“No. I mean my home. My apartment.”
Chapter Seventeen
Ansel
We got into the car, putting Monroe in the front, and I buckled her seat belt myself since she was still shaking. Her icy eyes met mine and, for a few moments, I thought she had changed her mind. She murmured a weak “thank you” while Edward turned on the engine and cranked up the heat.
We rode in silence. Edward and I shared glances in the rearview mirror. Monroe didn’t mutter a single word.
My bear raged inside me. Our mate was threatening to go home. We had to handle this delicately. If we couldn’t convince her to stay, my mind was already flitting through scenarios to win her back. We would pick up and move to her city. Perhaps she would give us a chance to earn her love.
No. I didn’t want her to leave. She belonged in our home. That room she stayed in had always belonged to her; we simply hadn’t met her yet. Our house had felt like an empty shell until she arrived. Monroe made it a home. Her laughter, though she tried to hide it, filled the spaces with a joy I hadn’t realized was absent.
We couldn’t let her go.
“Monroe.” Edward reached over for her hand, but she slid it away. “Can you please talk to us?”
“There’s nothing to talk about.” She turned to stare out the passenger window.
“Yes, there is,” I responded. “What’s going on? We deserve to know,” I asked.
She turned in her seat and my bear felt the fire inside her. “I’m a chicken and a fraud, and I just embarrassed myself so badly that I want to crawl into a hole in my apartment and die. How’s that?”
The tears welling in her eyes revealed there was more going on. Yeah, we all made mistakes and got embarrassed, but from being scared and cold to wanting to go home was quite a jump.
“You got scared up there. And those people? We will probably never encounter them again in our lives.”
She scoffed. “If I were you, I’d want to send me home.”
Tingles broke out along my arm. Our little mate had revealed something. “Is that what you wanted, Monroe?” I asked. “You want us to not want you? You want us to reject you and send you back to your apartment?”
Our mate hurt and not physically. Some people had been rejected and shunned so much in their lives that they found comfort in the pain. It was easier for them to live in that loneliness than to accept and trust others—to open themselves up to love.
I couldn’t pinpoint where she’d been rejected in her life, but I wanted to find out so we could help her heal.
Despite my doubts, Fate knew what she was doing. Maybe we needed all this life experience because that’s what it would take to make our mate realize how loved she was.
“Answer me, Monroe.” I growled, not in anger but out of frustration. The male in me wanted to fix everything, but I couldn’t fix a problem I didn’t understand.
She pushed out a breath. “Fine. You want to know everything? Here it is. I didn’t want mates, not really.”
An invisible knife twisted in my chest.
“Continue. Get it all out,” Edward firmly suggested.
Monroe let out a sound of frustration. “I got on the app to appease my parents because all of my brothers are married with children and my mother said I was a shame to the family because I wasn’t. It’s rich considering the only time she ever even bothered to pay any attention to me is when I messed something up. They hate me, and everything my brothers do is fucking perfect. They hate my cat. They hate my books. They hate that I work a minimum wage job. They don’t give two shits about my happiness, only how my situation looks. I signed up for the app after my best friend said he found his mates on there, and I figured that if I told my parents I’d signed up for a dating app that they would get off my back. I made all of my requests specific enough that I expected never to be matched to anyone.”
“Go on,” I prompted. “Get it all out.”
She turned around in the seat, still buckled. Her cheeks had turned even redder, and there was a fierceness in her stare.
But she wasn’t angry at me or Edward.
She was angry with herself.
