53. Driving him insane

The drive was filled with tense silence. Mostly from my side. I was acting like a petulant child. My hands were crossed over my chest, eyes focused on the road and I was fuming.

Through the corner of my eyes, I saw that he was smiling and that pissed me off even more.

“What the hell are you smiling about?” I asked. “There is nothing to smile about when you literally forced a woman to go out with you”

He keeps his eyes on the road when he answers. “I didn’t force you Red”

“You didn’t ask either. Just commanded me” I retorted hotly. “When did chivalry die?”

I was honestly curious about that. I mean I have never dated human men before but most Alphas or werewolf males were just arrogant and self-righteous. They don’t normally do the traditional human way of wooing women. They mostly just throw their weight around and the she wolves fall for it.

“I am chivalrous” He said.

“And I am the moon goddess” I scoffed.

“Given that you are her fucking left hand, you’re not far off from the truth”

I turn to glare at him. Why is it that he always has a retort to my sass? I study him but quickly avert my eyes. He was doing the one hand thing that men do. Where they drive with one arm while the other is laying on their lap. I was honestly a sucker for that. There was just something potent about it.

Something raw and sexy.

I shake my head trying to clear it. Those were dangerous thoughts and like he kept reminding me. Our relationship was on paper only. Nothing more and nothing less.

“Where are you even taking me?” I ask him, changing the subject.

He turns to me slightly before facing the road again.

“You said that you wanted something greasy, so that’s where we are going”

I didn't reply because I didn’t have anything to tell him. I did say that I wanted something greasy but I also didn’t think he would agree to that.

I should have put my foot down and refused to go out. Maybe I was the problem. Always giving in when these men pulled the alpha male shit. If I could put my foot down, just maybe he could start respecting my wants and needs. But then again it’s not like I am planning to stay with him much longer.

“We should play twenty one questions” he suggests out of the blue.

I turn to look at him as if he has grown two heads. Why would he suggest such a thing? Not only because it was childish but because it was so unlike him.

“What are we? Teenagers?” I ask sarcastically.

“No but we are mated adults who know nothing about each”

“Cut with the crap Sebastian, you probably know more about me than I do. I am sure you did a background check”

That was the kind of thing a wealthy and powerful man would do. Sebastian was both. There was no way he would have approached me with a proposal if he didn’t have me thoroughly investigated first.

“Yeah, but I would like to hear it from you. Know more about you” he says, his voice neutral.

“What has gotten into you…you weren’t this interested in getting to know me a few weeks back”

I say this while checking his temperature as I would do with a child.

He swats my hand away. “Would you fucking stop that?”

“What I just wanted to check if maybe you have a fever or something. You’re behaving out of character”

I say innocently. “We should probably stop by the hospital, just to get you checked”

“What’s your favorite color?” he asks, ignoring what I just said.

This time I turn my whole body and look at him. Was he being serious right now? My favorite color?

“I’m a hundred percent sure you’re really not interested in knowing my favorite color”

“Yes I am” he argues.

“No you’re not”

“Yes I fucking am” he fires, getting annoyed.

I fire back, loving how I was annoying the shit out of him. “No you’re not”

“How would you even fucking know that?”

“I just do”

I hear him groan in annoyance. “Fuck! You’re annoying”

“Thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment” I smile wide at him.

Damn. This was fun. Watching the annoyance play across his face while he tried to pray for patience.

You could tell by the way how hard he gripped the steering wheel. How his brows were furrowed, and how tensely his jaw was set.

“What is your favorite color?” I throw his question back at him.

Just like I knew it would. The question seemed to annoy him more.

“What makes you think I’ll answer your question when you blatantly refused to fucking answer mine?”

I shrug giving the air that I didn’t care whether he answered me or not. But I was curious though as to whether a dominant alpha male like him had a favorite color. His bedroom and office back at the pack and his house in the city were painted in black and grey color schemes.

“Red”

“Hmm?” I face him waiting for him to talk.

“I mean my favorite color is red”

I stare at him with wide eyes. “There is no way that’s true”

There’s just no way. He seems to be smirking so I come to the conclusion that he was probably lying to me and pulling my leg for making this night as difficult as possible.

“Take it or leave it but that’s my answer”

I don’t get to say anything because we pull up to a diner that I have never been to before. Parking the car, he kills the engine before getting out to come open the door for me.

The diner wasn’t full when we got in but we managed to get a table at the back. I order pizza and coke while he orders burger, fries and coke.

“Hmm, I never categorized you as a man who ate grease” I tell him honestly, studying him.

“Sorry for that. Next time I’ll wear a neon sign announcing that I eat fast foods” he shoots sarcastically.

Was he on a kind of male premenstrual syndrome or something? He didn’t have to be so sarcastic about it.

“Jeez, cool down…I was just asking since you’re always seen in posh restaurants”

He looks at me with a frown on his face. “You're honestly fucking drive me insane”

“Again, I’ll take that as a compliment” I smirk.

He sighs pinching the bridge of his nose. I guess he chewed more than he bargained for when he told me he would be taking me out.

“I answered your question so you have to answer mine”

Shit, why was he back to this again. I didn’t want to share with him anything concerning my life since like I said, he probably already knew about every detail. So it was pointless talking about it.

“How did you end up at the orphanage?” he asks.

This is the last thing I wanted to talk about. It’s still a sore subject for me even after all these years. It’s not that I am ashamed of my roots. I have come a long way to be ashamed of that. It’s just I don’t want to think about the people who left us there.

“To be honest I don’t know much, just what I was told by the women running the place. It’s the cliché type of story. Sarah, the one that found us, heard the doorbell to the orphanage, when she answered she found two little girls who couldn’t have been more than five months old at the doorstep. There was no note, no name, nothing but a really strong perfume scent” I reply taking in a deep breath.

I don’t know why I was telling him when I was so against coming to the date but I just found myself spilling the words.

“No one understood where Claire and I came from but they took us in. Efforts to try to find that out proved useless. At first everyone including us thought we were sisters because we came as a package, and I was told that we used to cry when we were separated. But that idea was thrown out of the window when the DNA tests proved that we weren’t even related at all” I finish.

I smile when I think of Claire. Family isn’t always related by blood and neither is a sister. Claire was more than that. She was my soul sister. We had a bond that had survived twenty eight good years and a love that was stronger than steel.

“Did you ever try to locate your parents?” he asked thoughtfully.

I felt the need to tell him that he had already asked his question. That it was my turn but I let it go.

“We agreed later on not to. After years of searching we gave up. You couldn’t find people who didn’t want to be found, plus we decided that if they could leave such youngsters on the doorstep of an orphanage and not even look backward, then they weren’t people worth knowing”

The one good thing whoever dumped us at the orphanage did was to have the mind to leave us at a werewolf orphanage. We were taught who we were, where we came from, how to shift when the day came and how to keep our identities hidden. It would have been a cruel fate if they had left us at a human orphanage.

He was about to open his mouth but I cut him off. “You’ve already had your turn, twice actually so now it’s my turn to ask”

I mainly did that because I wanted to close the subject. It was already in the past and it has been over two decades ago, going to three. I had said enough where that certain subject was concerned.

“What happened to your fated mate?” I ask him.

I was always curious. Of course it was obvious that Miranda wasn’t his fated mate and neither was I. I needed to know if he already found his or not. I don’t think he has found his fated mate though, he wouldn’t have otherwise mated Miranda or proposed to me. Which just confused me on why he couldn’t have waited for his true mate.

I see something pass in his eyes. But it’s too fast for me to read it.

“Pass” he says, his jaw set.

“That’s not how this works. I ask, you answer. So you can’t pass” I stubbornly refuse to let it go.

The fact that his jaw was set and he was grinding his molars meant there was a story there and I wanted to know what it was.

“I said let it go” he clipped.

I was going to continue but I read something akin to hurt in his eyes. I wasn’t sure but I also knew this wasn’t a battle I was going to win. He was already starting to close himself off.

“When are we going to strategize on taking down Miranda and Darren? We should really get to that” I change the subject and see him loosening his fists.

He stares intensely at me and I begin squirming in my seat. As always I felt like he was ripping off the layers one by one and was staring at the woman I was within.

“Soon. I know where to hit Miranda where it fucking hurts. She will not be able to recover from it”

I nod my head at his answer just as our food arrives. The rest of the evening goes smoothly. After dinner we went for a ride and I realized that I sort of enjoyed myself even if I didn’t want to admit it.

Despite that, I couldn’t forget the flash of hurt and pain I saw in Sebastian's eyes and I couldn’t help but wonder what happened with his fated mate.