Beta Bully (F/M) - Chapter 22 (Early Access) (Patreon)

Shoulder Deities

Melody couldn’t contain her excitement long enough to let Darcy eat a mouthful of her lunch before she brought up Luca’s pool party. Darcy and Reece let her babble for a bit about having never been to another pack’s grounds, what outfit choices she had, and how she was going to beg a lift off her mum. They gave her short, often single word, responses in between their food. Eventually, Melody got hungry enough to stop talking and eat some lunch herself.

In the pause, Reece gave Darcy a look of restrained concern. “You’re not going, are you?” he asked.

“Well,” Darcy mumbled. She stirred her soup messily. “Originally I did tell him no.”

Reece’s eyes flashed. “He’s forcing you?”

“No, he just… convinced me.”

“Through blackmail?”

Darcy sighed. “No, Reece.”

“I knew you couldn’t stay apart,” Melody squealed. A chip fell off the end of her fork in her excitement.

“He treated you like dirt, Darcy,” Reece grumbled.

“Yeah,” said Darcy. She wasn’t going to deny it or defend Luca in front of her friends, they knew his faults all too well. They had been her safe haven from him for years. They had experienced his bullying from the front row of the audience. “But he’s slowly making amends. I’m letting him try, at least. He hasn’t been forgiven yet by any means.”

Reece sighed.

“Reece, please,” Darcy whispered.

“What?” he asked tiredly.

“Please come with us to the pool party,” she said as sweetly as her embarrassment could bear.

Reece grimaced. Melody snatched his hand and squeezed it between hers.

“I’ll be all alone if you don’t come! Darcy will be off sitting in her mate’s lap and I’ll be squeezed into some deep, dark corner!”

Melody was wrong about Darcy planning to ditch her, but right that they needed extra allies. Darcy didn’t want to be all alone with a bunch of alphas and betas and other non-titled dominants. Melody barely counted as support because she was a melodramatic menace, she would be no help in any scenario. If anything, chances were that Darcy would get ditched at her own mate’s party.

Reece grumbled, “If you know that then why are you going?”

“It’s a cool party on another pack’s grounds!” replied Melody. “How often will we get these kinds of invites?”

“These aren’t the kind of invites I want.”

“We get it, Reece, you hate fun,” Melody groaned.

“I hate him,” Reece said simply. “I hate every single thing that he did to Darcy.”

“Well, this is depressing and I don’t want to talk about him any more,” Melody announced. “Let’s discuss outfits instead!”

Reece rolled his eyes but gave his full attention back to his food and said nothing for the remainder of their lunch.

Melody pestered Darcy into discussing colours and patterns for her swimsuit and dress. Of course, when she let slip that Luca was taking her shopping for her clothes, Melody squealed and Reece suddenly looked disgusted with his sandwich.

It was worrying just how polarising her relationship with Luca was to their trio. On one shoulder, she had Melody excitedly encouraging her to follow her heart and ignore every red flag for the sake of steamy soul-mate romance. On the other, Reece nagged into her ear every awful thing Luca had ever done. At this point she should be used to this argument, her heart and mind had been having the same one for months. She did her best to be the neutral party.

Two days later, Darcy was strapped into the passenger seat of Luca’s car, on their way to go shopping for his birthday party.

Her body was bubbling with nerves. When an oversized hand dropped onto her thigh, she jolted in her seat. Luca pulled it back to hover over her and gave her a look of concern out of the corner of his eye. He was still facing the road, but checking her reaction. Darcy flushed. She put her hand over the top of his and pushed it back down onto her leg, but set her gaze out the window so that she didn’t have to see the smirk she knew Luca would be wearing. His fingers curled around her inner thigh and applied the slightest pressure around it. Darcy shivered. She forced herself to stare out of the window as nonchalantly as she could, while her skin burned everywhere.

They parked up on a side road that trailed off from the town centre. Luca withdrew his hand and Darcy fought off a whine of indignation. She consoled herself with the knowledge that they still had the drive home for him to touch her more.

The town was filled with shops and eateries, but it wasn’t enough to contain the floods of humans bustling about. They were everywhere. Darcy clung to Luca’s side and allowed him to lead the way through the busy street. She wasn’t afraid of humans, but she didn’t like to get too close. As though he could sense her discomfort, Luca walked them into the nearest store that didn’t have a hoard of humans clogging up the doors.

It was a boutique aimed solely at teenaged girls. Posters of teen girls were plastered to the walls, teen girls were working behind the counter, and only teen girls were milling around the displays. Luca appeared unbothered, despite being so out of place in the environment. Darcy was grateful that one of them was at ease.

“The swimsuits are over there,” he said, pointing at a couple of racks. Darcy scurried over and started flicking through the hangers. Very quickly her heart began to sink. Darcy had a normal body size… for her height. And she had the height of a girl five years her junior. Every size label she plucked out was at least two sizes too big, or was her size but had ‘tall’ or ‘padded’ stamped on it.

She did two laps of the ‘BEACH BEAUTY’ section and sighed.

“You don’t like them?” asked Luca, who had been following silently as she checked every tag.

“None of them will fit me,” she answered wearily. They were only one shop deep and her hope for an adorable two-piece was flagging.

“What size do you need?”

Darcy flushed. There was something strangely intimate about sharing her size with him. She fiddled with the tassels on a pair of bikini bottoms.

“I can take a guess if you really don’t want to tell me,” Luca added with a quiet laugh.

She rolled her eyes and twisted up onto her tiptoes to whisper the number in his ear.

“Okay.” He rubbed a soothing circle into her lower back with his huge palm. “Let me go speak to the staff, maybe they have some extra stock,” he offered gently.

Darcy nodded and gave him a grateful smile over her shoulder before he slipped away to the checkout counters. Darcy watched him go, staring at him unabashed while he couldn’t catch her.

As he passed by a pair of human girls preening themselves in one of the full-body mirrors, they burst into excitable giggles.

“Jesus,” the first human girl said. “He’s a bit tasty.”

Her friend giggled. “Ssh! He might hear you!”

“I hope he does,” girl one replied, although she was keeping her voice low. “I’d let him do anything he wanted to me."

A sickly feeling settled onto Darcy’s tummy.

“Jessica!” her friend gasped, drawing out the ‘ah’ sound too long.

“And the things I would do to him-”

The skin of Darcy’s throat prickled. Almost anger, but not quite.

“Oh my god, he’s coming back!”

Both girls suddenly feigned interest in the folded jeans display. Luca strode past, but his eyes never wavered from Darcy. He grinned when he was near enough for her to see the tag he was holding up. Her size. Attached to it was a very frilly one-piece. Hot pink. Darcy did her best not to grimace at the sight of it. Perhaps Luca liked girls that looked like they’d just popped out of a giant cake. Would Jessica wear something like that to get his attention?

When he was close enough, he handed it to her and she turned the material over in her hands a few times. Her mind was still turning over the girls, wringing them out like cloths in her imagination.

Luca dipped his chin into the crook of her neck to place his lips at her ear. “What’s wrong?” he whispered.

Darcy gave a half-shrug, not wanting to displace his face from hers.

“We can go somewhere else. We can go to all the shops, it’s no problem. Just tell me.”

“Those girls were talking about you,” she mumbled.

Luca snorted. “I know. Bit eager, aren’t they?”

Darcy frowned and stared at the ground.

“Are you sulking because you’re jealous?”

“I’m not sulking!” Darcy huffed indignantly.

“But you are jealous?”

Darcy didn’t reply. It wasn’t like she thought that those girls were going to steal Luca away. It just made her uncomfortable to hear them talking about him like he was a sex toy.

“Let’s leave.” He snatched the hot pink horror from her hands. “The more distance we put between us and those drooling dummies, the better.”

That Darcy definitely agreed with. She nodded gratefully. Luca scooped up the swimsuits they’d collated in Darcy’s tag-reading marathon and dropped them in the basket by the changing rooms. He was away from her side for barely more than a second, but it left a stinging sensation in Darcy’s chest. As soon as he was empty-handed again, he wound his arm around her waist and pulled her against him tightly. They left the store walking in sync.