Beta Bully (F/F) - 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 Luna’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 her no.”

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

“No, she 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.

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

“Yeah,” said Darcy. She wasn’t going to deny it or defend Luna in front of her friends, they knew her faults all too well. They had been her safe haven from the beta for years. They had experienced Luna’s bullying from the front row of the audience. “But she’s slowly making amends. I’m letting her try, at least. Luna 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 her,” Reece said simply. “I hate every single thing that she did to Darcy.”

“Well, this is depressing and I don’t want to talk about her 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 Luna 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 Luna 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 Luna 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 Luna’s car, on their way to go shopping for her birthday party.

Her body was bubbling with nerves. When an oversized hand dropped onto her thigh, she jolted in her seat. Luna pulled it back to hover over her and gave a look of concern out of the corner of her eye. She was still facing the road, but checking Darcy’s reaction.

Darcy flushed. She put her hand over the top of Luna’s 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 Luna would be wearing. Her 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. Luna withdrew her hand and Darcy fought off a whine of indignation. She consoled herself with the knowledge that they still had the drive home for her to touch 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 Luna’s side and allowed her 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 she could sense her discomfort, Luna 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 in cute pastel outfits were plastered to the walls, teen girls with immaculate make-up were working behind the counter, and only teen girls were milling around the displays. Luna appeared unbothered, despite being a slightly different type of teenage girl than the one this store catered for. Not exactly a ‘tomboy’, Darcy thought, but certainly not a girly girl by traditional standards. Luna had her own strong style, one that was common for dominant female wolves.

Darcy was just grateful that one of them seemed at ease.

“The swimsuits are over there,” Luna said, pointing at a couple of racks. Darcy scurried over and started flicking through the hangers. Very quickly her heart began to sink. She 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 Luna, 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 her. 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,” Luna added with a quiet laugh.

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

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

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

As she 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. “She’s a bit tasty.”

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

“I hope she does,” girl one replied, although she was keeping her voice low. “I’d let her do anything she 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 her-”

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

“Oh my god, she’s coming back!”

Both girls suddenly feigned interest in the folded jeans display. Luna strode past, but her eyes never wavered from Darcy. She grinned when she was near enough for her to see the tag she 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 Luna liked girls that looked like they’d just popped out of a giant cake. Would Jessica wear something like that to get her attention?

When Luna was close enough, she 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.

Luna dipped her chin into the crook of Darcy’s neck to place her lips at her ear. “What’s wrong?” she whispered.

Darcy gave a half-shrug, not wanting to displace her 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.

Luna 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 Luna away. It just made her uncomfortable to hear them talking about her like she was a sex toy.

“Let’s leave.” Luna 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. Luna scooped up the swimsuits they’d collated in Darcy’s tag-reading marathon and dropped them in the basket by the changing rooms. Luna was away from her side for barely more than a second, but it left a stinging sensation in Darcy’s chest. As soon as she was empty-handed again, she wound her arm around Darcy’s waist and pulled her against her tightly. They left the store walking in sync.