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

Shoulder Deities

Melody couldn’t contain her excitement long enough to let Darcy eat a mouthful of his 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. He stirred his 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. He wasn’t going to deny it or defend Luca in front of his friends, they knew his faults all too well. They had been his safe haven from Luca 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,” he said as sweetly as his 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 his 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 his 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 their swimsuits and outfits. Of course, when he let slip that Luca was taking him shopping for his clothes, Melody squealed and Reece suddenly looked disgusted with his sandwich.

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

Darcy’s body was bubbling with nerves. When an oversized hand dropped onto his thigh, he jolted in his seat. Luca pulled it back to hover over him and gave Darcy a look of concern out of the corner of his eye. He was still facing the road, but checking his reaction. Darcy flushed. He put his hand over the top of Luca’s and pushed it back down onto his leg, but set his gaze out the window so that he didn’t have to see the smirk he knew Luca would be wearing. Luca’s fingers curled around his inner thigh and applied the slightest pressure around it. Darcy shivered. He forced himself to stare out of the window as nonchalantly as he could, while his 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. He consoled himself with the knowledge that they still had the drive home 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 Luca’s side and allowed him to lead the way through the busy street. He wasn’t afraid of humans, but he didn’t like to get too close. As though he could sense Darcy’s 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 teenagers. Posters of teen girls in short skirts and shirtless teen guys were plastered to the walls. Teen girls were working behind the counter with immaculate make-up.  And only teen girls were milling around the displays. Luca appeared unbothered by the surroundings and Darcy was grateful that one of them was at ease. Despite being teenagers, they really didn’t fit the teeny-bopper aesthetic of the shop.

“The swimsuits are over there,” Luca said, pointing at a couple of racks. Darcy scurried over and started flicking through the hangers. Very quickly his heart began to sink. Darcy had a normal body size… for his height. And he had the height of a boy five years his junior. Every size label he plucked out was at least two sizes too big, or was his size but had ‘tall’ printed on the tag. They might fit round the waist, but would reach his ankles in length.

He did two laps of the ‘BEACH BOYS’ section and sighed.

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

“None of them will fit me,” he answered wearily. They were only one shop deep and his hope for a cute pair of swimming shorts was flagging. It was just so difficult to find anything that sat comfortably between speedo and waterproof cargo shorts. He wanted his butt and his balls covered, and maybe even a pretty print if he got really lucky.

“What size do you need?”

Darcy flushed. There was something strangely intimate about sharing his size with him. He 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.

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

“Okay.” Luca rubbed a soothing circle into his 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 his shoulder before Luca slipped away to the checkout counters. Darcy watched him go, staring at him unabashed while he couldn’t catch him.

As his mate 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 him to see the tag he was holding up. His size. Attached to it was a very brightly coloured item. Hot pink. Darcy did his best not to grimace at the sight of it. Perhaps Luca liked guys that looked like they’d just popped out of a giant cake. Would Jessica wear something that colour to get his attention?

When he was close enough, he handed it to Darcy, who turned the material over in his hands a few times. His mind was still turning over the girls, wringing them out like cloths in his imagination.

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

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

“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,” he 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 he thought that those girls were going to steal Luca away. It just made him uncomfortable to hear them talking about him like he was a sex toy.

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

That Darcy definitely agreed with. He 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 his 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, Luca wound his arm around Darcy’s waist and pulled him against him tightly. They left the store walking in sync.