Page 245 of Night's Fall
I scrunched my nose.
He smiled at me.
“It feels weird,”Itold him.
“I suppose after all this time, it’s become somewhat of a nickname, as it were.”
“Yeah.Lookat it like that,”Iencouraged.
He smiled at me, then sobered. “Havepatience with him.Sadly, the male gender is not good across species at dealing with emotion.”
“I’ll try,”Ipromised, even thoughIthoughtIwastrying.
I was just failing.
And it wasAleksei’sfault (so said me).
We disconnected andIwent to find my tablet.
I returned to the daybed, holed up in a corner and got to work.
I searchedMaleFatedMateReactiontoFemaleMateVulnerability.
AndIgot a lot about volatility, unpredictability, and in some, the tendency to bait other males into a challenge.Inothers, though it was rare, physical abuse of their mate and/or young.
I stared hard at that one, rereading it repeatedly, untilIlet it go, becauseAlekseiwasn’t doing that, andIknew he never would.Butmy father definitely had.
ThoughIdid note all the articles said that a fated mate would continue in these behaviors, with changes in the intensity depending on his ability to control it, until he sensed the vulnerability had passed.Or, until he found a release of tension, and physical activity (including copulation, which was an intriguing concept), sparring or shifting were all suggestions on how to release said tension.
It was in this searchIfound myself sliding down a rabbit hole, skimming or reading full articles about the psychology of mates.
This was a fascinating, but not always fun place to be.
One of the fascinating parts was that the prevailing theory of the origin of fated mates was that theNightGod,SkyGod,DawnGodandLandGodall got together to create them for the purpose of the continuation of the species.
They didn’t explain why this was the theory, considering nature for all creatures was to procreate in the first place, but it was clear it wasn’t to keep species pure, because from the dawn of time, inter-species mating was a thing.
The next fascinating part was that there were different reactions to finding your mate, depending on your species, or if your mate was of another species, or if there was mixed blood.
Shifter beasts made it easy, because they recognized their mates instantly.
It wasn’t so easy for fae or the magical, even manifesting itself as unexplainable enmity, at first, until something happened when the mating became clear.
The not-always-fun part was an articleIread (definitely in full) about how there were mates who should not be.
The article was titledWhentheGodsGetItWrong.
It explained, in modern times, this was sometimes a conscious decision, say, shouldIhave turned away fromAlekseibecauseIwanted no part in his complicated life.
However, there were some who simply didn’t get along, couldn’t find harmony, their lives didn’t naturally intertwine, or they found they simply didn’t like each other.
And the authors of that article encouraged those mates to part and find contentment elsewhere, at the same time cautioning they’d do so feeling the loss for the rest of their lives.
Though, they assured the pain would become manageable, like a chronic illness of the past that had no cure: for instance, migraines.
In other words, the pain was debilitating, but you had no choice but to learn to cope with it and carry on, and this you would do.
This brought to mind thatAlekseiandIhad few things in common.
