Page 7 of Keeping His Mate

“No,” he interrupts. “Not the shape. The dots.”

“The…dots?”

“You have two brown dots, right here,” he says, pointing to the corner of his eye again.

Oh. Okay, so he’s not racist. That’s good. I lift a hand to the outside corner of my right eye, feeling the parallel bumps. “They’re just freckles. Tiny moles.”

Bruvix mouths the wordfreckles, still looking puzzled. “But why do you only have two when Kay-teh has many?”

“I don’t know. We all look different,” I reply with a shrug. Is he bothered by my lack of freckles? What a weird thing to notice. “My dad always said it’s a beauty mark, and that because they’re near my eyes, I have a sensitive soul.”

“Beauty mark,” he repeats, then huffs a breath, like the term is some kind of joke to him. He turns away from me, facing the falls, and leans his hands on the stone ledge of the pond. “You should not be in the forest alone. It is not safe.” His accent is so odd. All of them have it actually, but his seems more pronounced, maybe because his tone is always gruff. It’s like a French accent mixed with a Scottish accent with a dash of Boston mixed in. It’s not pretty, but part of me is desperate to keep him talking, so I can hear it.

“You’re alone,” I point out as my eyes trace the scars on his shoulders.

In a flash, he straightens to his full height and stomps toward me, being careful to tilt his head down slightly and to the left, most likely to conceal his facial scars.

“You are right. Neither of us should be here,” he says. Roughly grabbing my arm, he pulls me along behind him toward the village. “The tr’gorys could be lurking despite the early hour.”

“Hey!” I shout, trying to break free of his grasp. “Let go of me, asshole!” His urgent touch reminds me of before…of my previous owners and the way they touched me. Panic rises, my calm vanishing. He ignores the insults I spew at him, but when I thrust a knee into his gut and duck my upper half beneath his arm, twisting his elbow, he lets go with a pained grunt.

Then Bruvix and I stand there, him bent over at the waist, and me leaning against a tree as we both try to catch our breath from our brief tussle. “So,” he says as he rests his hands on his knees, a rigid smile lifting one side of his mouth, “that is why your previous owner returned you. I understand this now.”

Scoffing, I cross my arms over my chest. “Because when someone touches me without my consent, I fight back? Yeah. I suppose that would bother your average shitgibbon.”

“Is that what happened?” Bruvix asks, straightening to his full height. His smirk is gone, and in its place is a hard, grim line. I feel his anger from where I stand, and I’m confused. “He touched you?”

“What the fuck do you care?” I reply skeptically. Suddenly he’s worried about me?

He jerks back as if I’ve slapped him, which I’m still somewhat inclined to do. Then he clears his throat and places his hands on his hips. “You are right. It is none of my concern.”

We stand there, saying nothing for what feels like an eternity, before I blurt, “Okay, fine. The moment I woke up the last time, this feathery monster with a bulbous black nose was poking me. I told him to stop, but he continued to poke, poke, poke, like I was some kind of science project. When he leaned in closer and poked my tit, I bit a chunk of his nose off.”

I watch as Bruvix’s eyes widen, his mouth slowly stretches into a mischievous grin, and then he starts howling with laughter. It’s a rich, rumbling sound that makes me think of a thunderstorm in the middle of summer.

“And how did he react?”

“He squawked like a chicken the moment he noticed his own gooey blood all over his shirt,” I reply, smiling at the memory of him hopping around, clutching his nose like it was about to fall off.

Bruvix continues to laugh, clutching his stomach.

“I, um, I’m assuming that’s why he returned me,” I add with a chuckle of my own.

His laughter finally fades. “I am saddened I was not there to witness such an event.”

“Well, grab me like that again, and you’ll get the full reenactment.”

He nods and clasps his hands together behind his back, then looks away, his eyes scanning the depths of the surrounding forest. “I shall not repeat that mistake.”

I take this opportunity to really look at this mysterious male who rescued me. He hates how he looks, clearly, which I find baffling. He has scars, tons of them, in fact, but when I look at them, I don’t find them unappealing. I wonder where they came from. I ache for the pain he must’ve felt. The ones on his face are extremely deep. A long, jagged mark slashes through his brow, all the way down to the middle of his cheek. He’s lucky he didn’t lose that eye. Then there’s the scar that cuts through the left side of his mouth, making his smile crooked. The third scar is a short line that forms an L shape along his jawline.

His chest is also covered in them. Long silver stripes that cut through his gold skin, leaving uneven, raised, and puckered skin on either side.

He catches my eye, and quickly lifts a hand to the scarred side of his face, trying to cover them in a nonchalant way, and I instantly feel like a jackass for allowing my gaze to linger. I want to tell him it’s not what he thinks. That I was envisioning his pain and feeling sorry for what he went through.

But would that admission actually make him feel better? It’s probably best to not say anything at all. We need a change of subject. That’ll fix the mood. “I wanted...I just, um... Thank you for rescuing me.”

He lets out a quiet grunt, turning on his heel and striding for the tree line at the edge of the village. “It was no trouble.” As he’s about to step onto the main path, he says over his shoulder, “I am sorry you cannot return to your mate.” His gaze softens as it travels down to my grandmother’s wedding ring, and then snaps forward as he strolls away.

---