Chapter 68

“Ava!” Olivia was the first to call for me as I ran to my room.

My foot hurt. Tears stung in my eyes. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I just wanted Ethan to love me, I didn’t want him to need a reason to.

He didn’t love me or even like me, it seemed, until he found out we were fated mates. That wasn’t romantic to me, he didn’t learn to love me at all. He just decided that he did it all at once.

A little part of me felt betrayed by his admission to Mars and Olivia. He trusted them, I did too, but he did it without discussing it with me.

By the time I made it into my room, I was limping. A thin trail of blood droplets followed me up the stairs and into my bathroom. I stuck my foot in the tub and started running water to wash away the blood. I was hurt, physically and emotionally.

I heard knocking on the door to my bedroom, but I ignored it. I reached over to close the bathroom door while I finished cleaning myself up. The blood wouldn’t stop, though.

My bedroom door creaked open, footsteps led to the bathroom, and the knocking persisted there.

“Ava?” Ethan called through the door. “Let me in, I saw the blood.”

I wanted to scream at him to go away and let me be hurt and embarrassed alone, but my voice betrayed me. Nothing came out when I tried to speak, acceptance or rejection. Ethan took the silence as his cue to come into the bathroom.

I should’ve locked the door.

“Let me see,” He whispered, approaching the bathtub.

“No,” I groaned, but made no effort to move as he got closer.

He leaned over the tub and saw the bloodied water draining. With a soft hand, he ran his palm down my calf and gently wrapped his fingers around my ankle. He pulled my foot up, removed it from the running water, and brought it into his lap.

He reached for the first aid kit I put on the bathroom counter, and took out bandages and ointment. When he started drying the skin around the cut, I looked at his concentrated face, and the embarrassment and anger from before dissipated slowly.

“Why did you say that?” I asked him, my voice quiet.

“Say what?”

“That we aren’t getting divorced anymore,” I crossed my arms over my chest, my foot stayed in his lap and I had to ignore the feeling of warmth spreading up my thighs.

“Well, because we aren’t.” Ethan said, spreading ointment over the cuts. “We’re mates.”

“I know but,” I paused, taking a deep breath. “Why did you tell them that?”

“Because they are our friends. They deserve to know about us.” Ethan started wrapping a bandage around the cut. Butterflies rose in my stomach, but I had to ignore them.

“So you’ll express your thoughts and emotions to them, but you won’t discuss it with me beforehand?” I didn’t mean to sound so whiny, but Ethan wasn’t understanding what I was saying at all.

“Ava, don’t be like that.” Ethan massaged the muscles around my ankle soothingly. He was making it so hard to be mad at him.

“You didn't talk to me, we haven't talked about us at all! We've just been…” Heat rushed to my cheeks and I couldn't even finish the statement. Ethan glanced at me with a self-satisfied smirk.

“We're mates,” He said matter-of-factly. As if that solved all of our problems.

“Is that why you think you love me?” I questioned, pulling my leg from his grip.

“What are you actually upset about, Ava?” Ethan raised his eyebrows in an accusatory manner. I wished he already knew. I wished things were easy between us, but Ethan had so many secrets. He kept so much to himself.

“You don’t discuss anything with me!” I threw my hands down into my lap, a childish pout contoured my lips. “You hide everything and you never show me how you feel. You tell other people you love me, but you’ve never told me directly.”

Ethan’s mouth opened to reply, but I was on a roll and didn’t give him the chance to argue just yet.

“You leave me out of meetings so I never know what’s going on - like with Olivia’s wedding! You have told me the bare minimum about your past, I don’t know how you got from one point to the other, you knew Olivia and Mars were in love but you kept that from me and I misunderstood the situation which caused me a lot of heartache!” My ranting wouldn’t cease. As much as I wanted to tell myself to shut up, I really couldn’t. It felt so good to get all of this information off my chest.

“Ava, you can’t-”

I cut him off, “Ethan I can understand! I can listen, I can love you, I can be a good mate.”

Ethan smiled at me.

“But I can’t allow you to keep so many secrets from me in general. I need to know right now: If we were not mates, would you say that you loved me. Would you have told me you loved me three days ago?”

Ethan blinked at me. He didn’t say anything, and I knew he was thinking. The fact that he had to think about it, though, made me angry.

“You keep all these secrets. You don’t express yourself or your emotions so I have to stifle my feelings for you, and then you go and make this huge decision without giving me a mere hint about what you’re doing!” I reiterated with a frown. “And now, you don’t know if you’d love me if you didn’t know I was your mate.”

“Ava, that’s not what’s happening,” Ethan reached for me, but I stood up and walked out of the bathroom before he could touch me and make me forget that I was even mad at him to begin with.

I paced around in front of my bed, Ethan was right behind me after emerging from the ensuite bathroom.

“Please,” I turned towards him, “We have to talk about this, we have to make some sort of decision.”

“I’ve made my decision, Ava!” Ethan sounded a little frustrated, his voice rose just slightly. He’d never been angry at me, it made me shrink back a little.

“Ethan,” I breathed out, scrunching my eyebrows together. “We don’t know anything about each other. We don’t listen to each other.”

“Actions speak louder than words.”

“And you have not exactly shown me that you are hopelessly devoted or in love with me.” I told him.

Ethan’s eyes darkened and his expression morphed from frustrated to determined. He reached behind him and pulled out a folded packet of paper.

I recognized it immediately as the contract we signed when we first met each other in the pastry shop before wedding dress shopping. The paper that sealed my fate and saved my mom.

The paper that promised me to Ethan for a year.

“I will show you that you are my mate and wife, then.” Ethan shred the paper in half, looking at me the entire time. I could do nothing but watch as pieces of the contract fell to the floor like confetti.

It was gone.

“I have no copies,” Ethan shrugged. “There’s no contract anymore.”