Breaking the Rules (Pushing the Limits 1.50)

I toss my hands in the air. “Why do I try?”

“Chill. I get what you’re saying. So this Hunter guy offered you a position?”

“He offered to let me study with him for the year...here in Colorado.”

Isaiah scrubs both of his hands over his face, and the tiger tattooed on his arm ripples with the motion. “Noah sees you as his family, you know?”

“His brothers are his family. As are you and Beth. I’m just his girlfriend.”

“That’s bullshit, and you know it.”

“Is it?” I ask, as anger, in the form of tiny daggers, floods my bloodstream. “Because if I was his family I highly doubt he’d be walking away from me like he just did. He’d want to talk to me, fight with me, tell me we’ll figure it out or beg me to go home with him.”

“Is that what you want?” Isaiah slowly studies me, and it’s like how a panther must stalk an enemy from the bushes. I shiver with the gaze. “Him to decide for you?”

What pinches is my internal pause. “No.” I want to decide...I think.

“Are you looking for Noah’s approval?”

Yes. Even though I don’t verbalize an answer, Isaiah shakes his head in disgust as if I had spoken. “You think Noah’s going to leave you because you chase your dreams?”

At the very center of my being, the answer is a firm no, but there’s this doubt, this lingering doubt... “I’ve been left before.”

“He’s not like that,” Isaiah snaps.

“You thought he was when you found out he was searching for his mother’s family.”

A muscle ticks near Isaiah’s eye. “I told you that was my shit. Not his and not yours.”

I shrug. I should say I’m sorry for throwing it in his face, but I’m not because it’s true.

“You’ve gotta admit,” continues Isaiah, as though the last few sentences were never uttered, “what you threw at him is a lot to swallow.”

He has a point.

“Give Noah space tonight. Let him blow off some steam, and I’m sure he’ll get his shit straight. This relationship thing, it’s new to him. Don’t leave him behind because he’s human.”

In the distance people yell as if encouraging someone to do something. I nod in agreement with Isaiah’s words, but it leaves an emptiness in my stomach. A car parks beside us, and we remain quiet as five people pile out of a four-door sedan.

One girl stops laughing the moment she notices Isaiah, and then she smiles again when she surveys me like I’m about to flirt with her boyfriend, and she knows I don’t have a shot.

Isaiah stiffens. Crap, he senses a threat.

The group continues to the party and when they’re far enough away I say, “What was that?”

“What?”

I gesture to the group. “That. She looked at us strange, and then you got all tight.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He does, but he’s not spilling. “You should go find Beth.”

Isaiah hooks an arm around my neck, reminding me a lot of how Aires used to treat me. “You’re hanging with me and Beth tonight.”

“You said I should give Noah space.”

Isaiah leads me away from the crowd. “He knows some people from work. Besides, Noah’s always found someone to hang with at parties. Me and you, we’ll have a couple of beers and babysit Beth after she gets high. It’ll be fun.”