Chapter 135

For the next four days, I tried to say something to Charles, but my attempts always seemed to get cut off by something else.

One night, Charles got a phone call from his co-workers and came back beyond annoyed. Another night, someone in the building tripped the fire alarm, and we all ended up outside.

All those feelings of being lucky and blessed that I found at the moon temple were quickly slipping away. We were inching closer to the moon festival and Gwen’s arrival, and I hadn’t had a chance to open the subjects that were most important to discuss between Charles and I before his mother got her hands on everything.

Not that I would mind the wedding to Charles, but if Gwen was feeling the need for grandchildren, what if she talked Charles into it before I had a chance to talk to him? It would just make the conversation that much harder.

Two of those four days Charles ended up out of town, making talking impossible. He had to leave to go take care of some things before the interviews with the alphas began.

This left me stuck at home with Theo, which was fine. He had Violet over every night, taking advantage of the fact that David was gone, but it certainly didn’t help me. Because by the time Charles got back, my cycle was done, and I was right back where I’d been before with pregnancy risks. Except now I was tied up in nonsense about extended family.

Charles came home late on his second night away, virtually in the middle of the night. I only realized that he’d come home because he curled up next to me in bed, taking a deep breath of my scent before sliding his hands across my stomach and running them up along my breasts.

“Elena?” he whispered while curling against my back. “I’m home.”

“I can tell,” I murmured.

“I missed you,” he said.

“I missed you, too.”

I turned sleepily and gave him a kiss without even opening my eyes. He seemed to take this as an invitation and ran his hand down my stomach and into my panties, stopping at the upper edge.

“Is it over?” he asked. “Are we good to go?”

“I’m done,” I said quietly.

He started working me with his hands. And against my back, he grew stiff and ready.

Fuck it. I didn’t care that it was the middle of the night. We were going to have to have a conversation now.

“Charles,” I murmured.

“Yes,” he asked, slipping his finger up inside me, working so that he rubbed both the inside and my clit at the same time.

I grabbed this hand and stilled it. “Before we do this, do you have a condom?”

I just let the words tumble out. Otherwise, I was never going to work up the courage to say it, or I was going to miss the opportunity.

He jerked his hand out of my panties as if I burnt him, scooting back across the bed. “Why would you need a condom?” he demanded.

I sighed and rolled to face him. “For a lot of reasons—”

“But you’ve never made me wear one before,” he said, cutting me off all of a sudden. “Why now?”

I scowled at him. “I was trying to explain—”

The frown on his face grew deeper. “Why is this coming up after I’ve been gone for two nights?”

I jerked upright in bed, crossing my arms and glaring at him. “Are you applying what I think you’re implying?”

“If the strange cock fits.” He growled, sitting up in the bed and matching my dark look. “I’m saying the circumstances are fishy at best. And no. For the record, I don’t carry a condom around because I,” and he put heavy emphasis on the word, “am only sleeping with you. So I don’t need to worry about protection from anything else.”

“You know what?” I snarled. “Fuck you. I’ve been trying to get up the courage to have this conversation with you for weeks now, and every time I put things off because you’ve had a bad day or something else comes up, or it’s not the right time, and your mood isn’t correct. And the whole while, I’ve been getting more and more and more miserable. Because all I want you to do is wear a fucking condom while we have sex! Is that so hard to ask?”

“It is when I don’t know why you’re asking,” Charles snarled.

He got himself out of bed, throwing the covers back down over me.

“Why should it matter why I’m asking?” I demanded, all the while blinking back tears of anger. “Or would you like to just come out and say what you keep hinting at? You think I fucked someone else, don’t you?”

He threw up his hands and gave me the most disgusted look I’d ever seen from him. “You’re the one who said it.”

With that, he stormed out, and I heard the door to the spare bedroom slam shut.

I threw myself onto my stomach, pressing my face into the pillow so that I could scream on the back of heavy tears. For all I was in love with Charles, at that moment I hated him. How could he be such an asshole as to accuse me of cheating on him?

Charles was out of the apartment when I woke up, and I felt rather sick to my stomach. We couldn’t talk about where things had ended last night. I couldn’t even ask him when his family was coming in for the festival for sure. This left me feeling completely helpless.

I had one diner that I had to go eat at today as part of my story. Supposedly, on the weekend, they always had a theme for lunch only, and it included menu items for that theme that weren’t offered at any other time.

But I had wanted to patch things up between Charles and me before I left for work. I also wanted to start getting the house in order for his family’s visit. Since I was going out for my article, I needed to pick up some of the things we might need to host his family comfortably. For example, we didn’t have anywhere near enough pillows.

But with Charles gone, I couldn’t do anything except sit and wonder if he was so mad at me that he just couldn’t even be there. The whole time I went out and tried to enjoy lunch at the diner, my nerves kept my stomach fuzzing.

For a change, it was Theo who kept up most of the conversation. He had heard about the diner and its weekly themed lunches, but he’d never had the opportunity to go. He was quite excited about this outing.

By the time we got home, even Theo had given up on me. He took the extra order he’d gotten for David back to their apartment and left me by myself with nothing to do except sit in my misery.

I was unable to focus on properly writing, so I retreated to the bedroom and married myself under the covers, crying myself to sleep.