Clare

  What was once weird about two weeks ago felt like the norm as I sat in the makeshift cinema room in Sawyer’s apartment with Sawyer sitting between me and Elijah.

  The room was slightly dark to aid our movie night, but none of us were really paying attention to the movie. Sawyer was on his phone while Elijah was petting the treacherous cat, Queen, who was happily rubbing her fluffy self all over Sawyer and Elijah but barely even touching me with her fluffy tail.

  The only advantage I could get was a squeeze or two of her soft paws before I got kicked away. Before she met Elijah, I had thought she just had a special preference to Sawyer which was why she only allowed me to pet her in short bursts where she just stood still with tiny purrs like allowing me to pet her was a service in exchange for my service of saving her life.

  After she met Elijah, I realized that Queen was just a partial cat who just arbitrarily chose whoever she wanted to give her love to. Somehow, Elijah and Sawyer had qualified, but I hadn’t. Which was why the only reason she eventually left Elijah’s arms was the smell of treat I had to use to attract her attention.

  While she ate the treats from my hands, I was able to enjoy rubbing her fluffy body with my free hand. Unfortunately, when she was done eating the treats, she pressed her paw against my petting hand to stop it, giving me a bombastic side eye that told me she was well aware of my tactics to get a rub in.

  After patting my hand in warning twice, she walked off onto Sawyer’s lap, allowing her tail to drag over my hands.

  “Queen, no, how can you leave just like that? You’re killing me. You’re breaking my heart here.” I said with a fake groan.

  Queen, didn’t even give me a backward glance as she occupied Sawyer and Elijah’s laps at the same time with the lower half of her body fixed on Sawyer’s lap and upper half of her body fixed on Elijah’s laps.

  Elijah dared to laugh as he started rubbing her fluffy face. However, unlike with me, she didn’t just sit still for him to rub her head, she sat up slightly and rubbed her head all over his hands whenever he raised said hands to show off to me.

  She even had the audacity to turn around on her back to give him her belly, which made Elijah laugh even louder as I looked at him with resentment.

  “Sawyer! Talk to Queen. She and Elijah are bullying me!” I released a fake cry, pressing my hand to my chest.

  To my surprise, Sawyer didn’t join in our antics as he usually did.

  When I turned to stare at him, I saw that he was staring at his phone with furrowed brows and a worried, tense look.

  I nudged him with my elbow. “Hey, are you okay? Did something go wrong with one of your jobs?”

  He met my gaze and looked away as he replied with a fake smile, “No, everything is fine.”

  Before I could ask more questions, he locked his phone, pushed it into his pocket and rudely took off Queen from his laps, dropping her on my laps away from Elijah's attentive hands.

  He was acting so weird that I didn’t even take advantage of the time Queen was in my arms. Instead, I watched him leave the room without looking back once.

  “What’s wrong?” Elijah asked.

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head, looking down at Queen who gave me an inelegant snort before jumping off my thighs onto Elijah’s.

  “Don’t worry, he does this sometimes whenever there is an attack on the stuffs he guards online. He’ll be back once he has dealt with it.” Elijah said.

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  “You know, I just realized that while you both bicker like an unhappy couple about to get a divorce, you seem to know each other pretty well.” I said, moving my eyebrow suggestively.

  “We used to be friends…best friends, even.” He said, chuckling at my suggestive eyebrow movements.

  “So what happened?” I asked, moving closer to him on the couch.

  He hesitated, and I moved my eyebrows suggestively, like a true Fujoshi. “Did you develop feelings for each other?”

  Recognizing my facial expression from the time we had watched my favorite Anime together, he burst into laughter while shaking his head repeatedly. “Not at all. He’s straight, totally straight. Plus, I have never seen him that way. You can say that we were childhood brothers from different parents.”

  His laughter died down as his face turned melancholic. “He just…he wanted to protect me from something by revealing a secret that I didn’t want to be revealed. I…and that’s basically how we fell out. He thought I was being cowardly by not just letting go of that thing that was hurting me and I thought he was being callous, without caring about the emotional, social and legal implications I would have to face if I let go.”

  I stared at him and grabbed his large hand with mine, squeezing them to try to give him comfort as I tried to figure out the best thing to say to make him feel better.

  That was when Sawyer walked into the room again, still with that tense look.

  “Are you okay? Did something happen?” I asked.

  He sighed and then handed me his phone while explaining, “I just took it off the internet but everyone who found a way to download it or make a screen recording as well as the original person who took it still has it. I would have to hack into each phone one by one to pull out the video. To do that, I need my dad’s permission. Based on how far the video has already circulated in the pack, there’s a high probability it already got to your father.”

  I pressed the play button to play the video and as soon as I saw what had been recorded, I turned to look at Elijah, watching all the blood in his face flush away until he looked like a white piece of paper. The video was a pretty sensual video of Elijah in the throes of pleasure as he got a blow job from a boy at the back of the school bleachers.

  As if to make Sawyer a prophet, Elijah’s phone on the living room table started vibrating with the words, ‘Dad’ as the identity of the caller.

  Elijah turned even more pale as he dropped the phone on the couch, reclining back and covering his eyes with his palm as he muttered, “He’s going to kill me this time.”

  His words sounded a little exaggerated to me, but when I saw Sawyer’s tense and serious face, I realized that Elijah’s words probably had some merit to it.

  “There’s no need to panic, right? I heard the Alpha of the pack is pretty liberal and doesn’t mind people’s sexuality? Am I right?” I asked, looking back and forth from Elijah to Sawyer as Queen seemed to sense the tense mood and walked off Elijah’s thighs to sit with her head curled on my lap.

  Unfortunately, I was in no mood to pet her right now.

  Sawyer sighed. “My dad is not the problem. His dad is.”

  “The highest he can do is yell at him, right? Or if he’s super homophobic, I could pretend to be your girlfriend and you can tell your dad that you’re bi and I’ll be proof.” I suggested, my brain running several miles an hour as I tried to figure out why they were so somber.

  Elijah sighed. “It’s not that simple. The fact that I’m gay is enough of a stain for him. Whether I like both girls and boys doesn’t matter. The fact that I like boys automatically makes me an evil because when my mom ran away, she left with a female partner.”

  “And his dad is not just going to yell at him, he’s probably going to hit him till he loses several years of his life.” Sawyer explained.

  “That’s outrageous, right? How can he hit you?” I complained.

  Despite my problems with my mom and stepfather, I had never been hit more than getting a slap once or twice for ‘running my mouth’.

  “He has always hit me…and my mom, too. That’s why she ran away. He’s the pack Beta, and he pretends to be this perfect gentleman outside, but he just loves to take his frustrations out on his loved ones. When anything happens, like someone talking to him slightly rudely at a pack council meeting, I get the brunt of it.” Elijah said.

  I watched a shiver of fear rack his body and started to feel tense as I pressed my hand to his thigh to comfort him.

  “There has to be a way to stop him.” I said.

  “There is a way to stop him, but Elijah doesn’t want to do it. I’ve told you, Elijah, the only way out is to tell my dad and file for emancipation.” Sawyer said.

  “If I do that, I’ll lose the only loved one I have,” Elijah said.

  “He’s not really a loved one if he hits you and hates you for your sexuality, though, is he?” Sawyer said.

  His words seemed to get to Elijah as Elijah stopped speaking and finally put down the hand he was using to cover his red-rimmed eyes. “Even if I want to report to your father now, we have no evidence. It’ll just be my word against his, and your father can’t truly interfere.”

  An idea popped into my head immediately. “Well, how about we make evidence, then?”

  They both turned to me.

  “Tell me.” They chorused together.

  I shared my master plan and then, with some tweaks from Sawyer, we had a plan.