Chapter One: I Hate You

Lena's POV

"I hate you!" I shouted out loud from where I was seated.

I did not care who heard me, I screamed it at the top of my voice and the woman sitting beside me literally shuffled away like I had lost my mind.

And honestly maybe I had, because Kael Arden, the lead player of an ice hockey team I so detest had just stolen another match from my team and I was completely done.

"Is she okay?" someone behind me whispered but I could hear her.

"Clearly not," another voice answered.

I did not even turn around, I grabbed my cheer stick off the seat and smashed it against the back of the chair in front of me, the plastic cracked down the middle, I dropped it and went out immediately even though I could still hear the noise behind me.

His team celebrated like they had done something genius when all they had done was ruin my evening for the fifth time this Ice Hockey season.

"Every single time," I muttered, pulling my jacket tighter when I got outside

"every single time it is him, like does he not get tired of winning, does nobody on that ice ever just trip him or something?"

A guy passing by gave me a look and I ignored it completely.

This was also Priya, my best friend's fault. She had promised she was coming, I had literally said please four times in one message, four times, and thirty minutes before the match she texted me saying she had met someone at the campus café and was staying back. A guy she had known for two hours, over me. Her best friend who had begged.

My phone buzzed and I pulled it out. It was an anonymous guy I've been chatting with for over two years now.

He had messaged me from F******k where I barely made friends and we had funnily got along ever since then, arguing ice hockey and I unconsciously became so relaxed with him that I now tell him so much about me.

"How was the match?" He asked through the text

"Terrible. Your team just robbed us again. That number seven is the most arrogant player I have ever watched in my life, he plays like the rules were written specifically around him and it is disgusting."

I hit send and walked straight into someone since I wasn't looking straight.

My phone flew out of my hand and cracked against the pavement and I stood there staring at it for a full second before crouching to pick it up, muttering the whole time because the screen protector had a new split and this was the second time this month.

"Watch where you're going," the person said, already walking away, and I opened my mouth to respond but they were already gone so I just straightened up and kept moving.

Then my foot caught the edge of a raised paving stone and I stumbled, catching myself before I actually fell but twisting my ankle enough to make me stop and hiss out loud.

"Okay," I said to nobody, pressing my hand to the wall beside me,

"Okay, we are done, the universe has made its point, I get it."

I stood still for a moment letting the sting pass and my eyes drifted across the street to the bookstore I sometimes walked past on the way home.

It displayed books and my eyes caught sight of one werewolf fictional book and now I know that day is specifically meant to taunt me.

"Really," I said quietly, and I looked away but it was already too late.

My memory immediately flashed back to years ago when my mother's hand in mine went cold and slipped off, the way I had kept talking to her even after she stopped responding because stopping felt like agreeing that she was already gone, and then the stillness, my father's face afterward, and back to the rule he repeated until it became the only thing I knew how to hear automatically.

"Werewolves are beasts, they shouldn't be anywhere humans are. Run away from them" He would say everytime after my mom went to the forest for a trip with her friends and came back home poisoned with no cure.

I turned away from the window and started walking again. No, I was not going to cry tonight.

I was good at shutting it down, I had been practicing for years, so I shifted to something else and even my personal life was a disaster.

The very one relationship I had ended with him saying I was too closed off, then I lost my virginity in the back of a delivery truck with a guy whose last name I never got.

My phone buzzed and when I checked, it was that same anonymous guy who's starting to make my heart beats again.

"Number seven specifically? Or the whole team?" He asked.

I almost smiled and typed back.

"Him specifically. The whole team is irritating but he is something else. He plays like he already knows he is going to win before it even starts and everyone lets him because he is pretty, it is actually embarrassing to watch."

"Pretty?" he typed back almost immediately.

"Oh don't start," I said out loud, typing,

"You know what I mean, conventionally attractive and completely aware of it, which makes it worse."

I tucked the phone into my pocket and turned the corner toward the longer route home because I was not ready to even get back home so I'd rather walk 30 minutes extra.

My phone buzzed again and I pulled it out expecting another argument about the match.

What I read made me stop walking completely.

"You threw your drink before the final whistle."

I stared at the screen.

"What?" I was still typing but his reply came before I had even finished typing.

"And you missed when you aimed for the ice." He added, tagging his later message.