[Shayle]I laid back in the bed and stared at the ceiling above me. Though I had managed to distract myself a little, it wasn’t enough to make me forget. Nothing could seem to make me forget. A few days ago, one of my friends had managed to reach out to me after I came back from the troll village in the fae realm. Forrest had moved that lizard into his house. They were going to gatherings together and everyone was talking about how different Forrest was now that he had her. There had been some sort of issue with her mother and her mother’s mate. At the last gathering, they had shown up as well and my friends told me Forrest had to be held back from Pyla’s mother’s mate. He was making a fool of himself for her. After hearing that, I didn’t want to go home, so I went to the human town for a few drinks. That was how I ended up where I was. It was a small house with very high ceilings. The owner needed that. He was about as tall as me, which is rare for a softie. Craig was a weremoose. I figured if Rock could fuсk a shifter, I could, too. Craig was attracted to my human glamour and said the look in my eye drew him in. He wanted to know what made me look sad. I hadn’t even realized that my feelings bled through into my glamour as I was drinking. He came up with a bottle and refilled my glass. Most human drսgs didn’t work on trolls the same way they worked on other people. I wasn’t worried about being drսgged and let him sit with me. Free drinks were always welcome. While he tried to get me to talk, I worked on drinking my mind numb, then seducing the strange looking shifter. He wasn’t really attractive by troll standards, but he wasn’t so ugly a few drinks wouldn’t fix it. Craig was seven and a half feet tall. He had shiny dark brown hair and medium brown skin. His eyes were spaced wide on his face and his nose was large and mostly flat. He was well-muscled and thickly built. I didn’t really know how we ended up at his house, in his bedroom, but I didn’t mind it. Anything to get my mind off Forrest…. Craig hadn’t been too terrible in bed. He almost managed to dominate me, but muscles made of flesh tired long before muscles made of stone. For all that I couldn’t do much in a real fight, in a dominance fight in bed, I didn’t let up until I was either completely dominated or dominant. Forrest used to like that about me. Even though he regularly won, I would keep fighting each time as if it was the first time. At least, that’s what he told me he liked. Maybe he didn’t like that anymore. Goddess only know what that lizard was like in bed. She beat me very painfully. Did she fight him with the intention of winning? Did she simply submit to him? Did she actually win and dominate him? I shook my head. There was no way she won against him. Forrest was trained to fight and he was good at it. He wouldn’t let someone win. Forrest was a little softer than other trolls, but he would never relinquish control like that. “You have that look on your face again, Shayle,” Craig said as he turned to lay on his side. He slid a hand over my chest and down to my stomach where he stroked over my skin with his soft hands. It sent a shiver through me. I knew why Rock was so obsessed with his mate, now. Fuсking softies was so different from fuсking trolls. “Now you’re focused on my face again? I thought you passed out after you came,” I chuckled. “I was always focused on your face. You’re very expressive. Now that you’ve finished, though, why don’t you tell me what was making you look like that?” I scoffed. “What’s it to you? Just because we fuсked, doesn’t mean you’re anything more than a diсk to me. Maybe I should go.” “Don’t go, Shayle. There’s a lot more night left and I want to spend more time with you. I just have to wait a while for my animal side to heal me before we can get back to it. You damn near ground my pelvis into dust,” he chuckled. “Come on, a little pillow talk while I get back to fighting form. I’m not nearly done with you.” He was certainly tougher than I thought a softie would be. Most of them didn’t survive ѕex with a troll. I laughed at the leering look in his eyes. “You know I don’t look like this, right?” I asked. “I know you’re a fae of some sort. You are really tall, so I’m guessing something on the giant scale. Your skin looks soft, but it’s actually rough, inside and out. I don’t know a lot about fae, so you could tell me what you are. We’re just having some fun, so there’s no reason to take your glamour off if you don’t want to.” Craig knew what he wanted. My human glamour was a translation of my troll looks. I was attractive by their standards, and very tall. It kept a lot of men away, but there were some who still flirted. This was the first time I let myself indulge with someone who wasn’t fae. I kept the glamour on the whole time because I didn’t want him to lose what minor hardness he was capable of. He was a decent fuсk, but nothing like the troll men I’d been with. Even Rock was able to get harder than this man. But Rock wasn’t really thick enough to make it feel more than passably good. This man struggled to get inside me and I hadn’t felt that since the last time I fuсked Forrest. I’d have to say this moose’s diсk was the human version of Forrest’s. It was almost easy to close my eyes and imagine Forrest when this man was fuсking me. Almost. There was still a lot missing. More than anything, I missed what I had with Forrest. No one was ever like him. It made me regret not treating him the way I really wanted to. Maybe if I did, Pyla wouldn’t have gotten her claws into him. “Come on, Shayle. I can see you tearing up.” I scowled and reapplied my glamour, making sure it didn’t look like I was crying. I couldn’t let anyone else know what I really felt. That wasn’t the troll way. Sometimes, I was jealous of Forrest’s friendship with Elbio and Rock. I was younger than the three of them and a female, so a lot of the time, I was left out, even though we were all supposed to be friends. My mother had me for the same reason Elbio and Forrest’s moms had them. If I had been a boy, I would have been more easily accepted into their group, but our friendship had been fragile and ended around the time we were fifteen. That was when I fell in love with Forrest. “My feelings are mine I don’t need to share them with anyone else.”“You’ve never had anyone else to share them with, have you? I can tell that you have never been able to trust others with your real thoughts and feelings. I understand. Moose are solitary creatures and don’t live in larger communities like other shifters do. We’re raised by single mothers and leave soon after our first shift to find our fortunes. You don’t make a lot of friends when you know you’re leaving and the only person you can trust is your mother or a sibling if you’re lucky enough to have one…. I haven’t seen my mother in years,” he told me. “I’m a troll. My siblings are all much older than me. The only friends I have can’t be trusted with my real feelings. They do whatever they can for attention, even if it means telling people my secrets. I had some friends who didn’t do that, but I couldn’t maintain those friendships,” I admitted. “I get it. Maintaining friendships is hard. The plus side, is that I don’t know any other trolls. There’s no one I can tell and no one I want to talk to about you. Whatever happens in my bed tonight stays between you and me. I promise it won’t stop me from rocking your world again,” Craig replied and kissed my shoulder. Though I nearly laughed, I managed to stop myself. He barely teetered my world. This man was really confident, even without encouragement. “Do you have mates?” I asked. “No. Like our animal counterpart, we breed with whatever females we find during the rutting season. I’m one of the biggest moose in the area, so I have my pick of women in mating season. As I understand it, most fae have true mates, though.” I nodded. “Yeah. And, as a troll, I won’t be able to find mine until I turn fifty… unless he finds me first and is older. For the last thirty-four years, I thought I had already found mine. We were on again/off again for three decades. He never claimed me, though. “I thought it was because he wanted to play the field for as long as possible. I was fine with that. I would do the same, but I always knew in my heart that he was my true mate. For the last three decades, I thought he felt it, too. But he didn’t,” I said softly. “What happened?” “A half lizard woman came to the fae lands from the fae realm. She’s half-troll, so the seers in her village said her true mate would be a troll, not a lizard man. She was socially inept, but attractive. Even I could see that she was better looking than me. She was exotic and that drew a lot of males to her. “I was still confident in my relationship with Forrest, the troll I was dating. He saw her at a party and started fawning over her. I thought he just wanted to fuсk the woman, so I left him to it and let his friend take me home. Ever since I was fifteen, I’d been sleeping with at least one of the men in this friend group. Jett doesn’t sleep with anyone, but I fuсked Mica, Rock, Elbio, and Forrest pretty frequently until Mica found his true mate. “But no matter how much I did the others, Forrest knew all he had to do was crook his finger and I would be there. Maybe I gave him too much power over me. Maybe I should have played hard-to-get more. Whatever it was, he took what he wanted and never gave me a second thought,” I explained. “He wanted this lizard girl and not you. I’m guessing he wanted more than ѕex from her….” I nodded. It was so hard for me to think of the last interaction I had with Forrest. I let my temper get the better of me. I always had that problem. It was a troll tendency, but I was more invested in my anger than other people seemed to be. It boiled and seethed for hours after I exploded. Part of the reason I had to leave after the incident in the fae market was to get away from the people who were mocking me for letting my anger embarrass me. I was still seething and I wanted to lash out at more people. I wanted to attack that lizard’s back when she walked away with Queen Ivy. Forrest’s words rang in my head. I don’t love you and I never did. No matter how much I loved him, it was always one sided. If I had known he wanted me to be faithful to him, I would have. If he wanted me to be softer, I would have. Ever since I started falling in love with Forrest, I just wanted to be what he needed. When I saw him not being the troll he could be, I pushed him to be better. I acted exactly as everyone expected and reminded him of how he should be acting. It wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted someone who would let him be soft and would accept all the softies he wanted in his life. I didn’t even particularly dislike Rock, but I saw how being his friend was hurting Forrest’s name among other trolls. It didn’t matter to him, though. He wanted to keep protecting Rock and now he had to protect Rock’s werewolf, too. He even lied to other trolls for her. “No matter how I tried, I wasn’t what he wanted. I keep being bitter about him choosing her over me, but I’m beginning to think it was never a matter of choosing. Anyone can tell she’s his true mate. Forrest would never move a woman into his house just to try to get in her pants. He’s too prideful for that. He wouldn’t claim her and protect her like that if he didn’t really believe she was his true mate,” I sighed and closed my eyes, feeling tears squeeze out of them. “The goddess strikes again. For all that everyone says she loves her children and doesn’t want them to hurt, she certainly makes sure they do,” Craig scoffed. I opened my eyes and looked at him. “What do you mean?”