Misfits Like Us (Like Us #11)(122)

I smoke on the vape, and Luna’s hand disappears beneath the comforter while the show keeps playing. She wraps her fingers around me. I flex my abs as she jerks me off slowly, and I catch her grin.

Blowing out smoke, I reach over and massage her breast, flicking her perked nipple. She squirms with a smile. I shift too, the comforter slipping to my thighs. I see her working my erection, and goodbye, Bass. It’s been nice knowing you.

My attention has zeroed in on her.

When I lean over to Luna, I suck on her tender nipple and cup her pussy. The second I start teasing around her wetness, she cries out, “Donnelly.” Her hand clenches around my shaft as she hits a high again, and I almost come with Luna. But I resist, craving to unload inside her.

She sees that I’m still hard, and she shifts her long hair, about to go down on me—but I shake my head.

Confusion pinches her eyes, and I whisper in her ear what I’d like to do to her after the show. She squirms again, nodding rapidly, and then I try to find the remote with heavier breath.

“You should rewind,” she mentions.

I do, and after I keep looking over at her, Luna suggests we get dressed since she’s distracting me from the show.

“You have to be 1000% focused,” she says strongly. “I can’t destroy your experience seeing the show in its purest form, Donnelly.”

I’d rather fuck her, but I agree, this is important. So I pull on my black cotton pants. She wiggles on her panties, and while she’s pulling on her black baggy tee, she’s saying, “Donnelly…?”

“Yeah?” I lean back, passing her the vape.

She’s about to put it to her lips, but her brows crinkle. “How come you don’t like going by Paul?”

No one really asks me that. I think mostly because I don’t put up a stink about it too often if people do call me Paul. ‘Cause then you have people like Loren Hale who won’t stop. And I sorta gave him that ammunition.

I try to figure out how to answer this.

“If you don’t want to say—”

“No, it’s not that.” I tilt my head towards Luna. “Just trying to put the words together is all.” I take another beat. “Your dad asked me if I run, and I told him yeah, I’ve run before. Around the block in South Philly, but I never told him why. Most of the time, it’d be to get away from my family and shitty friends. They’d call after me, and I figured the faster you are, the more likely they’ll think you didn’t hear them. More likely they’ll never catch you.” I start frowning. “Paul. They’d shout my name, and it’s just the name I’d run away from. Paul.” I shrug tensely. “Donnelly was what everyone called me at school. It’s the name people used who weren’t my family or bad friends. It’s the name I started introducing myself as. I like it a lot more. Sometimes, it feels like Paul is stuck in that apartment with nowhere to go.”

“And Donnelly is free,” she whispers.

I nod, looking into Luna.





Ten minutes left in Beneath a Strong Sentiment and I can’t blink as the finale unfolds. Strider is pacing in the wintery woods where Callie lies unconscious on a bed of snow. She almost died, but her body is trying to heal in the cold.

He hasn’t sold Callie out yet to anyone who’d want her dead to protect the Peak. “They’re gonna leave this shit on a love triangle cliffy,” I realize with a slight groan.

“Keep watching,” Luna assures.

Strider drops to his knees, his face torn in an anguish. “Mom,” he chokes out, and my eyes pop out of my head. He repeats, more choked, “Mom.”

“What the fuck?” I blow backwards.

Luna is only watching me. She has a big grin.

“Callie is Strider’s mom?” I’m in shock. “Who’s his dad?”

“Watch,” just as Luna says it, Frost comes into view. He kneels down beside Strider and puts a hand on his shoulder. They look like they could be brothers, but Frost whispers, “She’ll live, son.”

As they rise together with the winter wind whipping through the wooded mountainside, the resemblance between them is a whole lot clearer.

Because I have the damn answers now. “Shit,” I’m grinning as the show fades to black. That was the end.

“Evolved age slowly,” Luna says, “and nearly everyone at the Peak looks between twenty-ish and forty. It’s been alluded that Frost is at least a thousand years old, if not more, but we were never given a range for Strider or Callie.”

“Yeah, they got me. What a fucking ending, man.” I shake my head in disbelief. Still awed over those last few frames.

Luna rewinds and we watch the last part over again.

“Stallie shippers have to be a mess right now,” I say since fans were unknowingly shipping a mother and her son.

“Oh yeah, their ship didn’t just sink. It got lit on fire first.”

“Burned alive. But not Frosties. We survived.” I make a rock on gesture and grab my phone. “You haven’t checked any reactions yet?”

“Uh-uh. I’ve tried to stay away after I saw the ‘Strider is the son of Frost and Callie’ spoiler.”

We end up on our phones. Checking the Fanaticon forum, both of us on the Episode 12 Discussion post.