Page 64 of Evan and the Alpha

“Fuck off, Ev.”

“Enough!” Sobek snaps at last and the three of us shut up. Sobek glares at my mother and my brother in turn. “Evan is correct—it is our house. We can do what we please. Further—what is the issue?”

“Uh,” Scott starts.

I sigh dramatically, cutting him off, because I know he won’t manage to explain this to Sobek. “They’re prudes. Humans don’t do it in front of each other. Especially not family.”

Sobek frowns, then squints at me. “How—”

I know I turn bright red. “I don’t know! It just is, okay? It’s embarrassing.”

“Embarrassing,” Sobek huffs, frowning. “How is it embarrassing that you’re getting fucked so well?”

If there was ever a time I wanted to sink through the floor and disappear, it’s this moment. I roll my wrist around, trying to convince him to let the subject go. “It just is, okay? Can you get off me yet?”

“No,” Sobek says, pinning me when I try to pull us apart.

I look at my relatives. “Could you guys leave? Stop staring? Give us some privacy?”

“If you wanted privacy,” Scott sneers, “you should have kept it in the bedroom.”

But he puts a hand on Mom’s back and steers her back down the hall. It takes about fifteen seconds for her to start: “But he’s ababy.”

“Mom,” Scott complains.

I roll my eyes and look back at Sobek. “Can you get off me now, please?”

“We’re still tied,” Sobek says. “You’ll have to give it a few more minutes.”

“Great,” I mutter, still pulling and then wincing, because Sobek is definitely stuck and we definitely do not have “a few minutes,” because—

“What the hell is going on out here, Evan, your mother—”

Dad stops dead and I sigh as dramatically as I can, because this is probably the one position I never wanted to be caught dead in. And yet here I am.

Okay, so I probably hadn’t imagined knocked up and under an alien murderer as the exact scenarios when I was a teenager, but same idea.

I tilt my head back as much as I can, wish that I could find some humor in the way Dad’s upside-down, the way he blanches, then turns almost green. Then his face turns pink, red, redder, almost purple, and there’s a vein popping at his temple.

“Evan.” It’s not a whisper or a roar, but it’s somewhere in between and so wholly filled with disgust and disappointment that I can’t help it when those same feelings sidle through my veins. I wish I didn’t feel it—shame—burning at my ears. I grit my teeth against bile, tears.

I wish I didn’t give so much of a shit about what he thinks. Why do I care if he likes what I do or not? Why do I care if he’s disappointed in me? I’ve never been anything more than a disappointment to him.

Dad lunges at Sobek. “Get the hell off him, you brute!” Dad roars. His face is still red-purple, that vein still pulsing. His eyes are bulging.

Sobek rears back, and I yelp, then try to throttle a scream when he pulls clear of me. I think I might throw up.

I like pain, but not that much.

I manage to get my breathing and my vision under control just in time to look up and watch Dad sock Sobek in the jaw.

“Oh my fucking God!” I snap. “Dad, knock it off! Stop!”

My heart’s in my throat when Sobek growls at my father, and I’m thinking of Nojak, of Sobek’s own father, Terek, Sobek’s claws and teeth and all the blood, how tissue-paper thin even kroakka scales were—

Sobek just hefts my father clear off his feet, holding him aloft by the front of his shirt. Dad kicks his legs; he grabs at Sobek’s hands, trying to pull him off. “Do not,” Sobek snarls, “tell me how to conduct myself toward my mate.”

Dad gives a particularly vicious kick, like he thinks he can hit Sobek or something. “He’s not your mate, you stupid—augh!”