Page 34 of Omega’s Forward

“Take care of yourself, Everett,” she says, and is gone.

I put the phone on silent and lie there, resolutely not thinking about it. He has an excuse not to be anywhere.

I get up to lock the door, but there is no damn lock. I eye the dresser on the other side of the room. I don’t think I have the strength to keep him out.

It isn’t to keep him out. He hasn’t come near the stairs all night — I’d have heard it. It’s to keep me in. It’s one decision between me and the version of this where I walk downstairs in nothing but slick and ruin us both.

I get back into bed. I last two minutes. Too hot for sheets, too hot for air, the room swimming with both our scents, my skin crawling everywhere the fabric touches. I get up again.

The shower, then. I crank the dial as far into cold as it will go and step in before I can flinch and I stay. I stay while my teeth start chattering and my fingers wrinkle, running it colder every time my body adjusts, trying to freeze him out of my head — the bike, the taped hands, the kitchen island that exists only in my skull — and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t even slightly work.

Under the cold water, folded up on the tile with my arms around my knees, I can still smell him.

11. Brody

I stay on the bike until I stop shaking. It takes a while.

The basement smells of him. Orange peel and dark honey, gone sweet and heavy at the end there. I know what that sweetness means, and my body knows too.

I get off the bike, rack the weights I already racked, and stand in the middle of my own gym breathing like I just played double shifts through overtime.

He’s going into heat. In my house. One floor up.

I take the coldest shower of my life and it does nothing. By the time I’m out, the scent has found its way downstairs, faint, coming down the stairwell in slow pulses. Within the hour it isn’t faint.

I want to go up there so badly my teeth hurt. That’s not a figure of speech. My jaw aches from clenching against it, this pull that has hooks in places I didn’t know I had — go up, be close, guard the door, fix it. I thought I had control over my alpha instincts. Nobody’s instincts ever met Everett Rourke.

But I stay down here because he said no. Maybe not to my hands — the kitchen happened, and we’ve been pretending it didn’t for days — but to me. To the match.

Yeah, I want him. I’m self-aware enough to admit it, but I’m not the type to force an omega who doesn’t want me.

Fuck. He smells so good. I shut my eyes, breathing deep. There’s nothing wrong with that. I can smell him and enjoy that. That’s not crossing a line.

The problem is that the more I breathe him in, the hornier I get.

If he wants me back, he has to say yes. If he wants me, he can tell me with his own mouth, someplace his blood isn’t doing the talking.

So, that means I have to be a gentleman, even if I don’t want to be.

I also need something to keep me occupied or I am going to go actually insane. I also can’t spend the next week in the basement.

Okay. If I can’t help him through it in the way that I want, I’ll have to be useful some other way.

I fill the good cooler with water bottles and the electrolyte mix from training camp. I make sandwiches and stack them in the fridge. Then I carry the cooler down the hall and set it outside his door without knocking, and I’m proud to report I only stood there like an idiot for about ten seconds first.

Through the door, the shower is running.

I go back downstairs, put the TV on and the volume up. It doesn’t help, because the problem isn’t my ears — although my ears are a problem too, because the shower stops, and the sounds that come after that are worse.

He’s quiet. He’s trying to be quiet. But it’s my house and I know every noise it makes, and the house has never heard those ones.

I sit on the living room floor with my back against the couch and my fists on my knees and take it.

Here’s what nobody tells you about being matched to somebody who wants no part of you: your body doesn’t get the memo.

My cock has been hard since the basement. Every pulse of scent through the vents cranks it tighter, and when he makes that sound up there — the one he’d die over if he knew I heard it — I have to grip the counter edge and grit my teeth until the urge to take the stairs three at a time lets go of me.

Then his next wave rolls down through the air and we start over.