Page 11 of The Last Great Omegaverse

“Go ahead,” I tell him. “Fix my tractor, Silas. Try not to look so thrilled about it.”

“I’m never thrilled. Ask anybody.”

He is, in fact, not thrilled, for the better part of an hour, muttering at the engine in a steady stream of complaints that seem to be directed less at me and more at the rust. I bring him coffee because it seems rude not to, and he takes it without looking up. Our fingers brush on the handoff, brief and unremarkable except for the way my whole arm goes flushed afterward like I’ve been standing too close to the stove.

I push my Omega back down as far as she will go. I see one hot Alpha with his shirt sleeves rolled up and my core awakens. I need to get a better handle on myself if these guys are going to continually be around.

“You’re staring at the engine like it insulted your mother,” I say, mostly to have something to say that isn’t why did that hand brush feel like that?

“It insulted my morning. Somebody let the belt go for too long. Whoever had this last, I hope they’ve got a good excuse.”

“That was my grandmother, so…”

He does look up at that, and something in his face shifts, not quite apologetic, more rueful, recalibrating. “She wasn’t careless,” he says. “Just tired, near the end, from what I understand. Running a place like this alone wears a person down eventually. Doesn’t matter how good you are at it.”

“Is that a warning?”

“It’s an observation.” His mouth does something that’s almost a smile, there and gone before I can be sure I saw it. “You want it as a warning too, that’s your business.”

I lean against the workbench, arms crossed, watching him work, and let myself notice, for exactly as long as I can get away with before it becomes a problem, the way his forearms flex when he leverages something loose, the concentration in his face, the competence of someone who’s spent his whole life with his hands doing more talking than his mouth does. It’s an inconvenient thing to notice about a man who, three days ago, told me point blank that my failure benefits him directly.

“You’re staring now,” he says, without looking up, and I feel my whole face go hot.

“I’m supervising.”

“That what we’re calling it?”

“I own the tractor. Supervision’s within my rights.”

“Uh huh.” He wipes his hands on a rag, finally glancing over, and there’s something tender in his brown eyes than his voice usually lets on, something that makes the engine cab feel a great deal smaller than it did a minute ago. “You keep looking at me like that, Calloway, I’m going to start thinking you don’t hate me as much as you’d like to.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” But he’s smiling now, and it does something unfair to the whole shape of his face, softens it in a way that makes me understand, suddenly and with real inconvenience, why Coop and Asher both seem to defer to him without complaint. I turn back to my seed catalogs before I can do something ill-advised about that smile, and it takes me two full pages to stop thinking about it.

He leans back against the tractor’s flank, arms crossed, and studies me for a second longer than the moment calls for before he says, “So what’s your deal?”

“My deal?”

“Yeah.” He doesn’t dress it up any. I don’t think he ever does. “You’re an Omega. Showed up here alone, no pack in tow. Most Omegas your age have got somebody. You have a pack back home waiting on you?”

The question hits harder than it should, old defenses snapping up before I’ve decided to let them. “That’s forward, for a man who spent this morning insulting my grandmother’s tractor maintenance.”

“Insulting her memory, not the woman herself. I stand by it.” He doesn’t push further than that, doesn’t fill the silence for me, just waits, watching with the same attention he gives a stripped bolt, like I’m a problem he’s decided to be patient with instead of a person he’s trying to charm information out of. Somehow that’s what gets an answer out of me faster than a gentler question would’ve.

“I had one,” I say finally, watching his hands instead of his face, finding it easier that way. “Back in the city. Three years, give or take. It didn’t work out.”

“Didn’t work out how?”

“Turned into the kind of thing my mother always warned me packs turn into.” I tug my sleeves down over my hands, an old habit, now with flannel armor. “It started out fine. Good, even, for a while. And then it stopped being about who I was and started being about who I was supposed to become for everyone else’s comfort, and by the time I noticed, I’d already given up more of myself than I meant to. So I left. Been very deliberately alone ever since. Worked out fine for me, right up until a kind woman left me a farm next door to four Alphas who don’t seem to understand personal space.”

Something shifts in his face at that, quick, there and gone, closer to recognition than sympathy. “Giving yourself up for everybody else’s comfort. Yeah. I know a little something about that particular trap.”

“That sounds like a confession.”

“Isn’t one. Not yet.” He pushes off the tractor, already reaching for his wrench again, conversation closing as abruptly as he opened it. “Nobody’s asking you to be anything you’re not. Not on this land, anyway. Whatever else you think of the rest of us.”

“Is that a promise?”