Page 19 of The Last Great Omegaverse

I don’t talk about that much. Not with the others, not with anybody, though Silas has pieced together enough over the years that he doesn’t ask anymore, and Coop’s too kind to press even when his curiosity’s obviously eating at him. Asher knows the least, by design more than accident. He wasn’t with me for the worst of it.

My mother was an Omega. My father built a life around her the way this whole county still half-believes a pack’s supposed to, work and devotion both bent toward keeping her steady, keeping the land steady along with her, and for a long while it worked the way it’s meant to. Then she died suddenly, no warning, and I watched my father spend the better part of a decade proving that a man can lose everything twice. Once when the person’s gone, and again, slower, when he can’t figure out how to be anything without her. The land went with him. Fields nobody planted right two years running. A house that stopped being a home the same week it stopped having her voice in it.

I left when I was young. Wandered longer than I’d like to admit before I found my way back to this stretch of ground and decided, mostly out of stubbornness, to build something that wouldn’t collapse the same way if it ever lost its center again.

That’s the whole reason there are four of us instead of one. You spread the weight out enough, no single loss takes the roof down with it. That was the theory, anyway, the night I found Silas half-frozen and angry in a town three counties over and told him I could use a man who’s good with numbers. The theory held up fine, right up until a woman got off a bus almost two weeks ago and started, without meaning to, without even trying particularly hard, becoming the kind of weight that theory was never built to carry.

I don’t like admitting that. I like even less how true it’s turning out to be.

She comes across the property line a little before noon, and I hear her before I see her, boots not quite quiet enough in the underbrush, the kind of walk that belongs to somebody working something out in her own head rather than somebody who meant to end up here.

“Sorry,” she says, when she spots me, stopping a good ten feet off like she’s not sure she’s allowed closer. “I didn’t mean to wander this far. I was just walking.”

“You’re allowed to walk.” I set the smoker down gently, and pull my veil back so she’s not talking to a stranger in mesh. “Bees mind company less than you’d think. Long as you don’t swat at anything.”

“I wasn’t planning to swat at anything. Mostly just planning to keep walking until my head stopped buzzing like your bees.”

There’s something tight around her eyes I don’t like the look of, fatigue that goes past the storm and the goats and whatever happened yesterday that’s left Coop moving through his own kitchen like a man half a step behind himself. I don’t ask. I’ve never been much good at asking, and worse at knowing what to do once somebody answers.

“Come here, if you want,” I say instead, nodding toward the nearest hive. “I’ll show you something, if you’re curious. Better use of a walk than wearing a groove in the dirt.”

She hesitates, then sidles closer, watchful of where she puts her feet, and stops near enough that I catch the rain-and-woodsmoke smell of her over the honey and hive smoke, close enough that something in my Alpha instincts tighten in a way I’ve spent days pretending not to notice.

I show her the frames instead of looking at that too directly. Talk her through the brood pattern, the workers, the hush that resolves over a colony that’s healthy and well-tended versus the restless hum of one that isn’t. She listens more attentively than I expect, quiet in a way that is real attention, the kind most people don’t bother giving anything that doesn’t serve them directly.

“They all know their place,” she says, after a while, watching a line of workers move in and out of the hive entrance with order that took nature considerably longer to work out than it took me to learn to respect it. “Nobody’s fighting for it. Nobody’s confused about what they’re supposed to do.”

“Mostly, yeah.” I close the frame back up gently. “Doesn’t mean nothing ever goes wrong in there. Just means when it does, the whole colony handles it together instead of falling apart over it. That’s the part worth learning from, if you’re looking for a lesson in it.”

“Is that what I’m doing? Learning a lesson from your bees?”

“You tell me. You’re the one who ended up standing in my orchard.”

That earns me something close to a smile, small, tired, but real. “Maybe I just like bees.”

“Maybe.” I don’t push it further than that, though I want to, more than I’d like to admit even to myself. I want to ask what’s sitting so heavy behind her eyes, want to close the last few feet between us and see whether the heat radiating off her skin in the cold air feels the way I suspect it might.

But I don’t. I’ve built a whole life out of not reaching for things I can’t be sure I’ll be allowed to keep, and a few weeks isn’t enough to convince the oldest, most stubborn part of me that this would be any different.

She shifts closer anyway, just slightly, close enough that I can see the exact moment something in her expression goes uncertain, aware, like she’s clocked the same charge I’m working hard not to acknowledge. Neither of us moves for a second that stretches longer than it should.

“Cal.” My name, quiet, testing.

“Yeah?”

“Why do you stay back? At the farm, I mean. Coop’s always right there, Silas shows up with tools, Asher can’t help himself. You just watch from the fence. Why?”

It’s a fair question. I owe her something close to an honest answer, even if I can’t give her the whole one standing in an orchard with bees humming around us both and a hive I’ve suddenly stopped being able to focus on.

“Because I’ve learned what it costs to want something and lose it,” I say, careful with the words, careful the way I handle everything that is important. “Watching from a distance doesn’t cost near as much. That’s the whole appeal of it.”

“That sounds lonely.”

“It’s reliable. Lonely and reliable aren’t always different things.” I step back, putting air between us before my Alpha decides to make a decision I’m not ready to stand behind. “You should head back before Coop notices you’re gone and worries. Storm did a number on that south fence, easy to lose your footing out past the tree line in the mud.”

Something flickers across her face, disappointment maybe, or just surprise at the sudden distance, but she doesn’t push, any more than I pushed her a few minutes ago. “Right,” she says. “Thanks for the bee lesson.”

“Anytime.”