Page 2 of The Last Great Omegaverse

“Kitchen’s closing but I’ll rustle you up something. Sit tight.”

She disappears through a swinging door, and I’m left alone with my cider, the fiddle music, and the general sense that I have wandered into a play where everyone else already knows their lines. Suddenly someone drops onto the stool next to me like he owns it.

“You’re new,” he says.

I turn, ready to be unimpressed, and it takes actual effort.

He’s got the kind of face that’s clearly gotten him out of trouble his whole life. A slow, easy grin, a few days of stubble, dark hair that looks like it’s been raked back by a hand rather than a comb. Flannel sleeves pushed up over forearms that suggest he does physical work and isn’t just cultivating the aesthetic of it. He’s got a beer in front of him that he hasn’t touched in the two seconds since he sat down, which tells me he came over here for a reason other than drinking.

He’s also an Alpha. His scent surrounding him like an aura, tender confidence and entirely unconcealed, the way Alphas never seem to think twice about broadcasting exactly what they are. I don’t have that luxury. A decade of city living taught me early that an unbonded Omega walking around unmasked is basically an invitation, so the patch behind my ear’s been doing its job since before I got on the bus this morning, dulling everything about me down to nothing worth a second glance. I don’t need this kind of trouble tonight. It’s a small mercy, at least, that he can’t smell my scent.

“Devastatingly perceptive of you,” I say.

“I’ve got a gift.” He extends a hand. “Asher.”

“Wren.” I shake it because it seems easier than not. His hand is scorching and a little rough, and I let go probably a half-second later than strictly necessary.

“Wren,” he repeats, like he’s trying the shape of it out. “Let me guess. You’re here about the farm.”

“Words travel fast.”

“Word doesn’t travel fast here, it travels instantly. This town’s got maybe eleven pieces of news a year and you’re currently three of them.”

He nods at Dot, who’s reappeared with a plate—some kind of stew, thick with root vegetables, bread on the side still steaming—and sets it in front of me with the smug satisfaction of someone who knows exactly how good it smells.

Asher continues, “Eleanor’s granddaughter, arrived on the bus, looking like she fought a bear and the bear won. That’s good gossip. That’s a whole week of gossip.”

“I didn’t fight a bear. I fought a Greyhound bus and several bad life choices.”

“Sounds worse, honestly.” His grin doesn’t waver, but something in his eyes does, slightly, softening at the edges. “Sorry about your grandmother. Eleanor was—” He stops himself, seems to consider the word instead of reaching for whatever’s easy. “She was good. Sharp as anything, right up to the end. Used to give me pumpkins for free every October because she said I had an honest face and honest faces deserved discounts.”

“Did she also say your honest face would talk her granddaughter’s ear off at a bar the same night she arrived?”

“She didn’t have to. Some things you just know.”

I eat. He watches me eat, not in a creepy way, more like he’s genuinely delighted by the sight of someone enjoying Dot’s cooking, and orders me another cider without asking. Somewhere between the stew and the second glass, the tight, wound-up thing in my chest that’s been there since the lawyer’s email loosens by a couple of notches.

He asks about the bus. I tell him about the trip, and it becomes, in the retelling, much funnier than it was in the experiencing. He laughs with his head tipped back, and it does something unfair to the butterflies in my stomach.

I was so hoping there would be no Alphas here. I guess it was too much to hope for.

“So what do you do?” I ask, mostly to steer the conversation off myself. “Besides collect free pumpkins from old ladies, of course.”

“I mostly annoy people for a living. I’m very skilled at it. Professional pest.”

“That’s not a job.”

“It’s several jobs, actually, none of which pay very well.” He tips his beer at me. “I help run a farm out your way, matter of fact. Little operation, few of us.”

“Out my way meaning—”

“Meaning close enough that we’ll probably see a lot of each other, is my guess.” He says it easy, unbothered, like it’s not a strange thing to say to someone he’s known for twenty minutes. I decide I’m too tired and too tipsy to interrogate what exactly a lot of each other is supposed to mean.

The cider keeps coming. I stop counting after the third one, somewhere around the point where Dot starts giving Asher a look over my head that I’m too hot and loose-limbed to properly parse, something between behave yourself and finally.

The fiddle player switches to something slower. I catch myself leaning into Asher’s shoulder at some point, not entirely on purpose, and he doesn’t move away. It’s cozy here, cozier than the rest of the bar, and I think, distantly, this is a bad idea, and then I think, less distantly, I don’t actually care.

“I should probably get you home,” he says eventually, close to my ear. It isn’t a line, or it is a line, but it doesn’t land like one. It lands like something closer to concern.