Page 38 of The Last Great Omegaverse

Chapter 16

Cal

My cabin sits at the far edge of the orchard. I’m the only one in the pack who needs a truly private space of my own. It’s small and spare and mine like the main farmhouse never quite manages to be. I lead Wren there in silence because I haven’t found the right words yet and I’d rather arrive at them slowly than force something out half-formed on the walk over.

I’ve known some version of this for most of my life. Not with the clean, documented certainty Wren’s just pulled out of Eleanor’s ledgers, ink and numbers laid out bare enough that even a skeptic couldn’t argue past them. But with the older, murkier certainty of a boy who watched his own family live it out in real time and never had the understanding to name what he was watching until years after it was already too late to matter.

I unlock the door, let her in ahead of me, and watch her take in the space. Shelves are crowded with books on beekeeping and orchard management, a single armchair worn soft from years of use, everything arranged with a kind of order that I know, without being told, reads to her exactly the way it is: a man who’s built a life around controlling what he can, because he learned young how badly things go when he doesn’t.

“Sit,” I say, nodding toward the armchair, taking the hard wooden chair for myself, needing the discomfort of it to keep me focused on what I’m about to say. “This is going to take a while to explain. I’d rather do it right than do it fast.”

She sits. Watches me with the same attention she brings to everything. I start where I should have started weeks ago, if I’d had the nerve for it then.

“My mother was an Omega,” I say. “You know that part, or some of it. What I didn’t tell you is what happened after she died.”

I lay it out, the way I should have laid it out from the beginning. My father, and the decade he spent proving a man can lose everything twice. The fields that stopped producing right, season after season, no matter how hard he worked them, no matter how much he poured into land that used to answer him easily and suddenly, after she was gone, didn’t answer at all. I was young enough that I didn’t understand it then as anything more than grief made visible, a farm mourning right alongside the man who ran it.

When I got older, I started noticing the pattern repeat in other families around this county, farms that thrived under a full pack and withered under a solitary hand. Old-timers traded the same story back and forth at the feed store like it was common knowledge nobody bothered writing down because everybody already knew it by heart.

“It’s not fate,” I tell her cautiously, because this is the part I need her to hear exactly right. “It’s not some cosmic decree that you had to end up with the four of us, some pre-written story neither of us gets a say in. From what I’ve pieced together, watching this county’s families for thirty years, it’s not even about who, specifically. It’s about a pack. Whether the land’s being worked by one person carrying the whole weight alone, or by an Omega and a pack together, any pack, any Omega. The Hendricks family had it. Three generations back, before your family ever farmed this stretch, there was another family on land two counties over, same pattern, documented the same way, if you go looking. It’s bigger than the Calloways. Bigger than us.”

My thoughts swirl around as I try to make sense of everything.

“Explains the south patch, too, if you want the practical version instead of the folklore.” I nod toward the window, toward the fence line I’ve walked more times than I could count. “The shared-resource agreement between our families runs an old irrigation line along that boundary, been there since before either of our grandparents were born. Technically, that corner of your land’s been drawing water off Ashworth wells for fifty years. Your grandmother worked this farm mostly solo those last years, near as I can tell, but that one patch never actually was solo. Never stopped being tied to a full house, even after everybody stopped paying attention to why.”

“So it’s not magic. It’s plumbing.”

“Could be both, for all I know. I’ve never found the line where one stops and the other starts, and thirty years of watching this happen hasn’t gotten me any closer to finding it. Could be it’s just old pipes and good drainage. Could be there’s something underneath the practical explanation that the practical explanation doesn’t fully cover.” He shrugs, easy in a way that costs him more than it looks like it does. “I stopped needing the answer to be one or the other a long time ago. Same thing’s true about this, about you and me and the other three. Could be biology. Could be more than that. Doesn’t much change what I’ve decided to do about it either way.”

“You’ve known this the whole time.” Her words come out deliberately, working hard to stay level. “Since before I got here.”

“Suspected it. Believed it, more than most people around here are willing to admit believing something that sounds this much like folklore. But I didn’t know it with certainty, not the way you’ve just proven it with numbers. Even if I had, I wasn’t going to hand it to you before you were ready to hear it on your own terms.” I hold her gaze, though it costs me. “I told myself that I was protecting you. Some of it was. Some of it, if I’m honest with myself the way I’m trying to be honest with you right now, was protecting the four of us too. Because the second you know this, everything that’s happened between you and us gets a shadow over it that wasn’t there before.”

“A shadow.” She stands, restless, pacing the small length of the cabin like she can’t hold motionless with this much weight suddenly sitting on her shoulders. “That’s one word for it. Here’s another, I don’t know anymore if anything that’s happened here is real. Every single moment, every kiss, every night I let myself believe I was choosing something instead of just following some old family curse dressed up as romance. I don’t know how to separate the two anymore. Did I want Coop, or did the land want Coop for me? Did I fall into Silas’s arms in that truck because I actually trust him, or because some ancient farming superstition needed us paired off to keep the soil happy?”

“That’s not how it works.”

“How do you know? You just told me you’ve spent thirty years believing this without proof, and now you’ve got proof, and somehow you’re standing there telling me it’s not fate, it’s just biology, like that’s supposed to be comforting instead of terrifying.”

She’s not wrong to be frightened. I’ve had thirty years to sit with this and it still catches me sideways some nights. It’s the not-knowing where instinct ends and choice begins, and I’ve got no honest way to promise her a clean answer I don’t have myself.

“I don’t know how to prove it to you,” I say honestly. “Not with words. All I can tell you is what I know about myself, which is that I’ve wanted you since the first week you got here. That wanting didn’t wait for permission from some old family legend. It just showed up, inconvenient and unwelcome, the same way it’s shown up for the other three, each in their own time, each for their own reasons that had nothing to do with numbers in a ledger.”

“You can’t know that for certain.”

“No, I can’t.” I stand too, closing some of the distance between us, needing her to see my face when I say the next part. “Same as you can’t know for certain whether wanting me back is you, or something the land’s nudging you toward. That’s the part I hate most about telling you this, Wren. Not that it’s true. That knowing it’s true doesn’t actually make anything simpler. Just means we’re all choosing each other now with our eyes open instead of closed, which is either the bravest thing any of us has ever done, or the most naive.”

She’s quiet a long moment, and I brace myself for her to walk out, back across the field, back into the guarded distance she kept for her first few weeks here. Some old, tired part of me starts already grieving the loss of something I only just let myself admit I wanted.

Instead, she crosses the last of the distance between us and kisses me first, hard, almost angry, like she’s daring the truth I just handed her to survive contact with something this immediate, this true.

“Tell me this is real,” she says, against my mouth, voice cracking on the word. “Tell me, right now, that whatever this is between us isn’t just some old farm superstition using both of us to keep the soil happy.”

“I can’t tell you that with certainty. Nobody can.” I pull back just far enough to see her face, needing her to hear this part clearly. “What I can tell you is that I’m choosing you right now, with everything I know and everything I don’t, and that choice is mine, whatever else might be tangled up alongside it. If that’s not enough—”

“It’s enough.” She kisses me again before I can finish, fiercely, desperate in a way that doesn’t feel like celebration so much as two people trying to prove something to themselves with their bodies that words have already failed to settle. “It has to be enough. I can’t do this any other way.”

I don’t have a response ready for that kind of honesty, so I answer with my hands instead, careful even now, even with thirty years of restraint finally breaking loose all at once, walking her backward until we hit the wall beside my bookshelf, her fingers working at my shirt with an urgency that matches the fear still shaking underneath it.