Page 4 of The Last Great Omegaverse

Selfish, probably. I’ll cop to selfish.

Around two, I hear her shift upstairs, the creak of the guest room floor, though she doesn’t know yet that it used to be Eleanor’s sewing room, doesn’t know the house well enough yet to know anything about it. I go still, listening, until the sound relaxes back into the slow, even rhythm of sleep.

It’s not the last time tonight I’ll do that. I lose count somewhere around four, lying flat on my back on a dead woman’s couch, cataloguing every creak that isn’t her by process of elimination until I’ve got the whole house’s vocabulary memorized.

Somewhere in there I get up anyway, glass of water in hand, and take the stairs slow enough that not one board so much as sighs under me. It’s a party trick nobody expects from somebody my size, though Coop would tell you I’ve been sneaking up on him since we were kids, if you asked him. She’s dead asleep, one arm flung off the edge of the mattress, and I set the glass on the nightstand where she’ll find it if she wakes up parched. I’m back downstairs and horizontal again before I’ve let myself think too hard about how easy it would’ve been to stay a minute longer than the task required.

In the morning, I make coffee around six, because I’m awake anyway and because it seems like the kind of thing you do, and because I find, digging through Eleanor’s ancient percolator and a tin of grounds that’s somehow still good, that I want to be doing something useful with my hands. The kitchen’s exactly as I remember it, same yellow curtains, same crooked cabinet door that never quite latches, except colder, and emptier, and missing the warmth Eleanor used to fill it with simply by existing in it.

I’m leaning against the counter with my own mug when I hear her on the stairs. Slow. Mindful. The gait of someone whose head is currently registering its opinion about last night’s ciders. Her perfume’s still on my shirt, faint now. It smells like rain and something underneath it I’ve apparently already learned to pick out from a room away. I catch myself breathing it in before I’ve decided if it’s a thing I’m allowed to do with a woman I’ve known less than twelve hours.

She stops in the kitchen doorway. Takes me in, my boots by the door, mug in hand, hair doing something I imagine is terrible, and I find it, against my will, sort of charming. She wears an expression that’s working very hard to be unreadable and mostly landing on deeply suspicious.

“You’re still here,” she says. Her voice has the rasp of someone who needs water before she needs conversation.

“I am.” I nod at the second mug, already poured, sitting on the counter within reach. “Made coffee. Didn’t know how you take it, so I left it black and you can ruin it however you like.”

She eyes the mug like it might be a trap, then crosses the kitchen and picks it up anyway, wraps both hands around it, and drinks like it’s medicine. “You stayed the whole night?”

“On the couch. Fully clothed. Ask Eleanor’s ghost if you don’t believe me, I’m sure she was keeping tabs.”

That gets a hint of a smile out of her. It’s quick, gone almost before it lands, but I clock it and feel unreasonably pleased with myself.

“Why?” she asks.

“Why what?”

“Why stay? You could’ve—” She gestures vaguely, a hand wave that seems to encompass the whole previous night, the porch, the door, everything that happened and everything that very nearly did. “Most guys wouldn’t have.”

“Most guys are idiots,” I say, though it costs me a little. “You’d had a lot to drink and a long day. You kissed me like it might fix something, and I wanted—” I stop myself. Recalibrate. This is not a conversation to have with a woman who is currently squinting at sunlight like it’s committed a personal offense against her. “I wanted you to wake up somewhere safe. That’s all. Nothing noble about it, really.”

“Sounds pretty noble to me.”

“Don’t spread that around. I’ve got a reputation to protect.”

She almost smiles again, wider this time, and drinks more coffee. Even hungover, she’s gorgeous. Her shy grin and flyaway hair do something to me that I haven’t felt for a long while. It’s only now, watching her drink her coffee with her collar loose from sleep, that I catch it—a small square of clear film peeling up at one corner along the curve of her throat, the kind of scent-suppressant patch I’ve seen advertised in city pharmacies but never once seen in person out here.

It clicks into place slowly, then all at once. That’s what I couldn’t place half the night. Some faint, frustratingly familiar note under the cider that never fully resolved into anything I could name. Not until right now, watching the last corner of adhesive give up entirely. She’s an Omega. An unbonded Omega, all the way out here in Hollow Creek, having spent who knows how long convincing her own body to keep that fact to itself. I don’t know how to feel about that, except that I finally understand exactly what I’d been smelling all night and couldn’t name.

For a minute we stand there in Eleanor’s kitchen not saying anything, and it’s easier than it has any right to be. Two people who met twelve hours ago standing in comfortable silence like it’s a habit they’ve already built. I could get used to this, is the thought that surfaces, unbidden and a little alarming. I put it away fast, the way you’d put away a book you’re not ready to start.

“I should probably feed you something that isn’t coffee,” I say instead, on safer ground. “You got anything in this kitchen besides baking soda and a jar of something I genuinely don’t want to identify?”

“You went through my fridge?”

“In my defense, you were unconscious and I was hungry and hopeful.”

“There’s nothing,” she admits. “I need to go into town. Buy actual food. Figure out how a stove that old even works.”

“I can show you the stove. Eleanor’s had that thing since before I was born, it’s got moods, you have to talk nicely to it.” I catch myself, too late, the slip already out of my mouth, Eleanor’s had that thing. It’s too casual, familiar, the kind of thing you say about someone’s kitchen when you’ve stood in it a hundred times, not the kind of thing you say about a stranger’s grandmother you supposedly only got pumpkins from each year.

She’s sharp even hungover. I watch her clock it, the tiny hitch, the way her eyes narrow slightly over the rim of her mug. “You knew her pretty well,” she says. Testing.

“Small town.” I keep my voice light, hoping lightness will carry the weight the words won’t. “Everybody knows everybody’s stove around here.”

It’s thin. I know it’s thin. She lets it go anyway, either too tired or too polite or too hungover to push. I feel the reprieve like a held breath finally let out, and hate myself a little for how relieved I am.

I’ve got chores. Actual, real, can’t-be-avoided chores. Goats don’t care about my personal drama, and Coop will absolutely come looking for me if I’m not back by eight, probably with an armful of concern and zero subtlety. So around seven, I tell her I’ve got to head out, and she walks me to the door like it’s the natural thing to do, which it is, which is the whole problem.