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“Well, you are, too, right? It’s not because of Damian. It’s just hard out there. I’m sure you understand.”
He slugged down the rest of his beer. “Fair enough.” He turned to the refrigerator. “You ever think it’s because we’re away from other wolves?”
“I can’t come back here,” I said.
“Well, I can’t either,” he said, looking into the fridge. “You still good on beer?”
“Yes, I’m good,” I said. “And anyway, you could come back here.”
“No, I’m dead to Damian.”
“You said you come back for Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
He shut the refrigerator. “I guess. But this is a small town, and I don’t know if I could do it again.”
“True,” I said. “Being back here, it’s a lot.”
“You like the city?” He raised his eyebrows.
“I do,” I said, nodding, very firm. “But maybe I’ve been holding my wolf in too much. I haven’t shifted in years now.”
“Years?” He raised his eyebrows. “That’s not good. We should go on a run.”
“What? Now?”
He shrugged. “Why not?”
“Well, it’s not easy for me to shift on my own,” I said. “I never mated and my dad’s still alive, so…”
“You’re an omega,” he said. “You can shift.”
He was right, of course. I could do it, but it hurt when I did it myself. It was slow, too, bones cracking, fur shooting out all over me in painful bursts. “I don’t know.” Inside me, though, my wolf threw back her head and let out a series of yips. “Where would we run?”
“The woods across the road.” He gestured. “But if we’re going to do it, let’s do it soon. Shifting always knocks out my buzz, and I don’t want to waste a bunch of beer.”
It was handy that way, how shifting could immediately sober you up. I wished that shifting would cure a hangover. If it would, I would do it more often.
He grinned at me. “You want to?”
“I…” The wolf in me howled. “Yes.”
CHAPTER NINE
THE FIRST TIME I went into heat, I was fourteen years old. Heat for omegas is tied to our regular menstrual cycle, but it doesn’t happen every month. Most women are fertile for about six days every month, right around ovulation. For an omega wolf, we’ll have those six fertile days like every other women, but we’ll also have an estrus cycle. Sometimes, it’s only once a year, sometimes twice, and—in rare cases—some omegas have up to four a year.
The heat cycle works mostly like a regular monthly cycle in a woman. It’s still those six days of fertility, but there’s a peak day, just before ovulation, where the symptoms reach a fever pitch, and everything is uncomfortable and you feel, you know, like you do right before you’re ovulating usually, only a lot, lot more intense.
When I was a teenager, my dad always forced my shift and sent me off running in wolf form, which made things different enough that I could handle it. After that, I suppressed my wolf so much that I stopped going into heat.
I haven’t since I was maybe twenty. It was a breakthrough heat in college. I ended up going out, making some bad decisions, and having to take a Plan B the next morning. The sex I had that night with that guy—and there was a lot of sex—was so frustrating. It wasn’t that I couldn’t come, because I did, again and again, but no matter how many orgasms I had, I couldn’t feel satisfied.
That guy passed out from sheer exhaustion, and I crawled out of his bed and went back to the place I was staying. On the way, I called Damian, and he didn’t pick up. It went to voicemail, and I left him a message, just one word. “Please.”
He sent me back a text the next day that said I knew it was better if we didn’t have contact with each other.
Anyway, I guess I’d come to associate heat and shifting, because I spent most of my heats in wolf form.
That first time, I knew it was coming. I’d heard all about what heat felt like from Opal, who’d been through it before. I knew what to look for, what to expect, how quickly it would go from feeling a little bit horny to a full-on ache.
