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"I could eat." Taking a seat opposite, Jake accepted the meat and cheese sandwich. "Thanks."
"Here." Colt reached back into the pack and produced two perfectly ripe peaches, handing them off with a wry tilt to his lips. "Don't forget your vitamins."
Jake plucked the fuzzy fruit from Colt's outstretched palm. "I think they're called peaches."
Colt lifted a shoulder. "Hunt's been on a kick lately, walking around muttering about vitamins and scurvy."
Despite himself, Jake chuckled at the entirely on-brand image of his old friend grousing about a rare vitamin deficiency. Replenishing the Pack's food supplies was top priority for Hunter and the entire Pack, but he didn't expect Hunter's worry to extend to balanced diets. Avoiding starvation satisfied a much lower bar.
Jake unwrapped the sandwich. "Is that a real concern? Or is he just getting himself exercised about something?"
They shared a conspiratorial "you know what he's like" look, and Colt shrugged. "How the fuck should I know?"
"Well, your teeth aren't falling out, so you're probably okay." Setting the ripe peaches aside, Jake chewed his sandwich, answering a few more questions from Colt about plans for the siding, waterproofing, water supply, and other details of the project. The poignant normalcy of the exchange lulled him into a premature sense of safety because, the next thing he knew, he was asking Colt, "You were born an Alpha, right? Born in the AfterEnd?"
"Yeah. I mean, I didn't know I was an Alpha until I turned sixteen and shot up a foot and a half. It was a bit of a surprise. Why do you ask?"
"I... uh..." Jake fiddled with the cloth wrapping around his half-eaten sandwich, filled with embarrassment about the questions he wanted to ask. "Can you explain the Alpha-Omega thing to me? Like, the bond or whatever."
Jake glanced up in time to see Colt's bewildered expression. "What d'you mean?"
"Well," — Jake knuckled a stray curl from his sticky forehead — "it's like this thing that everyone seems to know about and understand, but I just... don't, I guess."
Colt gave him a long, inscrutable look and then fished another sandwich out of his knapsack. "It's pretty simple," he said between bites. "Alphas and Omegas are drawn to each other, in some kinda way. Probably mostly for the purposes of reproduction, but no one knows for sure. I mean, you know Alpha-Omega pairs only make Alpha and Omega babies, right? Alphas can make Alpha babies with Beta women, although it's random, hit-or-miss; but Beta women can't birth Omega babies."
Jake chewed the inside of his cheek, feigning patience as Colt unscrewed the cap from his canteen and took several long pulls.
"So that's the bond, then?" he asked. "An Alpha-Omega pair who has a baby?"
"No." Colt wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, chuckling like Jake was a confused schoolboy. "How do you not know this? It's pretty basic stuff."
"I, uh..." Jake cast about for a ready excuse for his ignorance. He couldn't exactly pop out with, "Well, see, I was in a forced labor camp for thirty years after TheEnd, and by the time I escaped, everyone had all this shit worked out, but no one bothered to explain it to me. Also, I was too gorked out on whatever substances I could get my hands on to understand even if they did."
"I've just heard different, conflicting things over the years," he hedged, "and figured you would know the truth of it, being as you were born in the AfterEnd and all. I've never lived around Om — in a Pack before."
With a halfhearted shrug, Colt said, "Any Alpha-Omega pair can get together, but for some, there's a special connection, some invisible force pulling them together, something they can't ignore. I've heard that sometimes an Alpha feels it first, sometimes the Omega, but eventually, it becomes obvious that they're meant to be together. Like, fate or something."
Jake's pulse pounded behind his eyes like a hammer on an anvil. Within a day of his arrival in Morris Hill, he'd caught Zorah's scent on the wind, and his knees nearly gave out. In that moment, something sparked to life inside him. He'd been wrestling it back into submission ever since. She wasn't his. She never would be.
But then when he touched her the other night...shit. The instant his skin contacted hers, no one else on earth existed. Time froze. The planet stopped turning. Even the breeze seemed to hold its breath. Jake could've straight-up died in that moment. A fatal heart attack to wipe him out in one fell swoop and he would've died happy, with his fingertips buzzing from the warmth of her skin.
If that wasn't the pull Colt described, he didn't have any other explanation.
The bread and meat in his mouth turned tasteless. Forcing the mass down felt like swallowing a wadded-up sock. "And then what?" he croaked.
"Then, they exchange mating bites, and the connection gets even stronger, I guess." Colt looked off into the woods, a speculative look on his face before adding, "Like, they sense each other, pick up on each other's emotions. I've even heard some say they can hear their mate's thoughts."
"And" — Jake cleared the frog in his throat — "if they can't be together? Or the bond is refused? Or broken?"
He suspected he already knew. The night of the attack, he'd been posted to guard Della, to keep her in her cabin while Hunt and the others tried to figure out what the hell to do, given her sudden reappearance after Cal abducted, mated, and claimed her. Jake didn't know the woman, hadn't even formally been introduced to her, but the force of her hysteria that night blew his hair back from his face. The cause? Separation from her Alpha mate.
"I don't know." Colt rubbed at his chin, eyeing Jake carefully. "Why do you ask?"
Mechanically, Jake re-wrapped a second, half-eaten sandwich and set it aside with the peaches. He'd eat them later, when his appetite returned, if it ever did. Jumping to his feet, Jake stalked to the cabin's footprint, examining his work with unseeing eyes. "I mean, it can't always work out, can it? This is the AfterEnd. People get sick and die. They get injured and die. Every single day. What if an Alpha has an Omega who's meant for them, but they never meet? What if there's some other reason they can't be together? What happens then?" The words blasted from his lips like a busted water pipe, presenting every conceivable nightmare scenario except the one pounding against his temples.
What if an Alpha swore upon pain of death to never touch an Omega ever again? What if the Alpha is a wretched piece of shit? What then?What then?
Wiping his damp palms on his pants, he shot a quick glance at Colt, who sat unmoving despite Jake's sudden outburst.
