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A pair of worn boots stepped into his clearing vision. Jake tracked the boot's owner upward to find Hunter staring down at him, hands on his hips and looking none too pleased. Their respective positions underlined his earlier ruminations about the state of his existence. Hunter lording over him, Jake tossed in the dirt.
Hunter glanced over his shoulder and then back at Jake. "Let's take a walk," he said gruffly, offering a hand up.
Jake took it. Not bothering to acknowledge the group of silenced Alphas to his back, he followed Hunter across the village toward the dense forest without saying a word. With enhanced Alpha hearing, having a quiet conversation in Morris Hill often required going some distance from anyone else. The same reason Zorah walked the fussy baby to the outskirts in the middle of the night.
Zorah.
The simple whisper of her name pained him more than any punch Mick delivered. She wasn't for him, and she never would be, but that didn't fill the hole carved in his chest with her name on it. He asked himself the question he'd been mulling over for weeks:why her, though? There were other Omegas in the village now, yet they existed outside of his awareness or concern. He only had eyes for her, and that fact had become a daily, unrelenting agony.
Under a copse of young pines, Hunter stopped and faced him, brows lowered. "So, what was that about?"
"I was minding my own business, waiting to talk to you." Jake rubbed the back of his neck, sticky with sweat, dirt, and the rising day's heat. "Apparently that's offensive to some folks."
Hunter's cheeks puffed as he released an exasperated sigh, like a deflating balloon. "What'd you need to talk about?" He flashed Jake a narrowed, doctorly look. "Cravings?"
"No," Jake spat, too annoyed to hide his irritation. "I told you I was all right with that stuff."
"I know you did," Hunter said with careful patience, "but it hasn't been that long since..." Without spelling it out, he alluded to the two months since Jake left his life of depravity behind in OT.
The memories of the first few weeks, in particular, smudged through Jake's mind in a blur of new faces, new places, and re-acclimation to semicivilized life, further complicated by the attack on Morris Hill and the fire shortly after his arrival.
Hunter didn't know this, but his denial of cravings wasn't a lie. In truth, Jake had stopped using drugs years prior after a run-in with some dangerous characters and one of the worst beat-downs of his entire life. That one had left him near dead and immobilized for so long that he'd been unable to procure himself scratch to use even to ease his physical pain. He'd retreated to his garbage truck lair to hide and fight the dual-headed dragon of withdrawal sickness complicating his physical recovery. Once he could move around again, he took the blessing of his newfound sobriety and swore off that life.
It had been foisted on him to begin with.
But he hadn't shared that story with Hunter, or anyone, to be fair. For better or worse, he let the Morris Hill Pack believe what they wanted about him.
Whatever their worst opinions of him, his self-judgment would be far worse.
Jake raised determined eyes to his friend's. "I need to get out of here."
The prim doctor expression dropped from Hunter's face, and his blue eyes turned cold. "You're leaving?"
"I need a break from living in the village." The request blurted out, all his preparations for making a nuanced, convincing argument lost in the scuffle with Mick.
Hunter's expression remained guarded and stoic. "What did you have in mind?"
Jake shoved a hand through his hair, tearing through curly snarls gritty with dust from the fight. "Give me something to do. Away from the village. Something where I can camp out and work on it alone for a few weeks. I just need... a fucking break, okay? I need a break. There're too many people, I don't sleep..."
There's an Omega I can't get out of my head.
He held that part back. No one needed to know how Zorah affected him, especially not Hunt. Two months later, Hunter's words still rang loud in his ears: "You don't touch an Omega, you don't look at an Omega... I see you near an Omega, I'll cut off your balls myself."
Jake made a promise when his friend spared his life and offered him a new one as part of the Morris Hill Pack. Omegas were off-limits. Now and forever. Jake understood that; he'd agreed to it. Surviving in the AfterEnd by the skin of his teeth, Omegas were the absolute last thing he'd ever considered for himself anyway. Making the promise was easy; keeping it turned out to be much harder than he'd ever imagined.
Hunter hiked a dubious brow. "You really think that'll help?"
"I don't know. Butthis" — Jake jerked a thumb toward the village — "isn't. I'm trying here, dude, but... you think Mick is the only one giving me shit day in and day out?" Hunter's lips parted as if to argue the point, but Jake pushed on. "I'm not complaining, and I don't need you to run interference or be all 'daddy's putting his foot down' about it. I'm not asking for that. I'm just asking for a fuckingbreak."
Chagrin painted Hunter's face as he scratched at his wild, gray-streaked beard. "Y'know, we came home, and my first priority was to get Kess settled and happy. I know I didn't make much time for you, and then all that shit with Della went down, then the attack, and the fire, and since then, we've been rebuilding like our asses are on fire and trying to get ready to face a winter with a dozen new mouths to feed and wiped-out food stores." He shot Jake a bewildered look. "I thought an Omega would make my life perfect, but this summer has been an absolute fucking disaster. I'm not complaining, but goddamn, it's been a mess."
Jake's spirits wilted as he leaned against a nearby birch tree. He felt for his old friend. Hunt shouldered the leadership burden like he'd been born to it, or maybe he'd evolved into it when their bodies transformed into the bigger, stronger, Alpha version they became after TheEnd. Jake hated to think of those chaotic years, when modernity crashed and burned in a seemingly never-ending series of nuclear attacks, natural disasters, famine, and disease. People died, nations fell, and some who survived, like he and Hunter, weathered the environmental pressure and mutated into Alphas. Others remained unchanged and became known as Betas. And then there were Omegas, who didn't come to attention until later, when it became clear they'd evolved with their own set of biological adaptations, ones seemingly calibrated for driving Alphas bananas with lust and (likely related) repopulating the earth.
The world had weirded out right in front of his eyes. A great reshuffling, irrespective of class, race, or education, resulted in different flavors of people who now coexisted in this post-modernity dubbed the AfterEnd. He'd lived through all of it, yet Jake often failed to recognize the world he'd known buried beneath the veneer of this new one.
"D'you ever think about it?" Jake asked, the question springing from his lips without a thought. "About... before?"
"Not if I can help it." The corner of Hunt's lip kicked up. "It's easier now, with Kess. She's a good thing, and she's a part ofhere, y'know? She never knew that world. But before her..." His eyes went soft and sad for a moment as his memories wandered somewhere far away, some personal crucible he'd withstood.
