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He doesn’t answer me for a long time. Alongtime. Instead he rips up more tee shirt and wraps it around my thigh — too tight at first, but he gets the pressure just right the second time. I move my hurt arm again — now that it’s no longer bound to my chest, I can’t seem to stop myself from doing it — and again, he catches it and presses it back into the pack.
Because of that, he’s leaning over me, our faces only a couple feet apart when he says, “The Fates got ‘er.”
“No.” I jerk, trying to sit up, and whimper at the pain it causes me.
He rolls his eyes and mutters, “M’I gonna have to sit here all night to make sure you don’t move this shit?”
I don’t answer right away. His face is too close. I can smell his scent and the hints of blood beneath it. “You could just order me.”
“Only wanna order you when you need peaches. Don’t wanna have to for this. Don’t push me to it.”
Peaches. He rolls the word on his tongue, making him sound like he’s trying to fuck me with his tongue. “Then maybe you should stay.”
“That an invitation?” His smirk doesn’t return, like I thought it might.
My throat closes. No, it would be good if my throat would close, but it does not. Instead, I wheeze out a sad, pitiful, “N-no?”
His eyes flash and I jerk, moving my injured armagainand earning myself a growl. “What did I say, Omega?”
I recognize that the right half of his body is clothed and the wrong half of mine is clothed when he slides under the blanket beside me. Or maybe it just seems wrong because they’re not both the same half. I replay the feel of his bare chest pressed against my bare chest along with everything else that happened last night in the dark when I was totally out of it, but not so out of it that the memory won’t be branded into my skull forever.
“You shouldn’t…” I jerk.
“You want me to get up?”
“I don’t, um…you…I don’t like you.”
“Noted.”
“So don’t um…”
He dives down towards me and I squeak as his lips find my ear and he inhales directly into it, scattering my thoughts like he’s blowing tumbleweeds across the vacuum of my brain. “You want me to fuck you and I’m not gonna do it, Omega, so shut that shit down. Don’t move again. Just leave your arm elevated on the bags and go to sleep.”
He lies down next to me and it takes about five seconds for me to realize that the pressure of his body against my body is going to make me explode. Grasping for anything, I shout, “The Fates?”
“The Fates.” Shoulder pressed against mine, I glance at him from the corner of my eye and see him staring up at the sky blankly. The stars are now absent. I wonder what he sees. What her face looks like in his mind’s eye.
“How old was she when she ascended?”
“Ascended early. Too early. She was seven. I was ten. I hadn’t ascended yet. When they kicked her out of Bog City, I went, too.”
Seven. No.No no no no no.
“Holy shit.”
If I’d been seven when I ascended, I’m not sure what would have happened to me. I’d have died right away, either claimed by a bastard Alpha then —at seven— and used however he saw fit, or thrown into Paradise Hole to be torn apart by scavengers, gangs, or even animals. And that’s onlyifthe cold and the hunger and the thirst didn’t kill me first.
“How long did you make it…in Paradise Hole, I mean?”
“Seven days.” He laughs bitterly and thrusts a hand angrily back through his hair. “Not nearly as long as you.”
“I’m four times older than you were.”
“I shoulda protected her better.”
I balk and start to rise up onto my good elbow. “You weretenand a Beta.”
“Stay down. It doesn’t matter. Shouda done better. Shoulda done better for you, too.”
