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And the fool that I am, I chase her.
“Omega?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Echo.”
“No. Omega.”
“What?”
“That’s the problem, don’t you see? With the Ball, with everything. I don’t know how to be that…that thing. I know Paradise Hole. I could be the dirty, filthy Omega in the forest because that was me. I can’t…can’t belong to a Berserker because I don’t know how to do the…the things! I can’t even control my powers.Youcontrol them.”
“Omega,” I say a little louder. Been repeatin’ it the whole time she’s talkin’ and now I realize where she’s led me — to the guest bedroom. At the sight of the nondescript wooden door, my restraint meets its short end, like a truck smashin’ directly into the side of a cliff.
I can’t bear it another fuckin’ second. My fingers stab back into my hair again and again. The distance between us ends tonight. I’m not goin’ another moment without her body welded to mine. All the time. Short of Ward stitchin’ the two of us together, I want her as close to me as fuckin’ possible. Forever.
Forever?
Yeah. Forever.
“The fuck you talkin’ about? You’re learnin’ and so far, you’ve saved our lives multiple times. Doin’ fuckin’ great, baby.” Better than great. She’s been exquisite. I’m the failure.Unworthy, unworthy, unworthy.
She stands in front of me looking at me like I’ve grown ten heads and all of ‘em have fangs drippin’ in black venom. And she keeps standin’ there starin’ at me until even I start to get fuckin’ uncomfortable. I rub the back of my neck and try to ignore the heat crawlin’ up it.
“Echo, you don’t gotta do nothin’ you don’t wanna do. You’re home now.”
Her eyes get even bigger and when I drop my head and stare into them, I see that her pupils are almost fully blown and have taken almost all of the warm mahogany with them.
“Echo. For everythin’ that happened in Paradise Hole, I am sorry.” I glance at her neck, and then lower at her thigh, which is only partially covered by my tee shirt. The blankets she abandoned somewhere on the stairs and ain’t no fuckin’ way I’m gonna go back for ‘em. “Everythin’ but findin’ you and draggin’ you outta there. That I’d do again a thousand times.”
“You almost died. I heard what Ward said. If it had taken any longer for your Six to find us, you probably would have…”
“A thousand times,” I repeat with a slow nod. “A thousand times.” I drag my finger over her jawline, flicking her chin gently.
She bites her lower lip and backs away from me until she hits her bedroom door. “Just…wait here. Don’t move. Please. Okay?”
I nod and cross my arms over my bare chest. Her gaze drops down to it, moving over my pecs and then my abs, and I can’t help but tighten them. Her gaze drops lower still and my hard-on dares to hope. But then she disappears behind her bedroom door, wedging herself into an opening so narrow, it’s impossible for me to see any of the room behind her. I hear shufflin’ though.
“The fuck is she doin’?”
She’s in there for so long, I run through a laundry list of possibilities, have time to whittle it down to three, then scratch ‘em and start over.
“Adam?” she calls through the door, from a distance.
“Here.”
“You…you can come in now.”
I don’t hesitate.
I push open the door and close it quietly behind me. Her room’s big. Not as big as mine, which has large French windows that lead onto an arched veranda overlookin’ the garden. The walls in here are a soft jade and the floor’s cream-colored carpet. The bed sits on the right wall occupyin’ a ton a’ space with its four posters, but right now it’s been stripped. All the sheets are missin’ and behind it, the armoire doors are thrown open. All the shelves are bare, every blanket and pillow that once occupied it now piled in the center of the carpeted floor.
She’s taken all the pillows and formed a circle with ‘em that she’s covered in the blankets. There’re textures of all kinds in a chaos of colors and she kneels in the middle of it wearin’ just my tee shirt. Her palms rest on top of her knees and her face is tilted up at me and, with glossy eyes and red, puffy lips, she says, “I don’t know what I’m doing…I made a nest. It’s so dumb. Do you like it?”
I should have known it was a nest — her nest — the moment I looked at it. I should have…but I didn’t. The nests I’ve seen before have been…different. At Omega Balls, usually, the Omega being introduced will create a prop nest of towering and magnificent proportions. I’ve seen nests made entirely of tufts of down, knotted together thousands of times over to create beautiful, intricate mosaics and patterns. I’ve seen hand-stitched silk laid to cover entire rooms. Furs from animals whose species no longer exist. Melting candles formed to stand twice as tall as I am carved with symbols representative of the Omega’s gifts that the nest belongs to.
The last Omega Ball I attended was in Gold City — that one where Whiskey found, seduced and fucked Sierra. There, the Omega had created a nest of furs which she surrounded by glass she’d created herself, with her own powers. Pillars and chandeliers that took single droplets of light and broke them into infinite shards of infinite colors.
