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“No thanks needed, Lexie. I’m in total awe of you. I’d love to count you as a friend,” Ava said, making me blush a little.
“Already done,” I said.
Maia shrugged. “I’m not that easy. Payment will be required in cookies. I heard you make the world’s best chocolate chip cookie, Lex. I’m going to need a taste test to see if the guy’s claim stands up.”
I sighed. “I would love to make you some cookies, but I don’t know if we have any chocolate chips left, or vanilla extract. These are the things that we’re going to run out of, if we haven’t already. Things that we don’t grow on the farm.”
The thought of how much we still needed to figure out in order to survive if the electricity never came back was sobering. Not that chocolate chips would help us survive, but there were plenty of things that we would need long term that we didn’t have here and couldn’t grow. The problem had been gnawing at me and was taking up increasing space in my brain.
Plus, what about the people out there who didn’t have as much as we did as a starting point? How the hell were they surviving? I’d been part of the wider community before the Crash. I hadn’t isolated myself on the farm as much as the guys had. There were people I was worried about out there, particularly in the small town down the road.
“No! I refuse to live in a world without chocolate chip cookies.” Maia’s outburst jolted me out of my short reverie. She was looking at me in growing horror, as if she’d been waiting on me to solve the problem while my mind wandered.
“We’re going to have to figure that one out. Apocalypse be damned. I can do without a lot of things, but chocolate is not one of them,” Maia said passionately.
Ava and I burst out laughing. “I’m serious,” she said indignantly.
“She is,” Ava piped in. “We didn’t get a lot of sweet stuff at the palace. They were pretty strict about our diets. Maia used to squirrel chocolate away whenever she discovered it, and hide it in the library behind dusty old books.”
Maia moaned as if she was remembering the taste. “I’m an idiot. It’s an apocalypse, and I left all that delicious chocolate behind. We’re going to have to go back and rescue the chocolate… I mean omegas. We’re absolutely going back to rescue the omegas.”
Ava laughed lightly at Maia, the sound clear and sweet.
“We’ll figure it out,” I said, as I patted Maia on the shoulder. The omegas were a whole other problem to solve. There was no way I was leaving them there at the Palace at the mercy of the assholes running it.
“What about Dave? Where does he fit in?” Maia looked pointedly at me as she said his name, but I ignored it, pretending to look at my fingernails innocently. As if I was checking out my non-existent manicure. They weren’t having a bar of that, though.
“Yeah, I’d like to know about Dave too. If a man as hot as Dave looked at me like he does you, I’d melt,” Ava said.
Maia and I both gaped at Ava incredulously. Maia spluttered something unintelligible and Ava looked at us with her eyebrows raised in surprise.
“Uh, Cary?” was all I could get out.
Ava blushed furiously. “He’s not interested in me like that. He’s my friend. Besides, he’s an omega. Omegas don’t mate with other omegas.”
“Girl, you cannot be that naïve. He watches you like he’d die if you so much as got a split end in your hair. That man is gone for you,” I said.
Maia finally found her voice again. “Besides all that, who decided two omegas can’t be together? Not us. Lex and I are breaking all kinds of rules. What’s one more?”
Ava looked sad for a moment as she played with the bracelet on her wrist. I noticed she did that a lot whenever we talked about Cary. “It’s complicated. I can’t go there, but I don’t want to get into why right now. Besides, he’s protective and a little intense, but he’s never made any kind of move on me. Sure, he stays close, up to a point, but he’s never even touched my hand. He keeps a certain distance as if there’s a force field around me.”
“Yeah, same,” I said with a sigh. “Well, except for that one time, when Dave kissed me.”
Maia squeaked like a startled mouse as she leaned forward on the couch, grabbing my arm and shaking it. “I knew it. When did this happen?”
I looked sideways at her, pursing my lips and trying not to laugh as she jostled me. “At the community meeting, the night you got together with Hunter.”
“Yes.” She pumped her arm like she’d just bested us in an epic board game battle. “I knew something was up the next day. He couldn’t keep his eyes off your ass and you were all like, ‘who are you again?’”
I laughed and threw a muffin at her. Which she caught and started demolishing. She totally had me pegged right. “Leif unknowingly interrupted us and Dave disappeared while I had my back to him, then he pretended like it never happened.”
“Oh, he is going down. You’re my sister now. I will not let this go unavenged.” Maia had dropped her muffin into her lap and had her hands steepled together and was tapping her fingers in a classic evil plotting pose. All she needed was a maniacal laugh to complete the picture. Ava was grinning along with her and I didn’t want to know what those two could get up to together.
“To be fair,” I held up my hands, trying to hide my smile and calm them down before they unleashed hell on Dave, “we both kissed each other and both acted as if it never happened.”
“Doesn’t matter. We’re going to have so much fun with him,” Maia said emphatically, as if it was a done deal.
“I’m in,” Ava said, looking surprised at herself for speaking up and jumping in. Maia just cackled and gave her a high five.
