What wasit about teeth meltingly sweet teeny-bopper chick flicks that possessed casting agents to put the same three identical-looking men in the leading roles of like every 80’s movie ever?
This was the fifth one I’d watched today, the same boring, recycled plot flying by over and over in a reasonable 90 minutes or less. Omega girl meets alpha boys; boys are conventionally hot, bad boys with hearts of gold that her paternal packhates. Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes omega and the bad-boy pack make it work, disproving her judgy ass family and living happily ever after.
Lather. Rinse.Repeat.
Yawn. Move on.Next.
Not that it mattered much, but they were seriously starting to blend together at this point. If I had to watch one more would-be romantic montage of dates that consisted of riding motorcycles into the sunset or sitting on the hoods of cars watching the stars, I was going to scream.
Okay, fine. Maybe it was time to put down the popcorn and switch to something a little less pathetic. How long could I go on being the world’s biggest cliche, really?
Ice cream containers littered my coffee table, taking up residence between empty soda cans and a giant popcorn bowl that I’d refilled no less than three times today alone.
I wiped my salty, buttery fingers on the front of my oversized pink blanket-sweater combo, glowering at the screen from under the hood.
Romance, I’d decided, was kind of bullshit.
When Tara told me she’d settled down with a nice beta, that she’d found a way to make it work even through her heats, I’d decided to widen my dating pool a little. Give someone who wasn’t a packed-up alphahole a chance.
Do you know why nice guys finish last? Because they’reneveras nice as they say they are. Most of the time, actually, they were a loser finance manager with a gambling addiction who cleaned out your savings accounts and stole your car.
Okay, maybe, justmaybe, I was a little justified in being a sad-sack. Sometimes cliches existed for a reason, and right now that reason was a need to sulk over my broken picker and to stuff my face with snacks until I entered a food coma I wouldn’t wake from.
Fucking.Stephen.
He’d seemed so normal at first, the type of guy that I could consider bringing home to my parents, the quintessentially nice, affluent type of pack that often had pretty little omega babies. In my case, anyway, that was true.
My two sisters and me presented like clockwork, just a few days shy of our eighteenth birthdays. So it was basically expected that I’d want to pack up the second I finished college, and, believe me, Itried. There just wasn’t a single pack in entirebinder of scent cards at the Omega Center that I liked more than your typical lemony car air freshener.
Absolutely nothing that excited me in the least, totally lacking the electric sparkle that my sisters had in their eyes when they found their mates. No magic.Nada.
Just a bunch of names and faces that were as uninspired to me as cardboard.
So, fine! I tossed aside my family’s expectations of what my lifeshouldlook like and took a page out of my best friend's book—settling down with what I thought was a perfectly nice beta. Designation never really mattered to me, anyway.
I just wanted a connection, something real.
Stephen and I burned hot at first. So hot I thought he was the one.
Turned out he was just an assface with a gambling problem.
And a mediocre actor to boot. His lies, especially near the end, were so outlandish it was difficult to make peace with the idea that I’d ever believed anything that’d come out of his mouth.
Either way, the breakup still hurt, and left me sullenly rotting on my couch. Draped in my scent-soaked blankets and pillows in a makeshift nest that I could still watch my flatscreen in like some kind of depressed version of kept ladies who ate bonbons on the sofa while watching their soaps.
A knock at my door jolted me from the dissociative haze I’d been in for the past few hours. Returning me to my crumb-filled reality with a small groan.
The only thing that dragged me off the couch, my blanket hoodie falling to mid-calf as I stood, was the promise of egg rolls and sweet and sour pork. I’d ordered from my favourite Americanized Chinese food place in the hopes that I’d had enough to last me a couple days, saving me from having to speak or interact with anyone until Monday at the earliest.
Stream was going to have to wait. It was hard to want to entertain anyone when I felt like this. And if I wasn’t going to be entertaining, I wasn’t of any use to anyone.
A dip in my viewership—or worse, my die-hard fans asking me what was wrong—were blows that I staunchly refused.
Stephen had fucked with my money enough; he wasn’t going to mess with my sponsorships and donations, too.
I shuffled to the door, unlocking the deadbolt before throwing it wide, eyes on the mat hunting hungrily for a paper bag filled with enough carbs to put me into a three-day coma. Only, it wasn’t carefully stacked to go containers that met my eyes, but a pair of high top sneakers streaked with purple and hot blue.
My eyes trailed up a pair of slender legs in surprise, finding Tara’s eyebrow cocked as I reached her face. She was a bit taller than I was, leaving me looking up at her.
