Naturally, during those two years, there were quite a few students who showed interest in me. My program was mostly betas, about thirty percent omegas, and maybe three alphas in the whole year. Those three were taken, but the betas figured they could try their luck with an omega, which was a terrible idea because I've never been into betas at all.
Unfortunately, they were interested in me and kept calling me pretty, a compliment I heard countless times. "Oh, how is it possible that someone so pretty doesn’t have a boyfriend?" I got little notes praising my lips and eyes, invitations to the movies, offers to take me out to dinner or parties, even proposals to buy me a trip to Europe. All of it just irritated me and made me uncomfortable because I had to decline every single time.
Once, out of sheer exhaustion and boredom, I agree to go to the movies with a guy, a beta named Jed, who is exceptionally insistent and fairly handsome.
He spends half the movie glancing at me and leaning closer, like he wants to kiss me but does not dare. Then we grab something to eat. The conversation does not flow.
Jed walks me home and finally, very obviously, musters the courage, because he suddenly leans in to kiss me.
Repulsion and anger surge through me and I shove him away hard.
Without a word, I turn and run inside the house, leaving Jed standing there, gaping and heartbroken, I suppose. That is the end of our so-called dating.
After I get home, still shaking with a strange irritation, I sit on the bed, wrap myself tightly in a blanket, and open Bay’s diary.
I know it so well now, every page, every memory, each one dear to my heart.
I run my fingers over the pages held together with clear tape.
My eyes stop on my favorite entry.
From the day we made love for the first time.
I can see how Bay’s handwriting trembles there. His emotions are almost visible. He describes everything in broken sentences, some without verbs, fragments of thought.
"Insane. What I felt was so new, so strange, and yet so powerful. Alex’s eyes stayed on me the whole time, with such patience, drawing courage out of me. It was like light was falling on me, and wherever he looked, the darkness pulled back. I burned for him. I melted into him. And he healed me…"
Trembling slightly, I squeeze my eyes shut and reach for my inhaler. The memories drift through the corners of my mind like an endless river.
It hurts. So much.
???
There is, of course, one more thing that occupies my time, aside from the suicidal thoughts and reading Bay’s diary.
I spend a lot of time trying to figure out which of the Lowens is my father. I treat it like a strange side hobby. I have their entire family tree laid out on a huge sheet of paper. I map out probabilities, physical traits, talents, professions. And none of it fully adds up.
Thor, who looks-wise is a good candidate, didn’t even live in Florida at the time. His home was in the neighboring state where the Lowens originally came from. The odds of him showing up at a lecture by a detective specializing in complex criminal cases were close to zero, though not entirely impossible.
Victor seems much more likely, since he owns a press company and could have been interested in an interview with that famous detective to gather material for an article. That could fit, but on the other hand, he was already the head of the entire press agency then, and would more likely send one of his journalists. It is still possible that twenty years ago he did some of the reporting himself, but when I comb through every issue of East Time Magazine from that period, there is no article, no report, no mention of Detective Dupont’s lecture.
It doesn’t rule Victor out entirely, but it lowers the odds.
As for the patriarch of the family, when I was conceived, he was around sixty and still actively running the family business with Thor, dealing with investments, real estate, and government contracts.
Tracking his whereabouts back then isn’t easy. He now has a residence downtown in one of the buildings the Lowens own, and if he had it back then as well, he could theoretically have attended such a lecture, so I can’t fully eliminate him.
The rest of the sons are all omegas, although one of them, Jacob, is a super rare gamma subtype of omega. He has two young children born from his husband, another omega. Jacob is supposedly the sire, he is the biological parent of his children,but I doubt he is mine, especially because when I was conceived he was eighteen. And my dad was forty-two.
It is hard to imagine my dad taking an eighteen-year-old Lowen heir to a back room and having sex with him. Gross!
Besides, Dad mentioned he had been advising him on some criminal matter, which would have been bizarre. Jacob also studied in another city at the time, so the chances are basically zero.
There are two other brothers, both typical omegas: Sebastien Lowen and Blue Lowen. I can rule out the younger one, Blue, right away, because first, he was fourteen when I was conceived, and also, after an accident in his teens, his reproductive organs were removed, although to be fair, it happened when he was around fifteen or sixteen. But anyway, besides the fact that it would be horrible and illegal, I know my biological father already had kids at the time, so Blue is excluded either way.
There is still Sebastien. When I was conceived, he was twenty-seven, married, and already had two children that he had carried himself. But he isn’t a gamma subtype of an omega, so he couldn’t have impregnated my dad.
Those types of omegas usually lean more toward the beta side in appearance, slightly taller and more robust in build than the regular ones. Jacob is a good example of that, but both Sebastien and Blue are small and delicate-looking even for typical omegas.
