Her expression flickers—pain, then acceptance. “I told you before he passed away. Car accident. I was nineteen.”
“So sorry.”
“It was a long time ago.” She takes a breath. “It took me years to feel normal again. To want anything. That’s why I don’t do serious relationships anymore—can’t risk that kind of loss again. But I know how intense that attraction is. How impossible it is to fight. And if you’re feeling that, then this is the real thing.”
“So what do I do?”
“Talk to them.” She says it like it’s simple. “Tell them the truth. Let them decide what they want. Besides, from what I’ve seen, those boys are already gone for you. Scent match or not, dormant or not, they look at you like you hung the moon.”
“Around them I lose my ability to think. I just stand there drooling like an idiot. How am I supposed to have a serious conversation when my brain shuts off every time they get close?”
Hazel laughs. “Yeah, that part’s hard. The first few weeks with my mate, I could barely string two words together. But it gets easier. The intensity levels out eventually.”
“Eventually.”
“A few months. Maybe a year.”
“Fantastic.”
She’s on her feet. “Gonna order us something to eat and drink.”
It doesn’t take long for the simple bar food to arrive, and while we eat, she tells me more about her experiences as an Omega—the good parts and the hard parts, the things no one warns you about. It helps, somehow. Knowing I’m not alone in this.
“Okay,” she says eventually, pushing her empty plate aside. “Enough heavy stuff. I need to show you something that will make you laugh.”
She reopens her laptop and connects it to the bar’s main TV screen—she’s friends with the owner, apparently—and starts scrolling through photos.
“These are from the carnival shoot. The official ones.” She flips through images of the guys posing with fans, looking professional and devastatingly handsome. “But then I got bored and started playing around.”
She clicks to the next image, and I burst out laughing.
It’s me, Kai, and Carter standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. We’re posed like tourists, Kai throwing up a peace sign, Carter with his arm around my shoulders, me grinning at the camera. Behind us, clearly photoshopped in, is Seth on horseback, looking stoic and slightly confused.
“Oh my God.”
“Wait, it gets better.”
The next one shows us at the Egyptian pyramids. Seth is still on his horse, now wearing a pharaoh’s headdress that Hazel has crudely drawn in. The photo after that is the Great Wall of China. Then the Grand Canyon. Then what appears to be the surface of the moon.
“Hazel.” I’m crying with laughter. “These are hilarious.”
She clicks through more. “Look, here you are at the Taj Mahal. And here’s one where I put Seth on a surfboard in Hawaii.”
I hear the door open behind us. “What in the hell am I looking at?” a familiar male voice calls out across the empty bar.
I spin around. Seth is standing in the entrance, hat in hand, staring at the TV screen where his photoshopped face is currently surfing a twenty-foot wave.
He strolls closer, studying the image with an expression somewhere between disbelief and amusement.
“Is that me?”
“No, that’s your doppelganger who happens to be really good at surfing,” Hazel deadpans.
“I heard you both cackling from out on the sidewalk.” He slides into the seat next to me, his thigh pressing against mine, and nods at the screen. “Show me more.”
Hazel grins and starts clicking through. Seth watches each image with growing amusement, occasionally snorting or shaking his head.
“I’m impressed I made it to Egypt,” he says when the pyramid one comes up. “On my horse, no less. That’s dedication.”
