“Well, Jackson immediately scooped him up and ran out of the cafeteria with Robby in his arms. We had to go after them, of course, because, like hell am I letting an Alpha run off with a newly presented Omega. I found Robby ripping Jackson a new one. I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing at how heartbroken Jackson looked.”
My best friend takes a long sip of her beer and burps so loudly I’m surprised my windows don’t rattle. She may look cute and dainty, but she has five Alpha brothers and acts like it.
“So Robby rejected him?”
She waves her hand. “For now, yeah. You know it won’t last, though. How fortunate for them to meet their scent matches at such a young age. They’ll have their whole lives together.”
The food sours on my tongue.
Marlie holds the romantic ideal that meeting her scentmatch will be the greatest day of her life. She’s been putting herself out there, attending speed-dating events and even signing up for a new service that stores Alpha pheromone samples for Omegas to smell, in hopes of finding her match.
She’s been unsuccessful thus far.
As much as Marlie loves me, I know she doesn’t understand why I am so against finding my matches. She couldn’t possibly, since she has never lost someone to Foresaken Omega Syndrome.
She doesn’t understand how serious it is. How bad things got for Calvin at the end.
“Look, Ariana.” Her voice is soft as she touches the back of my hand. “I love you. You know that, right?”
Looks like it’s time for our quarterly argument in which Marlie swears she’s met the Alpha for me and tries to get me out of the house, I refuse, and we get into a fight that takes us a week to get over.
I brace myself for the ‘but’ that is sure to follow.
“But…”
Called it.
“You can’t keep living like this.”
She practically has a script at this point. I could stage my own intervention.
“The world is scary. I could get in a car wreck on the way home. You could get cancer. Everything could explode into dust. There is risk to everything. What is the point of being alive if you aren’t really living?”
I bury my face in my hands, using my index fingers to rub my temples. “Marlie…”
“No, let me finish. Anything could happen. You’re twenty-six. You have one life, and you’re not living it. Your parents are worried. I’m worried. I feel like I’ve been enabling you.” She gets up from her chair and grabs thelegs of mine, wrenching me around and crouching in front of me. “You have to get out of this house.”
Bile rises in my throat. “I… I can’t, Marlie. I’ve tried. I just… It’s safe here, okay?”
She hums and strokes my hair from my face, tucking one of the unruly brown strands behind my ear. “I know. I know it’s hard. And I know you’ve tried, and you couldn’t. I think you can, though, with the right motivation.”
I narrow my eyes. “What does that mean?”
“It means you need a compelling reason to get out and stay out of this living tomb.”
“Hey! My house isn’t a tomb, thank you very much.”
I love my house. It’s cozy and lived in, with three bedrooms and a nesting suite. Not that I need it. I don’t have a nest. I’ve had one nest in my life, and Calvin helped me shop for it.
I don’t want another.
“Not yet it isn’t!” She pushes to her feet and grabs her oversized purse from where she dropped it on the counter. She starts to dig through it. “You know, with everything being digital nowadays, it’s hard to have dramatic reveals like there used to be. It’s frustrating, honestly. Colleges email acceptances, they don’t mail those massive envelopes like you see in movies anymore, you know?”
“I guess?”
She finds what she was looking for and holds a folded piece of paper up triumphantly. “It takes away a bit of the flair of the moment. The drama of it all. You know I live for those big reveal moments.”
I stare at the paper in her hands, nerves on edge as I worry about what she’s building up to. Marlie has always made a production of things, but this time feels much heavier than others.
