My goal every day was to go to work, do my work, and go home to a plate of delicious Indian takeaway and back to marathoning all of the old seasons ofLove Island.Which, in my opinion, made a whole hell of a lot more sense than the date I was subjecting myself to.
At least the betas on that show were able to couple and uncouple when things weren’t working out. I’d been looking foran escape route for the last hour and had yet to figure one out. I wished I had a firepit uncoupling session so that I could run screaming from the museum and at least enjoy the rest of my Saturday not in the place I worked next to an alpha that liked the sound of his own voice more than actually paying attention to the woman he was on a date with.
I wasn’t sure what exactly I’d been expecting for a date off of PackFinder, but it certainly wasn’t this.
Not that I’d ever been on a date on PackFinder before today.
No, before Trini had finally cajoled me into it, filling every hour we worked together with praises sung about the app one of her own alphas helped to develop, I’d had absolutely no interest in finding an alpha or pack of any sort.
My independent little princess,my mother used to say to me after one of our many arguments about me trying to find a pack. She always used my childhood nickname when she wanted to try and soothe my temper.I just don’t want you to be alone.
I’d been a late bloomer—my designation finally rearing its ugly head when I was twenty-one right when I’d been in the middle of university majoring theater set design with an impulsive minor in history. At the time, I’d had dreams of working on the sets of Broadway, so when my doctor asked what I wanted to do I immediately asked for suppressants.
My beta mother never understood why I wanted to tamp down on something about me that should have been celebrated, but all I wanted was to follow my dreams and being an omega would only have gotten in the way of that.
When she’d gotten sick a couple of years later I put my entire life on hold to take care of her, including quitting my job in New York to fly home to Washington to take care of her.
Even the consideration of finding a pack had been too overwhelming to consider as I watched her wither away, so Istayed on the suppressants against my doctor’s wishes until after the funeral when he refused to prescribe them anymore.
So, after that I paid the taxes on the house on the beach that my mother had owned for the next five years, fled the country entirely, and took a job that I never thought in a million years that I’d land. It surprised me to find that designing and setting up museum exhibits was not all that different from designing stage productions.
It was also way less stressful than Broadway and my new, much more overworked in London doctor hadn’t even blinked when I asked her about suppressants. Instead, she’d just reminded me that I would need to go into estrus at least once a year to keep myself healthy which I promptly ignored.
And now, somehow, here I was, doing what many omegas—hell what many women in their twenties—dealt with almost like it was a rite of passage: a shitty app date with a man who I was pretty sure would marry himself if he could.
I was going to throttle Trini the next time I saw her.
Go on a date, she said,it’ll be fun, she said.
Trini didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. She’d never been on an app date in her life, the lucky bitch. She was one of the fortunate omegas that didn’t even have to go through the omega center system because her pack was built from her childhood friends—and the designers and creators of the app that was currently the bane of my existence.
I was starting to get the feeling that I was more like a guinea pig for them because there was no way that Charles was the best they had to offer. Trini hadn’t even let me swipe, claiming that I was too picky.
We’ll just try it with one alpha to start with—how bad could it be?she’d asked as she gripped my cell phone with glee last week after she’d gotten me just drunk enough on my favorite white wine to agree to this harebrained scheme.
“Oh youhadto have helped design this one,” Charles gushed, bringing me from my thoughts of how I was going to smack the crap out of my friend and back to the present.
I blinked dazedly up at the exhibit that I had spent the past three months avoiding like the plague.
Emblazoned over the wide doorway were the words‘King Arthur, Myth, Legend, Man?’
It was a very cheeky title for a surprisingly somber exhibit.
“I didn’t,” I muttered barely loud enough for the alpha next to me to hear and started to turn around. “Let’s go look at theRomanticismmovement instead, it was the last one I put toge… oh, he’s already going.Great.”
Charles, ignoring everything that had just come out of my mouth, was already walking in the direction of the King Arthur exhibit at a steady clip.
Every instinct in my body was telling me just to leave him to it—that I didn’t want to be on this date anyway and any man that wouldn’t listen to me now definitely wouldn’t listen to me later on if there were actually relationship issues.
But as I stared up at the softly glowing sign, I was filled with what felt almost like anitchto go inside, which was completely weird because this was the exhibit I’d been avoiding ever since they put it together three months ago.
When my boss, Albert, had asked me to be on the design team for a King Arthur exhibit I’d given him a firm no without giving him a reason why.
Everyone in the room had paused with surprise at the vehemence of my rejection because, typically, I rarely ever talked at all and usually did whatever was asked of me, even if it was the shittiest tasks that were offered.
Needless to say Albert never asked me again and I’d steered clear of this exhibit ever since, even taking a different route around the museum to get to my work spaces every day.
And now my brain was telling me to just walk inside?
