Chapter 1
One Door Closes
JOHANNA
My world fails to end when Max Shallot dies. My heart keeps beating, blood circulating, brain thinking, and all other things necessary to maintain life.
I’ll survive.
Even thrive, somehow. He’d be disappointed in me if I didn’t, not to mention I have no desire to follow him to the grave when I’m only in my fifties.
I always suspected he’d go first. Suspected, feared, worried, for Max was a human comet, blazing across the sky, touching and changing all who came within his compass, along with multitudes who never knew him. Search any encyclopedia or anywhere on the internet for the definition of genius mad scientist, and you’ll find him.
As with many geniuses, he never paid enough care to himself. He was too busy chasing this new discovery or that innovation or some new or improved way to allow omegas more control over their complicated biochemistry. He wanted the freedom to define himself separately from biological mandates—and, for the most part, he got it.
At the cost of his health and well-being.
Watching over him and his health and well-being was my unofficial job—as his best friend, life companion, and as-needed lover.
Beloved.
I didn’t set out to make him the center of my life. Neither do I regret it. He was worth it, and he made certain I knew how much he valued me.
Though he didn’t make caring for him easy.
Still, he flared for more than a half-century before all those days of burning the calendar at both ends—not to mention missed or rescheduled doctors’ appointments—caught up with him.
A few weeks of complaints about a cold he couldn’t shake.
A collapse.
One month later, he was gone.
However, because I’d known this might happen someday, too soon, I was ready. Not that I wanted to be, but I spent that last month tending him while mourning hard and weeping in the lengthening hours when the pain meds meant he wouldn’t know.
At his memorial service in early November, in a carefully chosen downtown Cleaveland hotel, I don’t weep. I’m raw and empty. Numb, apart from a restless foot tapping against the pale-blue carpet which muffles the brush of my shoe.
Numb and itchy. My black dress hides red lace lingerie: one of Max’s last gifts, for he loved red, where I prefer rose pink. I’ve never worn the lacy bra and panties all day before, and they chafe—especially the panties—when pressed against the inadequate padding of a hotel conference center chair. From the front, I can’t see the family members, acquaintances, and coworkers filling the other rows, but rustles, coughs, and sniffs make it clear the big, echoing chamber is filling up.
Even with the industrial strength scent filters blowing overhead, carrying scent neutralizing droplets, the press of so many bodies gives the air weight. Harder to breathe with the hints of so many alphas’ and omegas’ personal odors mixing together, apart from the chemical perfumes most betas enjoy.
In my youth, I had the usual ‘beta’ sense of smell—not good, not bad—and could shrug it off. Betas don’t tend to catch more than a whiff of people’s aromas, unlike alphas and omegas.
Some women’s senses of smell improve as they age. Mine has, which is not a blessing. I can’t always pick out individuals, but I can usually tell an alpha or omega by smell and identify one or two notes of their perfumes. Thus, even neutralized, the collected grieving scents form a heavy odor, coating my tongue with bitterness.
So many people.
So many eyes on me. One of my honorary nieces grabs my hand and holds tight, but the welcome warmth fails to dispel my nerves.
Max kept most of his personal lifepersonal, rarely speaking about it when interviewed for umpteen million articles, which only makes overly nosy people more curious.
We met in college, after we’d both come into our secondary sexual designations, his omega and mine beta.
The majority of people, around three-quarters of the populace, experience little change from before when we present as betas. We’re calm, cool, and collected compared to the other designations. Alphas, maybe a quarter of the population, become more dominant and forceful. Omegas, the smallest of the designations, are cuddly, emotional, and highly-sexual. They rely on instinct, perfuming at the least hint of stress or arousal.
Stereotypes and assumptions, all of it.
Except the population breakdown, which manages to stay pretty consistent, despite shifting patterns of interaction and reproduction.
