He sighs. “Okay.”
I sit with him while he finishes his breakfast, and then I help him clean up the kitchen. He shows me where they keep the bear spray, along with hiking boots that are technically his mom’s. They fit, so I borrow them, along with a thin jacket.
It might be summer time, but the mountain air is still cool compared to what I’m used to.
By the time I leave for my little hike, Asher is on his laptop, doing stuff for his classes. I still don’t know where Mason is, and I don’t really care. It’s none of my business where that alpha is or what he does with his time while he’s here.
I have the bear spray in the jacket’s pocket and the hiking boots snug on my feet. I leave through the back door of thehouse, the one just off the side of the living room. It opens up to a huge wooden deck.
The sun shines brightly overhead, hardly a cloud in the sky. A gentle breeze blows past me, and I breathe in deeply and fill my lungs with air that doesn’t taste of pollution.
I might not be able to smell anything, but I can feel how clean the air is. It’s not something I’m used to. Even at home, we might not be directly in the city, but we’re close enough to it that it’s just not the same.
This air? Untouched. Clean. Light. Full of nature in every breath. It feels good.
Only once I get used to the feeling of the clean air in my lungs do I start walking, taking the left path off the patio.
The area immediately around the house has been cleared of all trees. It’s a good thirty or forty feet before the forest begins, left untouched. I make sure to go in a straight line, not wanting to get lost or confused. The absolute last thing I need is to be unable to find my way back and need Asher to come find me. I’d never hear the end of it.
Hearing the crunch of the leaves beneath my heavy shoes, the snapping of fallen twigs; it’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. It’s a whole new world out here, far away from everything I’ve ever known, and you know what? It’s not bad.
It’s not bad at all. I wouldn’t mind getting myself a cabin, even if that cabin was a fraction of the size of Asher’s place, and staying out here. I could easily live out here alone. Get my groceries delivered, along with anything else I’d need. With my inheritance, I could easily afford it.
It’s strange. I never pictured what my life would be like when it’s all said and done. I never wasted the time, but now that there’s a possibility I can reclaim my family’s fortune for myself, there are so many opportunities out there.
Yeah. I wouldn’t mind living in the mountains. Learning how to start fires. Being one with nature. Having ugly hiking shoes and bear spray is a small price to pay for that kind of freedom.
After a while, I stop and go to lean on a rather large tree. I lean my head back on it, staring up at the sky through the forest’s canopy. I wonder what it all smells like. And then, as much as I don’t want to, I wonder what Asher and his brother smell like, what kind of alpha musk they have between them.
For some reason, I bet they smell good. I bet if I was whole, they’d both drive me crazy… kind of like that alpha at the Omega Garden, Rourke. I couldn’t smell him, but the mere sight of him walking away from me made me feel so desolate and incomplete.
So hopeless. So depressed. Things I was used to feeling, yes, but intensified times ten.
No, times a thousand.
But he didn’t put an offer in on me, so it ultimately doesn’t matter. I succeeded in scaring him off, which was what I wanted all along, wasn’t it? All those times at the Omega Garden, all those alphas I’d met there, none had ever made me feel so conflicted and confused.
What the hell is wrong with me? I’m actually upset I didn’t get an offer? That doesn’t make one lick of sense. The whole reason I’m here, the only reason I reached out to the alpha who used to be my best friend when we were kids, was because I didn’t want to be matched. Not nailed down. Not mated.
I want my family’s wealth. I deserve it. Simply because I’m an omega doesn’t mean I don’t.
My aunt? Definitely doesn’t deserve shit. That woman can kiss my ass any day of the week.
I hate feeling so strange. Some moments I’m confident in my decision to come here, while other times I feel like I do right now: so very confused. Being confused is unlike me in every way.
I’m confident. I’m headstrong. Sometimes I’m a bitch. I’m a freaking Dryers, the last one.
My eyelids close. A part of me wishes I could blend in with the tree behind me forever, become one with nature and never go back to the city. That place, that house… it’s not my home anymore. The day my aunt and uncle moved in, it got cold, and it only grew colder the day my uncle died. That’s no way to live.
But I can’t stay up here forever. I might be privileged to a certain extent, but I’m nowhere near as privileged as Mason, who can come up here whenever he wants and stay for as long as he wishes. Not all of us are so fortunate. My luck ran out a long time ago.
Sometimes… sometimes I hate the fact I’m still here, that the crash didn’t claim my life, too. It might as well have. All those doctors, all that physical therapy, not to get fully better but to find a new baseline. My new normal.
What did it get me? A life I didn’t want. No friends. No love. No warmth. On the outside it may look like I live a fantastic life, but the truth is the opposite.
This life of mine is no life. Anger, pettiness, and faking it brought me this far, but those emotions can only carry you for so long. When they finally give out, when I’m left to pick up the pieces, will I even want to?
What kind of life is it really if it’s a life you don’t want to live?
