Swallowing hard, I ask, “What are you doing up?”
“Laundry,” she says with a shrug.
Hmm. Odd time to do laundry, in the middle of the night, but who am I to judge? Besides that, it’s been what feels like forever since I last saw her—not that I was counting the hours or anything.
“What about you?” Jess asks, turning her gaze away from the yard and landing it on me. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so I could pick out her smooth features: her high cheekbones, her full lips, her heart-shaped face.
She really is beautiful, isn’t she?
That thought comes to me out of nowhere, and I have to look away as I push it back, back to whatever nook in my mind it came from. A thought like that shouldn’t ever cross my mind, for multiple reasons.
“I was hungry,” I say.
“And that little thing filled you up?”
I sigh, and I sound pretty damn despondent when I reply, “No.” She chuckles at me when I say it, causing me to ask, “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing.” A moment passes before she corrects herself, “You. Did you look in the fridge? I think Asher left you a plate of leftovers from dinner. He made some kind of pork and potatoes. It was actually pretty good.”
My brother the chef. Who knew? He’s probably spent more time in the kitchen here than he ever did before, and I don’t have to place a bet to know why: Jess. He likes her, wants to impress her. They have a lot of things they need to discuss.
“Asher told me you want your room to be off-limits,” I say, though I don’t know why I bring it up. “Are you… nesting already?” I’ve only been around my mom when she nests in the prior week to her heat. After that, my dads always took care of her, and I didn’t see her for days at a time when those two heats a year came.
Every six months omegas lose their minds. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not really that much time, and yet the fact that they have heats is made their entire personality by the media.
“No,” she says that a little too quickly, and it makes me wonder if she’s lying or hiding something—either way, I shouldn’t care. Her secrets are her own, and I have no right to them. Still, for whatever stupid reason, I do care.
Just a little.
“You spent all day in your room,” she reminds me. “What do you do in there by yourself?”
“None of your fucking business.” The curt, abrasive answer comes from me before I can stop to think, and the moment those words leave my lips, I feel my shoulders sagging. “What else am I supposed to do? I came up here wanting to be alone, not to spend time with my brother or the omega he’s helping.” I think of Rourke. “Or a stranger who works for Alabaster Security.”
“Rourke’s actually not so bad,” she instantly defends the other über. It should irritate me, hearing her leap to his defenseso easily, as if it’s second nature to her, but it doesn’t. “Can I ask you why you wanted to come up here to be alone?”
I almost say the same thing I said a few seconds ago, that it’s none of her business, but for some reason, that denial doesn’t surface. I don’t say anything right away. I sit there, my shoulders slumped, as I stare out at the darkness beyond the patio.
Jess takes my silence as my answer. “It’s okay. I know it’s none of my business. You don’t have to say anything.”
She’s right. I don’t have to say anything. I don’t have to say another word. I could get up and leave her out here right now, and she’d let me go, I don’t doubt it. All that aside, however, it’s a special sort of peculiar to me, what I want to do.
And by that, I mean I don’t want to get up and leave. I want to stay right where I am.
Fuck. I thought this whole thing might get messy, but I didn’t really think I’d be a part of that mess. I thought she’d rope Asher or me in when she was mid-heat; I didn’t think she’d cast a damn spell on me and make me feel things before her heat hits.
That’s what it has to be, anyway. A spell. Some kind of magic. No omega has ever made me question things like this before. No one’s ever made me want certain things before. It has to be some kind of magic, because I don’t know her at all.
I don’t know her, but I want to.
“Can I tell you something?” she asks quietly, the question weighing heavily in the air.
All I can do is nod; I don’t trust myself enough to speak.
Jess hooks her arms under her knees, leaning forward. “A part of me still wishes I would’ve died with my parents.” Her statement, spoken so softly, hits me like a brick wall. If I wasn’t already seated…
Out of all of the things I thought she might say, that honestly wasn’t one of them.
She goes on, “I thought that feeling would disappear eventually, that I’d get used to my new life. I was wrong. Nothing really changed. I became an outcast at school, the girl whose parents died, the girl who had to go to physical therapy multiple times a week because she didn’t have enough strength to do the normal things kids do.”
