I wiped my face on the pillow and tried to force myself to pull it together. I owed Mads a thorough cleaning of his RV once this whole thing was done.
With a sigh, I continued my story. “The bond happened by accident, if you can believe it. Chester was the only one who had ever taken my heats, but it was my third heat when it happened. We were at university together. He was studying Programming and Computer Science. I was in Hospitality Management. He’d already started to make a name for himself, not to mention a bunch of money, with an app he’d designed. And honestly, everything was good at first.”
“At first?” Jack continued to stroke my knuckles, and despite the aversion to touch, it felt good.
I swallowed the bile those memories brought up. “If I’m honest, he had already started to turn distant before the bond happened. Once I could feel him, I realized he didn’t love me the way I loved him.”
“But he must have loved you,” Jack insisted. “Alphas and omegas don’t bond unless there’s a deep compatibility and mutual affection.”
“Oh, we were compatible, alright,” I said. “We were childhood besties. He did love me, but he loved me the same way that someone loved a teddy bear they’d had on their childhood bed.”
“That sounds awful,” Jack said, covering my hand with his.
I shrugged one shoulder and sniffed as my tears finally dried up. “Part of me thinks we could have made it work. We liked and respected each other, or so I thought.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
I sighed, wiped my face against the pillow again, then dove into the last, and possibly worst, part of the story.
“He told me I was an anchor that would hold him down,” I said. “He had ambitions. Another program he’d designed was snatched up by a big tech company. We hadn’t even graduated yet, but he was already being tapped as the next wunderkind of the computing world. He said he could have any omega in the world, if he wanted. He didn’t want to be saddled with a nobody who couldn’t keep up with him.”
“That’s…I don’t have words for that,” Jack said.
“He forced me to go through the bond severing procedure,” I said, feeling numb.
“Forced you?” Jack sounded like he wanted to kill Chester.
I nodded sadly. “I was so scared,” I confessed in a small voice. “The procedure is damaging to omegas, but not so much to alphas. The list of side-effects they gave me was a mile long. I told Chester I didn’t want to go through with it, but he told me if I didn’t, he’d ruin me and my family. My dad was banking on an important promotion at the time, and I believed Chester had the power to mess everything up.”
I could tell that only made Jack more furious.
I felt sick, but I finished with, “The doctors assured me that since I was young and Chester and I hadn’t been bonded for more than a few months, the side-effects would be minimal for me. I guess they were right. Most of the time, I’m fine. It’s just around my heats that I…lose it.”
“You didn’t lose it with me,” Jack said. His body undulated a bit, like he wanted to pull me into his arms and had to fight not to.
I laughed. “You think any of the behavior I’ve exhibited in the last twenty-four hours is normal?”
“Well, um….” Jack held his breath for a second, then puffed it out. “No, I guess not.” He sent me a gentle smile, then said, “We sure are having fun, though. Or we were.”
I laughed. I felt like laughing. Jack made me feel joy again. But I couldn’t tell him how much I was hurting. I couldn’t tell him how incandescently painful the best moments of the sex we’d just had were.
With a blink, I was certain Jack knew.
“That’s what that feeling was,” he said, his eyes losing focus for a second. “That’s what the weird, warpy, uncomfortable feeling just when things got hot was all about.”
I nodded sadly. “It’s like there’s a thick, glass wall between me and that liminal space where alphas and omegas bond,” I said. I lowered my head and told him the thing I’d never told anyone so far. “It feels like my inner omega had his arms cut off. He’s absolutely desperate to hug someone—” to hug Jack, “—but he can’t. And he knows he can never embrace anyone ever again.”
“God, Quincy, I’m so sorry,” Jack said with a swell of emotion.
He slipped closer to me, and regardless of my post-heat touch aversion, he pulled me into his arms and clung to me like I meant everything to him.
The prickling, revolted feeling that I usually felt after heat was minimal. The comfort and strength of Jack’s body all around me was so much more important. I needed him like I’d never needed anything before. It was madness, and it would probably come back and bite me in the butt, like everything else in my life, but I wanted to disappear into him. I didn’t care about anything else.
For a moment, even if it was just a heartbeat before reality set in once more, I closed my eyes and buried my face againstmy alpha’s chest, pretending that it was possible that he could actually bemyalpha…when I knew it couldn’t happen.
CHAPTER NINE
Jack
