Not unless she asked me to.
Joon being here was just a happy coincidence.
“It wasn’t away from the Uber, it was away from her,” the omega all but growled out. It was supposed to be angry, but there was something about it that was cute instead. A bit like a kitten playing hunter for the first time.
Unluckily for Joon, I wasn't a mouse. It would take more than that to scare me off.
I raised an eyebrow, curiosity piqued as we continued our path down the sidewalk.
“I thought you liked Eva?”
“And I thought she liked me too,” I snapped. “But she only came onto me because I smell like Indi.”
Indigo? I barely restrained a laugh, thinking that Joon wouldn’t find it to be very supportive. “Indi couldn’t even manage to touch her; she’s just an omega fixated on why she got rejected.” I tilted my head, taking the next corner towards the lot where I'd left my car. “It seemed to me she was pretty desperate to get your attention just now.”
Joon sighed loudly. “Probably because she felt bad. Come on, I just want to go home.” He started towards the car he recognized more intently, pulling at the locked handle
“I didn't take you for being insecure,” I said, nose wrinkling as I smacked his fingers away from the door to open it for him myself. “Is this a new thing for you?”
He got in without a word about it, which was better than I expected from his normal attitude. “I’m not insecure. Look at me?” He gestured his hands over his body. “It just pisses me off.”
I let the words hang between us, snapping the door shut to round the car and get inside. He wasn’t wrong. When Indi first brought him home, his appearance caught my eye. That dark, slightly too-long hair he kept half up, and those plump lips had me focusing on him more often than I was willing to admit, even to myself.
This felt eerily similar to last time, and I didn’t want to make that mistake again.
“The idea of another omega with your alpha?” I asked, obscuring the hope in my voice.
He tucked his legs up against himself, hugging them and resting his chin on them. “I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I shouldn’t feel so protective, huh?”
“It’s a bit unfair, refusing to commit and getting annoyed about us exploring other options.” I buckled us both in before heading towards the house. “We respect that you don’t want a bond, Joon. But… it’s a biological demand for us.”
“It’s not like I want to be like this,” he snapped. “And what about you? Is your entire idea of courting bending someone over whenever you feel like it?”
I considered the question… surely not, I'd been raised in the kind of suffocatingly proper family that knew what I was supposed to do—flowers, gifts, dates… but I'd never been good at vulnerability. Never had a reason to be. Not until now. “Do you want something else?”
The actual consideration of the question seemed to take him off guard; he was just hoping to deflect. “Not really,” he admitted. “But it doesn’t tell me you’re interested in commitment either, just that you like me enough to fuck me.”
“You belong to me,” I said, resisting the urge to roll my eyes. I could normally handle his attitude for a while, but after the headache that bar gave me, I really wasn’t in the mood. “I would bond you today, if you allowed it. I'd ask you to have our baby if you were interested, but you aren’t. So I give you what you ask for instead.”
He glanced out the window, being obviously avoidant. His hand rubbed up the side of his arm near his tattoo. “I want to be committed, I’m just not ready to go all the way.”
“One would assume agreeing to raise children with us is considered, even by loose American morals, ‘all the way,’” I said, glancing at him a little too long. “She doesn’t offer anything you don’t… except maybe possibility. If you want Indigo, if you want Eva… you need to tell them.”
He looked over at me suddenly. “Have you ever broken a bond?” he asked.
The question threw me off, leaving me blinking and speechless for several long seconds. Breaking a bond was agonizing, painful beyond belief. And the loss of the connection itself was potentially worse… a level of loneliness you couldn’t understand unless it’d happened to you. Even the thought of breaking something like that made my stomach roll. “I've never been bonded,” I said. “If I had… wouldn’t my omega be here?”
Joon nodded. “Yeah, it’s not something I’m interested in.” He sounded insecure again. Hearing him like that irritated me more than the attitude.
“Dio mio. That doesn’t make any fucking sense, you know?”
“Well, leaving me gifts like a crow doesn’t make sense to me either.”
I kept my eyes fixed on the road, the prickle of embarrassment along my spine an unfamiliar and entirely unwelcome thing. “I—well—you aren't always available.”
He snorted. “I liked the last one you gave me. Where did you even find that edition?”
“Indigo wanted to go to the antique mall,” I hedged, “looking for their… weird stuff.”
