1
Wilson
The whiskey burns on the way down and I let it, tilting the glass until the last of it coats my tongue before settling the empty tumbler back on the table. Two fingers of Maker's Mark gone in under ten minutes. Not my worst showing, but it's early yet.
Vice & Virtue is packed tonight, bodies pressing against each other on the dance floor while the bass from the overhead speakers rattles through the booth and into my spine. The lighting is low enough that I can barely make out the faces of the people nearest to me, all of them blurred into shapes that don't require my attention. That's why I come here. The noise fills the space where my thoughts try to root, and the dark means I'm just another body in a room full of them.
Nobody looks at the Beta drinking alone in the back corner.
Nobody should.
I lift my hand to flag down a passing waitress, and she nods, already knowing my order. Third week in a row I've been here on a Thursday night, and she's got me figured out. Whiskey, neat, back booth, don't make conversation. Tip well and leave before last call. Predictable in a way that would have embarrassed me a few years ago when I still thought I was headed somewhere.
My phone buzzes against the table and I flip it over long enough to read the notification. It’s a job listing forwarded from an employment board I forgot to unsubscribe from. Administrative coordinator for a small medical office downtown. I could do it in my sleep. I could do most things in my sleep and none of it matters because the moment they run my name through any kind of background search, the same word keeps surfacing.
Hearthstone.
I lock the phone and shove it to the far edge of the table before pressing the heel of my palm against my left eye. The headache sitting behind it has been building all afternoon, the kind that starts as pressure and turns into something sharper if I let myself dwell too long on things I can't change.
One of the last interviews I had, the woman across the desk went from interested to repulsed in the span of a single question. Where did you work before this?Hearthstone Omega Center. Two years in their care program.Her smile didn't just fall. It evacuated, like I'd told her I was carrying something contagious.
She didn't let me explain that I was working against them from the inside. She didn't let me tell her about the years I spent feeding Omegas information they weren't supposed to have, memorizing files I wasn't authorized to read, and slipping a phone number to a terrified kid on my last day so he could cut himself free from the monster who owned him.
None of them let me explain that my position at the worst Omega Center framework nearly two years ago had been so Icouldget those Omegas out.Hearthstone had been dismantled shortly after I left but no one ever wants to hear my side of the story. All they know is the horrors of what the media told them happened in that place and assume I had a part in it.
An HR call from last month was the worst of it. Three minutes of some woman reading from a script while I stood in my kitchen with a coffee going cold in my hand.Your employment has been terminated effective immediately due to concerns regarding your prior affiliation with an organization currently under federal investigation.I started talking, trying to explain myself as fast I could but she hung up. I didn’t even get to finish my sentence.
It’s only a matter of time before my current employment calls after running a routine background check or a review. It’s always bullshit. It’s usually that someone said something or they google my name and then realized where I had worked.
The waitress drops off my second whiskey and I wrap both hands around the glass, letting the cold settle into my palms. A heavy sigh falls from my lips, my lids fluttering shut for a moment before focusing back on my glass, a dull throb pulsing up my shoulder, reminding me in some part how I ended up here.
The scar on the right side of my neck itches the way it always does when I think about the parts of my life I can't scrub clean. I reach up and tug my collar a little higher, making sure the fabric sits flush against the ruined skin underneath. It's a reflex at this point. I don't even register the motion until my fingers are already back on the glass, the raised edges of the scar burning a reminder into my skin through the cotton.
The bite was removed two years ago. The scar never will always be a reminder.
I take a slow pull of whiskey and let my gaze drift across the room, cataloging exits out of habit. Front entrance,twelve o'clock, currently bottlenecked with a group of Alphas comparing cologne like it's a pissing contest. Fire exit behind the bar, partially blocked by a stack of crates someone forgot to move. Hallway to the restrooms on my left, narrow enough that I'd have to press past people to use it. Back door somewhere behind the DJ booth if the layout follows any kind of code.
Four ways out. I always count. My ex-Alpha, Sebastian, trained that into me without ever meaning to, the constant awareness of how quickly I could leave a room if something felt off. It's one of the few gifts from that period of my life I haven't managed to shake.
Not that I've managed to shake much.
I raise the glass to my lips, taking a larger swig than necessary as I continue to mull over everything wrong in my life. Bills are due. Jobs won’t keep me. And then there’s that Christmas card still sitting on my kitchen counter, forcing me to face the fact that I’ve been stalling while the world passes me by.
I found it in my mailbox three days ago, the envelope addressed in god-awful handwriting from the last Omega I saved at Hearthstone.Luca Keller.Two photos were tucked inside, one of the twin boys with frosting smeared across their faces, the other of the whole pack crammed onto a couch with Luca in the center holding his belly, round with another one on the way. A girl this time, according to the note scrawled on the back.
I stared at those photos for a long time, long enough for my coffee to go cold again. The boys have Luca's curls and wide eyes and I thought about the night I sat across from him in that sterile room at Hearthstone, watching him curl into himself like he was trying to disappear into the wall. He had looked so small and yet so angry with the way the world worked. It was then I showed him my scar, offering him an out, a way to be free of his past aggressors.
And now Luca’s got a pack, a family, and babies. I’m ecstatic for him. There isn't a bitter bone in my body about Luca's happiness.
The bitterness is reserved for the fact that I went home to an empty apartment after looking at those photos and crawled into a bed that smelled like nothing but detergent and my own stale coffee-and-leather scent.
And then, I laid there in the dark and waited for the nightmares to come like they always do, every single night for the past two years. There is no one on the other side of them when I jerk awake with my hands fisted in the sheets and the phantom smell of cold metal and smoke lodged in the back of my throat. But, I don't scream anymore. I stopped doing that when I realized no one was coming.
I take another sip, the whiskey doing its job, dulling the sharper edges of a day that didn't deserve to be this exhausting, given that I didn't do a goddamn thing.
I woke up, drank coffee, and scrolled through job postings I won't apply to. I even considered going for a run and then sat on the couch until the sun started dropping, showered, and then came here.
The sum total of Wilson Ashford's productive day.
