Chapter One
Cameron
“For the last time, Shay, you’re going to end up locked in a fish tank in someone’s basement if you’re not more careful,” Cameron said, hitting the enter key on his laptop with a little more force than necessary.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Shay’s voice rang out from Cameron’s phone. Even across several states, multiple time zones, and sketchy cell towers, he couldn’t miss the bored drawl in her voice.
“I don’t think it’s dramatic to ask you to stop meeting people from dating apps at their house!”
“I sent Audrey my location on the way there. Besides, we met on the sidewalk in front of her house.”
Cameron hit the backspace button so hard, he nearly flipped the laptop off his lap. With a huff, he closed the lid and shoved it onto his cluttered coffee table. He was supposed to have clocked out hours ago, so it seemed like as good a time to stop as any. He leaned his head back onto his couch, his poof of ginger hair providing minimal padding against the wooden frame.
“Okay, so you met this six-foot alpha, who advertised on her profile that she’s a professional boxer, on the sidewalk in front of her house, and if things had gone south, you were just going to… What? Shift and bite her?”
Shay’s laugh cut through the relative quiet of Cameron’s living room. “Ba and Pa always called me an ankle biter for a reason.”
They hadn’t called Shay that inyears, but it had been one of their favorite nicknames for her growing up. She’d shift into her alligator form and chase them around the house, nipping at their heels like a puppy.
“Have you spoken to them recently?” Cameron asked, scooping up his phone and curling his legs beneath him so he could get into a slightly comfier position. He wasn’t very tall, but what height he did have was mostly in his legs.
Shay let out an exaggerated sigh, and Cameron couldn’t help but smile. Their beta Ba and omega Pa had adopted both of them when they were little. While Cameron had known all he ever cared to know about his birth parents, Shay’s past was somewhat of a mystery. Her birth parents had opted for a closed adoption, and their parents knew only the sparse details the adoption agency had shared with them. Adoption was quite common nowadays, given that only alphas could impregnate and only omegas could conceive, but closed adoptions were a little less common.
When Shay hit her teens, she began asking questions about her birth and the first year and a half of her life, and sadly, their parents hadn’t been able to answer them. They encouraged Shay to seek out other alligator shifters and fully supported her decision to attend college and graduate school in New Orleans to further explore her Creole and alligator heritage.
Nowadays, their relationship was stronger than ever, even though she had stayed in New Orleans while their parents stilllived in the Pacific Northwest. Distance definitely made the heart grow fonder…even if it also made the nagging parental phone calls more frequent.
“I’m assuming they’re asking about your dating life again?”
“Why do you think I’m on this stupid app? According to Ba, I ‘might as well see if my fated mate is on there,’” Shay groaned.
Ah, yes, their parents’ never-ending mission to get both of their children happily paired off with their fated mates. They were seahorse shifters, some of the most romantic fated mates on the planet. Hell, their elaborate mating rituals were used as examples in school textbooks. Their parents still did their mating dance several times a week and would spend hours holding tails in their backyard pool.
“And just to clarify, the rude alpha who spent the entire date interrupting and talking over you was not, in fact, your fated mate?” Cameron teased.
Fated mates were most common between alphas and omegas, so Shay, a beta, had grown up skeptical of the whole thing. Fated mate bonds had been known to happen withsomebetas, and while alphas and omegas were typically only fated to those of differing secondary genders, betas could form fated mate bonds with alphas, omegas,andother betas. Some people claimed that because of the abundance of options, the bond felt different for betas, almost as if it were less binding. Their Ba claimed that was a total lie, though, which made sense given how strong his bond was with Pa. Either way, Shay had never been interested in mate bonds, fated or otherwise.
Evidenced by the fact that she was now making a horrible gagging noise. “Don’t even joke about that, Camy. There wasdefinitelyno supposed mate bond.”
While a lot of betas never found their fated mate, many still entered into lifelong partnerships. Some would even mate with their partners, forgoing fate and forming their own matedpairs. Shay had never seemed particularly interested in dating in general, but at least once a year, she’d download a fated mate dating app and put on a big show for their parents.
Cameron just wished that it didn’t involve going to strangers’ houses.
“Shaybay…are you sure you’re actually into alphas?” Cameron asked, pulling out his own childhood nickname for her.
“I’m not sure I’m actually intoanyone—you know that. I figure I should cycle through primary and secondary genders once a year just to double check, though,” she said with a lighthearted snicker.
Cameron tilted sideways until he came to rest on a throw pillow his ba had made him. “You know Ba, Pa, and I would love you all the same if it turns out you’re not into anyone, period.”
He could practically see her shrugging from here. She was probably rolling her eyes, too.
Unlike Shay, Cameron had pretty strong feelings about fated mates…and they weren’t good feelings. While things had worked out well for his adopted parents, his birth parents were another matter. Cameron didn’t trust fate as far as he could throw it, and since he wasn’t even sure if he owned workout clothes at this point, that wasn’t very far. When he was a kid, he had read every book he could get his hands on, both fiction and nonfiction, trying to figure out how fate could have gotten things so wrong for his DNA donors. Thankfully, he only had a few years of memories with them, but what he did have was abysmal. Raised voices, objects flying overhead, and?—
“I know, Camy,” Shay said, pulling Cameron up and out of his darkening thoughts. “For all that they’re obsessed with fate, I know that all three of you are more obsessed with me and love mejust the way I am.” She added a sing-songy lilt to the end of her sentence that dispelled the rest of the lingering bad thoughts.
Shay liked to say that Cameron had a tendency to hurt his own feelings by dwelling on things he couldn’t control. She wasn’t entirely wrong.
“How am Iobsessedwith you?” Cameron asked, not liking the way the question came out sounding more like a whine.
