“I need to go.” His voice is hoarse, and I’m shocked as he stumbles away and gets into the truck.
This man physically dragged me to his car, and now he can’t get away faster. That acid feeling I call shame grows and infests my chest, and I have to suck in a breath not to cry. I don’t want to be everything my grandfather hammered in me that I was, but their reaction doesn’t leave room for arguments.
A siren luring good men.
“Come on, Veda. Let’s go.”
Derrick doesn’t yank my arm like his brother, and for some reason, that hurts even more. Jesse follows us. I feel his hand hovering at the small of my back, but he never makes contact. Their softness tastes bitter like fear, as if I’m suddenly carrying the scarlet letter tattooed on my chest.
Eyes cast down, I follow Derrick to his truck without a word. Quiet and alone in the back seat, I have a chance to curl into myself.
Goddammit!
Tears I don’t want to shed run down my cheeks, and I curse the world and my grandfather most of all. I have so many reasons to cry. This should be at the bottom of my list, yet I can’t stop feeling dirty—not only for the way they looked at me but also at how much I wanted them to keep looking.
How can something so good be wrong? I was loving Jesse’s care, and I melted under Derrick’s eyes. Even Major, with his grumpiness, makes my belly flutter. I have to hold back from taking his cowboy hat and putting it on my head as a challenge.
The pain ups a notch, and I wince, uncomfortable. When I think things couldn’t get worse, the front of my dress becomes damp. My horrified gaze follows the movement of my rising chest, panic and confusion arrive at once, and I curse loudly.
“Are you okay?” Derrick eyes me through the mirror.
“I’m okay,” I gulp.
My arm crosses in front of my breasts to hide from them, and grief strikes me when I realize there’s indeed nothing wrong. I’m just lactating, five days after giving birth. It took so long for my milk to drop that I actually forgot it was going to happen. My body doesn’t care that my baby was taken from me. It’s doing its thing and ruining my mental health in the process.
Piercing pain slashes me like a knife, and a raw scream creates a lump in my throat, yet I don’t let anything out. I raise my eyes to Derrick with the fakest smile on my lips, and my arms crossed in front of my chest.
“Everything is okay.”
His eyes narrow, and he sniffs the air, but of course he’s not smelling the milk. He’s not a hound dog, for god’s sake, yet the action makes me feel weird, and I press my arms even closer to my chest, my eyes averting to the window by my side.
I’m stupid, so damn stupid.
My breasts were like balloons, sore and sensitive, but I’m feeling so poorly overall that I didn’t pay enough attention. My vision blurs as I hold back the tears, and the minute we’re back at the ranch, I run to my room, locking my door once again. I make a beeline for the bathroom, tossing the damp dress aside as I go. I only let the tears fall when I’m under the hot, steamy shower.
The hot water only makes me leak even more, and I sob harder. If I had my baby, this would be such a special moment.
But she’s not here, and she’s not mine.
It’s just a reminder of what I’ll never have.
nine
Derrick
None of us says a word as she races from the truck to her bedroom, the sound of a lock enough to make us flinch. Around the kitchen table, I wait until I hear the shower running before I let out the breath stuck in my throat, and with that, a statement that brings chills down my spine despite the Texas heat.
“She’s a goddamn Omega.”
I’m no longer wondering. Her scent has been strong from the moment she came to the house, but I wasn’t expecting to ever meet an Omega, so I brushed it aside. I can’t do that anymore. This is happening, whether it is possible or not.
“She perfumed so fucking good,” my brother says with an uncharacteristic thickness in his voice. “I’ve never scented something like that.”
He reacted the worst of any of us. The perfume dazzled me, sure, but Major almost took the woman right then. Her perfume is thick, something we never experience, so I can’t fault him on that. I almost did the same. My heart does something strange when I think that she perfumed because of me, when I called her Darling.
“How’s that possible?” Jesse interrupts my thoughts. “They are gone.”
They are gone.It’s all we know for so fucking long. No reason but that they stopped being born. In our generation, Major and I, only one Omega in our township and news of another not far from there. By the time Jesse was born, there was none at all. Sohowis there an Omega in her twenties under our roof?
