Page 39 of Omega Chattel
“I know. You were expecting Kee.”
Kee who didn’t love me. And really, did I even love him? He was impossible to hold. To see clearly. Always out of focus, always running toward me or away without a second’s notice or a glance. Taking what he wanted. Laughing to the outskirts of his own addictions and never wanting to come back.
Never really wanting me.
But yes, I had been expecting him.
And now another lived in his room.
“I don’t know if I could be better.” Alli made the statement as if out of context.
“What?”
“But I will try harder than any of them. I will!”
“Any of whom?” My lovers?
“Your Omegas. Your Burn partners. All of them.” He bent his head, his hands weaving on his lap. “I know, I keep saying that. I shouldn’t. But I want you to know it. I smell you and I know. I would be better. For you.”
The boldness of him. I should have been incensed. Instead, all I could think was:How brave.
I smelled him and I knew, too. But I couldn’t get past the wall in my head.
This Omega, small and young and a runaway who had never known his own rights, or learned proper math and science, reached out to me then, and put his hot little palm on the top of my forearm, letting it rest there.
With that one touch, everything changed.
Chapter Eleven
Alli
Against my palm, flame.
It burned but didn’t hurt.
Being this close to Tarin flipped my heart upside-down and sideways. I wasn’t sure what to do, but it was as if I had no control. Over my body. Or my mouth and what it said to him.
Fated mates.It wasn’t real.
This was just a crush. A stupid child’s crush.
The night was so damp the moon fogged up for a moment.
He didn’t want me back. He was just being kind, sitting there, not moving, telling me intimacies about his first time. His rite of passage.
Tarin was so much older than I, and smarter. I was boring. I was silly. But I kept thinking I could be good for him. I didn’t know any other Alphas, but this was the Alpha my body wanted. I wanted.
Suddenly, his low voice broke the songs of the crickets. “I scented you, too.”
“What?”
“Right away. The moment you decided to follow me from the Trenches, past the bars and the strip clubs, past the massage and tattoo parlors and down into the darker streets.”
“You sensed me, of course. You practically attacked me.” I smiled into the dark at the memory of his hands holding me tight against the closed storefront wall, his body nearly pressing me into the brick and stone.
“I heard you. Yes. But I scented you, too,” he repeated.
What did he mean? I waited, but he didn’t speak further. He didn’t pull away from where my hand pressed his arm, either.
