Dead 2 Me (The Streamverse #3)

Chapter 1

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Yawn. Move on. Next.

Not that it mattered much, but they were seriously starting to blend together at this point. If I had to watch one more would-be romantic montage of dates that consisted of riding motorcycles into the sunset or sitting on the hoods of cars watching the stars, I was going to scream.

Okay, fine. Maybe it was time to put down the popcorn and switch to something a little less pathetic. How long could I go on being the world’s biggest cliche, really?

Ice cream containers littered my coffee table, taking up residence between empty soda cans and a giant popcorn bowl that I’d refilled no less than three times today alone.

I wiped my salty, buttery fingers on the front of my oversized pink blanket-sweater combo, glowering at the screen from under the hood.

Romance, I’d decided, was kind of bullshit.

When Tara told me she’d settled down with a nice beta, that she’d found a way to make it work even through her heats, I’d decided to widen my dating pool a little. Give someone who wasn’t a packed-up alphahole a chance.

Do you know why nice guys finish last? Because they’re never as nice as they say they are. Most of the time, actually, they were a loser finance manager with a gambling addiction who cleaned out your savings accounts and stole your car.

Okay, maybe, just maybe, I was a little justified in being a sad-sack. Sometimes cliches existed for a reason, and right now that reason was a need to sulk over my broken picker and to stuff my face with snacks until I entered a food coma I wouldn’t wake from.

Fucking. Stephen.

He’d seemed so normal at first, the type of guy that I could consider bringing home to my parents, the quintessentially nice, affluent type of pack that often had pretty little omega babies. In my case, anyway, that was true.

My two sisters and me presented like clockwork, just a few days shy of our eighteenth birthdays.

So it was basically expected that I’d want to pack up the second I finished college, and, believe me, I tried.

There just wasn’t a single pack in entire binder of scent cards at the Omega Center that I liked more than your typical lemony car air freshener.

Absolutely nothing that excited me in the least, totally lacking the electric sparkle that my sisters had in their eyes when they found their mates. No magic. Nada.

Just a bunch of names and faces that were as uninspired to me as cardboard.

So, fine! I tossed aside my family’s expectations of what my life should look like and took a page out of my best friend's book—settling down with what I thought was a perfectly nice beta. Designation never really mattered to me, anyway.

I just wanted a connection, something real.

Stephen and I burned hot at first. So hot I thought he was the one.

Turned out he was just an assface with a gambling problem.

And a mediocre actor to boot. His lies, especially near the end, were so outlandish it was difficult to make peace with the idea that I’d ever believed anything that’d come out of his mouth.

Either way, the breakup still hurt, and left me sullenly rotting on my couch. Draped in my scent-soaked blankets and pillows in a makeshift nest that I could still watch my flatscreen in like some kind of depressed version of kept ladies who ate bonbons on the sofa while watching their soaps.

A knock at my door jolted me from the dissociative haze I’d been in for the past few hours. Returning me to my crumb-filled reality with a small groan.

The only thing that dragged me off the couch, my blanket hoodie falling to mid-calf as I stood, was the promise of egg rolls and sweet and sour pork.

I’d ordered from my favourite Americanized Chinese food place in the hopes that I’d had enough to last me a couple days, saving me from having to speak or interact with anyone until Monday at the earliest.

Stream was going to have to wait. It was hard to want to entertain anyone when I felt like this. And if I wasn’t going to be entertaining, I wasn’t of any use to anyone.

A dip in my viewership—or worse, my die-hard fans asking me what was wrong—were blows that I staunchly refused.

Stephen had fucked with my money enough; he wasn’t going to mess with my sponsorships and donations, too.

I shuffled to the door, unlocking the deadbolt before throwing it wide, eyes on the mat hunting hungrily for a paper bag filled with enough carbs to put me into a three-day coma.

Only, it wasn’t carefully stacked to go containers that met my eyes, but a pair of high top sneakers streaked with purple and hot blue.

My eyes trailed up a pair of slender legs in surprise, finding Tara’s eyebrow cocked as I reached her face. She was a bit taller than I was, leaving me looking up at her.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“What are you doing? You haven’t streamed in days and haven’t answered any of my messages. I thought you’d died!” She shot me a confused look as she breezed into my apartment, dark hair falling in carefully styled waves around her as she moved.

Like me, Tara was a streamer. Though my best friend put more of her time into SLCK’d these days—an adults-only streaming website for omegas—than Streamverse, which I preferred.

Not that there was anything wrong with being a spicy streamer, especially not when you looked like Tara did, all curves and big, perfect tits that even I wanted to faceplant into half the time.

“Oh.” I said, a little dumbly.

That was fair. I did sort of just fall off the face of the Earth when usually I was one of the most chronically online people to live. Though, really, that was a skill. No one, and I mean no one, had meme game like I did.

Before Tara had gotten all packed up, she would’ve come close to rivalling my screentime.

But with a successful streamer for a boyfriend and an alpha sugardaddy at her beck and call, she’d diverted her attention a little.

As far as I could tell, she kept a regular three times a week schedule, but for the most part, that was only to keep her rank, or if the three of them were feeling like being watched.

“Oh?” Tara repeated back to me. “Eva, what’s going on?”

If the sight of my depression cave—formerly my living room—offended her, she didn’t show it.

What was usually a fairly clean, if not slightly cluttered, pink and white cozy space was now covered in snack wrappers, half-drunk plastic takeout cups, and my mountain of blankets.

I hadn’t even bothered to turn on any of the damn near dozen vintage lamps smattering the room, and I was someone who loved mood lighting.

“Stephen and I broke up,” I said, flopping back onto my couch with my arms crossed petulantly.

The effect was meant to give off the vibe that I was annoyed, if not a little angry, but it was, admittedly, a little ruined by the visual of my fluffy pink body disappearing into the overly plush couch cushions.

Usually, I was a pretty frugal person. Even though I was a Streamverse partner and one of the highest-grossing horror game streamers, I’d always kept up with the habits I’d created for myself when I was a broke student struggling to scrape together my rent.

But all those carefully curated skills went out the window when it came to furniture.

I always demanded the coziest thing I could find, and spared no expense to make sure I got exactly that.

My viewers usually joked that it was just my omega side coming out in full force.

Tara called it my birdhouse. All nest. And, fine, she wasn’t wrong.

The omega in question’s nose wrinkled slightly at my admission, and I could practically see Tara fighting a smile as she tried to be supportive in my wallowing.

To her credit, she did manage a half convincing, “That really sucks,” as she patted my knee, barely poking out where the hem of my blanket hoodie had rucked up in my descent.

She hated Stephen.

I didn’t get it before, but now? Maybe she had a point. Tara did always have better instincts about people than I did. I was too trusting, too eager to please.

She was harder, and it served her well.

Sometimes… I sort of wished I could be like that.

I let out a frustrated breath of air. “You don’t actually feel that way.”

She flopped down on the couch next to me, ignoring the crinkle of discarded snack wrappers as she pulled me into a hug that smelled of sharp, sour lime and sweet cherries.

“It does suck… I do feel bad that you’re hurting, but I’ll never understand what you saw in him.

Her dark eyes widened with excitement as they caught on a bag of open rainbow liquorice, pulling a blue one free to dangle into her mouth.

“Steve was a stick in the mud, Evie. And like… a six at best? You could absolutely bag a ten, easy.”

“He wasn’t all bad,” I tried to defend, though it came off a little hollow, even to my ears.

Her brow rose as she grabbed another to pass to me. “Babes, he was the worst. Like the literal worst. I thought Charlie was going to knock him out the only time they met, and Charlie’s thrown less punches in real life than Inky.”

I winced, the memory a sore spot even now. Stephen had made a comment about how feminine streamers only gained viewership by exploiting themselves sexually, while Tara was out of earshot, and Charlie was absolutely having none of that.

It wasn’t just degrading to Tara, it was dismissive of my career too… That really should’ve been the end, but I’d been loveblind enough that the red flags looked like roses and casual misogyny was a quirky joke that for some absolutely delusional reason, I was willing to explain away.

Yikes.

“You’re not wrong…” I sighed as she pulled another candy free, accepting it as she handed it over to me with a vicious bite to the lemon-flavoured candy that had its flavour exploding over my tongue.