24
calix
THIS IS KNIGHT’S idea, huh?
I stand outside the security office, looking through the window at the cameras that show Knight with a gun to Dr. Acker’s head, just walking her right out the staff entrance back here.
Acker and Coltrain are keeping anyone from making any sudden moves, I have to note. Is Coltrain fucking Acker? Does that explain why he lets her get away with murder?
Who knows?
Anyway, this is a problem. This is not going to go well. Doing this publicly like this, parading her out of Cedar Falls? It’s only going to make things worse.
But he gets out with her and disappears out into the woods.
They send everyone in the place out after him. All the guards are combing the woods, and I hope he’s gotten free, but I don’t see how he would have. He didn’t have any transportation except what I provided.
What was his fucking plan?
I’m going out of my mind.
And then someone points out to me that I’m not wearing my lab coat, just scrubs, and I realize they’re correct. I’m not exactly medically trained, but they have us all dress like nurses if we work with the omegas back here. Well, maybe like doctors? With the lab coats? Who knows?
I’ve left it in my car, so I have to go back there.
Knight’s in my car. With Dr. Acker. They’re in the back seat.
I gape at them. How the hell has he avoided detection for this long in the goddess-damned staff parking lot?
I yank open the door and glare down at him. “What the fuck you doing?”
“It’s, um, it’s Beckwith, isn’t it?” says Dr. Acker. “Thank God you’ve found me, thank God—”
“Shut up,” says Knight, sticking the barrel of the gun into her mouth. “You done work yet?”
“No,” I say. “Not even close.”
“Well, I think today’s the day you quit,” he says. “You said you wanted to.”
“Yeah, I thought Striker said it might be a good idea for me to keep this job for now.”
“Well, is Striker the boss of you?”
“I mean, kind of,” I say. “And he’s kind of the boss of you.”
“Fuck that,” says Knight darkly. “Call them and tell them you’re vomiting out here and can’t come in. Then I have somewhere I want you to drive us.”
“You made this sound like you could handle everything,” I say. “You were all, I’ll take care of her body and no one will ever find it, and—”
Dr. Acker whimpers around the gun, looking at me with accusing eyes.
I slam the back door and get out my phone, sighing. “This is not cool, Knight. If we’re going to exist together in this pack, we are going to have to have a talk about boundaries, okay, and where mine are, and how if you cross mine, it will have consequences, and—”
“I really appreciate this, Calix,” he says to me. “I know it’s a big inconvenience. I really didn’t think this through as well as I could have.”
“You think?” I say, sarcastic. I’m dialing on my phone.
“Cedar Falls, this is Tammy,” says the person who’s answered.
“Tammy, it’s Cal,” I say. “I, uh, don’t know what’s going on, but I get out here, and I just start projectile vomiting all over the parking lot. I feel fine and everything, so I think I can finish the shift. I mean, it’s probably nothing contagious, you know? It’s probably like food poisoning or—”
“You’re throwing up, Cal?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think it’s a big deal, and I’m just coming back in. I just wanted to check with you, make sure you think it’s okay.”
“Go home, Beckwith,” Tammy sighs.
“No, you guys are short staffed and everything’s crazy right now with the break-in and that maddened hound kidnapping Acker—”
“And the last thing we need is you running around, vomiting in a damned bucket,” she says. “Or, heaven forbid, giving everyone in the facility the stomach flu. Go. Home.”
“Okay,” I say. “If that’s what you want.” I hang up the phone. I give Knight a nasty look. “You owe me, Knight.”
“I do,” he says. “I really do.”
arrow
MY KNOT DOESN’T go down.
Thirty minutes pass, and Striker is out there with Carla, serving her tea, while Lotus and I are still stuck together.
The first thing I tried was fucking her until I came, which took longer than it should have because of the entire situation. I did it with my eyes closed, imagining something dirty and transgressive that I thought would get me off easily (a girl begging to suck me while I told her I would think about it), but it still took forever, probably because of the entire horrible situation.
And the orgasm did nothing, anyway, and now I am stuck inside her, and she is looking at the ceiling, not at me, and we are quiet and awkward, and it’s weird how I could be as close to another human being as possible and yet still feel as if we are a million miles away.
“You hate me,” I say to her.
“No,” she says, but she’s not looking at me.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Not your fault,” she says.
Which is when I realize that she did not come. Well… she did, before, a while ago. But not any time recently. “Maybe, uh, what I need to do is get you off,” I say to her. “Maybe that’s when my knot will feel like it’s done its job.”
She blinks at me. “I cannot have an orgasm right now.” There’s an accusation I hear in her voice, sort of, And I can’t believe you could either.
I feel ashamed.
It’s still awkward.
Time slows to a crawl, and I punctuate it only by testing my knot, finding it still inflated, and then waiting again.
“It should be fine,” she says finally. “She married your goddamned brother, so I don’t even know why I’m… it’s fine.”
It’s not fine, though. I know it’s not fine.
“I’m sorry,” I say again.
“It’s really not your fault,” she mutters.
“I mean, I’m sorry you’re going through this,” I say. “Regardless of whether or not I really have the capacity to make it actually better for you, I mean.”
“You knotted me because you wanted to make it better,” she says with a sigh.
“Yeah, but I’m sorry that you’re even in this position, that you’re so triggered by us, or by… whatever it is that’s making you need sex like this. That must make you feel really helpless.”
She looks back at me. “We’re all helpless, though.”
“Maybe,” I say, “but this is not… I mean, oh, poor me, I have to put my dick in a very beautiful woman who’s begging for it.”
She laughs softly. “But you said that thing before, about how you didn’t even miss having sex with your wife.”
“Yeah, I would miss having sex with you. With our mates. This is different.”
“Is it?” She searches my gaze. “Only because we don’t have a choice? Because it’s fate or biology or necessary or something?”
“Hey, I would choose you,” I say. “If someone had told me, back then, when I met Carla, that you existed, I’d have waited for you.”
She scoffs.
But it’s true. I’m positive of that. “I mean it,” I say. “And not just you. Striker and Knight and Calix, too. Whatever this is, it’s different than anything I’ve ever felt. It’s more. It’s, uh, it’s… I don’t deserve it, something this good.”
She reaches up to touch my face. “Try harder, then, alpha,” she murmurs in a silky little voice. “Try to deserve me.”
Fuck, those words settle into me in a way that tingles. I roll my hips against her, hard, and then—
I deflate.
I roll off her, gasping.
She sits up, pulling the sheets over her naked body, eyes wide. “I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t even know why I said it. I—”
“It’s exactly right,” I say to her. “We’re not helpless, omega. We just have higher demands than other people. Time to rise to them.”
She furrows her brow.
“Let’s get dressed,” I say.
She nods.
Moments later, we’re in the kitchen.
Carla looks up at me and then away, mortified.
I’m not sure how I feel about seeing her right now. A moment ago, I think my predominant emotion might have been shame, and I would have drowned in it. But I need to do better. I need to deserve this, and I will. I go and sit down next to her. “Hey,” I say. “Do we talk?”
She glances at me. “What’s there to say?”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Was this your fault?”
“You should know, right after we got out, I didn’t remember you,” I say. “And then, after I did remember, we were being chased by people who are trying to kill us, so contacting you could have put you in danger, but that’s not why I didn’t do it. I was confused, I guess.”
“I was never enough for you,” she says with a shrug, into her tea cup. “You think I didn’t know that, deep down, always?”
I suddenly remember this conversation I had once with Jeff. We were drunk, and it was before he met Donna, but after I was already married to Carla. He got real animated, gesturing around with his glass, beer sloshing on the floor of the bar where we were sitting, going on about how everything came easy to me and I didn’t appreciate anything that I had and that I took my entire life for granted, not least of all my wife, did I know how lucky I was to have a wife like that?
“Jeff, though, you’re enough for him,” I say quietly.
She flushes.
“I think he might have always had a thing for you.” I think about that. “Poor Donna.”
“Shut up,” she says. “I don’t need you to do that. I do that enough to myself. God, you can’t imagine the guilty alimony settlement we gave that woman.”
I chuckle softly. “It is all my fault, then. I should have never tied you down like I did. You deserved better than that.”
Carla looks at me again, and her expression is all twisted. She sighs, shaking her head. She gets up from the table. “You can’t stay here in this house.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I guess I should have figured that it wouldn’t be a great idea. Um, about the door?”
“Gave her some money,” says Striker.
“Oh,” I say, nodding at him. “Good.”
“You need to go,” she says.
Right.
I scrub a hand over my face. “Did anyone think to get Calix’s cell number?”