Chapter 19
NINETEEN
Playing: Vertigo by Griff
I squeeze my thighs together and force myself to think about anything else. Literally anything other than Jett’s stupid hair and his stupid back muscles and his stupid sexy smirk .
Not to mention his scent . I want to cut the spice of it into a line and snort it so I can have it directly in my bloodstream.
I shake my head almost violently at the thought. It’s exactly like Stacia said. My body feels like it’s experiencing a second puberty. Its awareness of its scent match leaves me wanting, and I absolutely refuse to satisfy it.
It’s been almost two days since everything turned upside down.
Every memory I have with Jett now feels different, full of expectation.
He never gave me any indication, any sign .
He always called me twilight even though it annoyed me and sat near me even though he knew I didn’t want to speak to him.
But he’s also been my biggest supporter these last few weeks, and now I know why.
We were both eighteen when we met, young and inexperienced and new to being on our own.
There could be any number of reasons why he kept this a secret from me, but remembering that we were just kids helps me a little bit.
Now we’re young adults, entering into the rest of our lives.
He’s matured, that much is true. He’s kind, considerate, emotionally aware.
It pisses me off.
I groan again when I feel my omega beckoning me closer and closer to the edge.
She is feral inside my skin, waiting for the moment I give up and let my body have what it wants.
I’m doing everything I can to distract myself, even going as far as to doomscroll YouTube shorts because it’s a dangerous portal and I need to be sucked in.
I feel bad for declining Stacia’s offer to hang out again last night.
Being around her would have been a minor distraction—minor because of them all being scent matches—but I just can’t be around Dax or Everett right now.
Being around them is confusing enough, but now that I have a scent match, it feels impossible to think about them.
When my omega does convince me to remember my night with them, and all the awkwardness I’ve built with them since then, I normally end up questioning whether or not they would be okay with Jett. Would they still want me if they knew about my scent match? Would they get along?
But then I feel guilty, because I have no right to have these kinds of questions, not when I have been pushing them away at every turn.
I’m not the only one avoiding men, though.
The second Opal heard Sam’s name on the speaker phone, her eyes flashed with fear and she shook her head from side to side so hard that I thought she might snap it off.
She’s still struggling to come to terms with her situation.
I don’t blame her. In fact, trying to understand her point of view is helping me understand Jett’s as well.
Maybe what Jett did wasn’t malicious. Maybe he had a perfectly good reason, just like Opal does.
I haven’t told her about what happened yet, but I still apologized to her for lashing out.
Opal is a very forgiving person and doesn’t like to hold a grudge, but I know she’ll need to know the whole story soon.
Maybe she can get something out of it, too.
Maybe it’ll help her understand what she’s going through a bit more, push her to make a decision.
Although, the two situations aren’t totally parallel. Sam already has a scent matched omega. Jett only has me, as far as I know.
The doorbell rings sometime after eight, and I scrunch my brows, wondering who it could be. Opal went out with Cindy (barf) and Stacia should be at her house with most of our friends again. Unless she canceled and came here instead?
It’s that single thought that has me getting up from my makeshift nest to walk swiftly across the house. But when I open the door, it’s not Stacia standing there waiting for me.
It’s my scent match.
“Hey,” he says, and the look in his eye causes me to pause before I can slam the door in his face. There’s physical guilt there, swollen bags underneath his eyes, and his lips look chapped from being bit into submission.
“I told you that I didn’t want to talk yet,” I say, although it isn’t completely true. He did text me the night it happened, wondering if we could talk, and I responded. Up until right now, he has given me space to figure things out.
“I know,” he answers softly, not using my own rebuttal against me. “I just needed to see that you were okay.”
No apologies, no defensive statements, just a declaration that’s all about me and whether or not I’m okay. Despite his bruised eyes and his shallow breathing, he’s focused on me .
And that’s why I open the door a little bit more and invite him inside.
Jett looks shocked but doesn’t question it. He just quietly follows behind me as we travel through the living room where we normally rehearse and then a little further as we inch towards my room.
“Wait, but you don’t like alphas in your room,” he says, pausing in his tracks.
I shrug. “Well, you’re my scent match so that rule doesn’t really matter, does it?”
“But it does,” he responds, not taking another step. “It does matter. Just because I’m your scent match doesn’t mean I get to veto your rule or cross your boundaries.”
My heart hurts when I look back at him.
Why did he do this to us? He’s saying everything that I thought my match would say, and now I can’t appreciate them because it’s tainted by a lie.
“Fine. We can speak out here then,” I say, but instead of sitting down I linger in front of the couch. Jett stands there awkwardly, keeping a decent distance from me so I don’t feel crowded.
The tension is thick, and I’m just hoping he doesn’t notice the sexual nature of it simmering beneath the surface.
“I just,” Jett starts, and then he rubs his eyes before continuing. “I just wanted to see if you were okay. I feel like shit.”
“Yeah, you should,” I bite out.
“I do ,” he responds without any fight. I almost wish he would fight with me.
It would be better than the distraught nature I can see clearly all over his face.
“Two years ago, when we met in our first film class together, I was captivated by you. And that was before I even scented you. Your hair, your demeanor… the way I could see that you were going to be a star .”
My omega whines inside of me. I look away from him, not wanting to see the sincerity in those words, not wanting to let the beast in me convince me to forgive and forget.
He continues, “And when I realized we were scent matches… I lost everything cool about me because I immediately knew I could never measure up. I said something stupid, you instantly hated me, and then what was I supposed to do?”
I grit my teeth with anger and hiss, “Tell me that I have a goddamn scent match?!”
“But you couldn’t smell me!” he yells, and some excitement drums in my veins.
If he gets angry, this will be easier. “You couldn’t smell me and I wasn’t willing to go off my blockers, I had barely been on them!
And you hated me. Do you really think you would have believed me if I just told you we were scent matches?
You’re not the type of person to just take someone at their word, much less someone who had already lost your respect. ”
When he puts it like that, there’s not much argument to be had. It’s true that I thought lowly of him. I would have assumed he was trying to find some kind of weakness in me by pretending to be my scent match. Still, my insecurities rear an ugly head.
“Even so, you had an entire semester to make it better. Why didn’t you at least try to show me who you really were?” I ask.
I’ve been curious about it for a few weeks now. The Jett I’ve been rehearsing with is not the same Jett I remember from our early college days. He’s a different breed of alpha than before, and I’m starting to suspect he’s always been that way.
He’s robbed us of years of moments and memories that we’ll never get back. But if I’m honest, I don’t know if the truth would have made it a smoother path. Not with my past, not when my anxiety fills to the brim when any strange alpha walks by.
“I thought it was better if you hated me,” he admits, and I swallow down the whimper it tries to pull from me. “I wanted you to feel strongly for me, even if it wasn’t lust or love. Hate was achievable. I wanted anything but indifference.”
“ Hate, ” I repeat, my blood boiling. I’ll show him a strong emotion if he wants one so fucking bad.
I walk closer to him. “Well, you got your fucking wish. I hate you for this. I was annoyed by you, besotted with absolute loathing because of how attracted I was to someone so fucking arrogant .” I huff out a breath.
“You made me hate my scent match , and now I’ll have to live with every memory of that for the rest of my life. That’s fucking torture .”
“Rory,” he says, taken aback. “I didn’t think about it like that. I didn’t mean to?—”
“I know,” I hiss at him, getting so close to him that I can feel his breath on my face. “You didn’t think about what I needed at all. You’re supposed to be my person.”
“Hey, I didn’t?—”
“No, you didn’t.”
I sigh and I can see the second he’s flipped the script, his eyes darkening as his scent sizzles in the air between us.
“I wanted to give you everything ,” he howls, but yet he still doesn’t reach out to touch me. There’s such little space between us, my chest almost brushes his in an illicit touch. “But fuck , I couldn’t even give you the scent match introduction that you fucking deserved. I am nothing .”
“Shut up.” I say the words but they’re barely above a whisper. I don’t think he would’ve heard me if he wasn’t right in front of me.
“ No , I can’t. Because I come from literal toxins that somehow procreated, Rory.” He shakes his head. “I should have stayed on my blockers.”