17
lotus
WE DON’T TALK a lot after that.
It’s a weird revelation. Someone says something about how that means that part of me is being assaulted or something, but I say that all of us are being assaulted, really, if our designations are making us do something against our will.
But that gets really convoluted.
Which part of us is our real self?
Is it the designation side or is it the other side? I want to say it’s the other side of me, the side with a name, one that Calix provided for me. But the thing is, that name doesn’t seem right and that old life doesn’t seem right either. If I had to choose, right now, to go back to that life and give up my mates? I would never do it.
I can’t.
They mean something to me, more than anything has ever meant to me.
I wonder if that part of me that’s afraid of them, if I should just ignore that part.
It speaks up, very sarcastic, Yes, let’s just get ourselves killed, then.
Right, that’s stupid, isn’t it?
It’s just, they’re probably not going to kill me, right? They haven’t killed me thus far. So, I’m probably safe.
Striker and I volunteer to go to the grocery store since we need food. We take some of the money from Knight and we wear wide-brimmed hats we find in the beach house to try to sort of hide our faces, since we were all on the TV, and people are looking for us. Hopefully, we’re not being stupid going into public like this.
But the news report did make us seem like rabid animals who’d escaped from the zoo, not human beings capable of grocery shopping. So, we can hope, anyway.
I’m kind of weirded out by Striker being a priest. I’m not Catholic or even religious, really, at all, and I can’t imagine what sort of person would be drawn to a life like that. I can only think of two sorts of people, really. A person who’s really good at following rules and doing the right thing all the time and who likes lording that over other people—which is a particularly unpleasant sort of person. Or a person who’s the complete opposite, really bad at following the rules, who thinks that living a really strict lifestyle will cure this about them. But what sort of person could be so worried about their sexual behavior that they decide they should curb it entirely? Just pedophiles, right?
I mean, that’s why there’s a rash of them in the profession.
I don’t ask Striker if he’s attracted to children, of course. But he doesn’t seem like the first kind of person, I have to admit.
Well, he seems sort of like a natural leader, someone who you want to please and want to obey, but not in a bad way, just in a good way, like… I don’t know. He makes me feel safe, Striker does. I feel the safest with him.
Maybe he is the first sort of person.
Or maybe there’s a different sort of person who’d be attracted to a life like that, someone who doesn’t go into it because of the self-sacrifice but for other reasons entirely. Could there be a person like that? A person who’s just good? Who just wants to do good for other people?
I kind of doubt it.
Mostly because I’m not that kind of person, and I’ve never met anyone who was. The maddening thing is that most people are really ignoring all the bad things about themselves and casting themselves, in their minds, as angels. I wonder what it would be like, to be a person who saw themselves in a positive light? It would be a lie, sure, but I bet it would feel nice to believe a pretty lie like that.
He puts vegetables into bags and put them in our cart and glances at me sidelong. “Your scent, it’s a little muddled. I’m not sure what to make of it.”
“You can smell me right now?” I whisper, feeling mortified.
“You can smell me too, can’t you?” he says.
Sure, I guess, but he only smells good and comforting and safe, like always. I guess I don’t smell like that to him. “Sorry,” I mutter, “I guess my scent isn’t making you feel as good as your scent’s making me feel.”
“Doesn’t scent like you’re feeling good,” he says, rolling the cart toward the dairy section.
“I’m fine,” I say, grabbing several bags of different blocks of cheese. I like cheese. All kinds of cheese.
“Not to be that guy, but what are you thinking about?” He gives me a little smile, his warm brown eyes practically twinkling. So, that’s what it looks like when eyes twinkle, huh? I never really could picture it before. I like him smiling at me. It makes me feel good.
“You, obviously,” I say, grabbing more cheese for good measure. We need swiss and some habanero cheddar too.
“Ouch,” he says, shaking his head, selecting a carton of milk. “I don’t think I want to make you scent like that. What is it? Is it the rug burn, because it occurs to me that I have not apologized for the way I held you down like that. And I am sorry. I don’t ever want to hurt you. Hurting you makes me feel ill, kind of nauseous, like something’s very wrong.”
“It’s not,” I say. I eye the cheese. Do we have enough cheese? Can there be enough cheese? “It’s, um, the priest thing.”
“Oh,” he says, chuckling. “Yeah, I’m not dealing well with that either.”
I give him a double take. “What do you mean?”
“It feels strange, like there’s this past self who is me, but is not me, if you know what I mean? I remember making decisions and wanting certain things and believing certain things, but I would do it all completely differently now, you know?”
“Oh,” I say. “You don’t want to be a priest?”
“No,” he says. “Mostly because of you, admittedly. And our mates. It’s clearly idiotic that I thought… but it also sort of makes sense. I wasn’t interested in settling for less than an intense connection, and I had never found it, not even close, so I thought maybe I wouldn’t find it. And then I went all the way through all the training and the various steps, got ordained, and two days later, I went into my first rut. I had no idea I was an alpha.”
“That’s kind of like me,” I say. “I didn’t go into my first heat until I was in college. I was in my twenties. I know a lot of people do it near puberty, but… not me.”
“Yeah,” he says. “And I didn’t know what to do. Because, let me tell you, the Catholic faith doesn’t entirely know what to do with designations. European culture didn’t have contact with the Polloi until the 1800s, and the Church was well established by that point. God supposedly created us—alphas and omegas—but if so, he had literally zero to say about us in the entire bible.”
“Supposedly?” I say, raising my eyebrows.
He sighs. “Okay, I’m just not that kind of Catholic. I never was.”
“What kind of Catholic?” I furrow my brow.
He gestures. “We need more cheese?”
I giggle. “We probably have enough?”
He laughs, too. Together, we start walking down the aisles. “Look, I believe in God, and I believe the essence of scripture is truth,” he says. “But if you ask me if I think that literally, God spoke the creation into existence, or that literally, he created Adam from dust, I’m going to say, ‘First of all, those creation stories already contradict each other and they’re two pages apart in Genesis. And second of all, I can’t believe in a God who is smaller than human intelligence.’”
I furrow my brow. “I don’t…”
“God created us,” he says. “God created science. God created everything. So, to say that God needs to be limited in any way, like by some book interpreted by flawed humans, like the bible, no. Never going to be that kind of guy. I might not understand God, sure, but if something is a scientific fact, I’m going to assume God knows that.”
I laugh. “Okay, that makes sense. But you just said that God ‘supposedly’ created alphas and omegas.”
“I don’t know how God did it is all,” he says with a shrug. “Did he guide evolution? Did he just put a bunch of the matter out in the universe and walk away and then come back and go, ‘Oh, look, I seem to have accidentally created life’? Whatever he did, he’s there. I believe in God, but I don’t believe in every human interpretation of God. I believe the bible gets things right in essence, but not always in specifics. Look, here’s what I know about God. God is the essence of goodness and love. So, when people try to use God in ways that aren’t about goodness or aren’t about love, that’s wrong. Sometimes I think the Church gets in its own way. And finding out you’re a man in a rut who’s taken a vow of celibacy? It’s a mindfuck.”
I let out a breath. “Yeah, I can imagine.”
“I wanted out then,” he says. “But I didn’t know where else to go. I’d devoted my life to this, to becoming a priest. So, I didn’t leave. I stayed. I got through that rut, and on other side of it, I loved my job. I loved everything about it. I was a good priest.” He sighs heavily. “I like helping people, you know? I like being people’s safe haven. I like it when people trust me enough to tell me the worst things they’ve ever done, and I get to be the voice of God and tell them, ‘It’s okay. Actually, you’re perfect. Actually, you are perfectly you. Actually, I created you to be just this way, and don’t you change, and I forgive you, and you need to forgive yourself, and—’”
“That doesn’t sound particularly Catholic to me,” I say with a laugh. “Isn’t being Catholic all about guilt?”
“Guilt is a message,” he says with a shrug. “You need to get the message and do something with it and then let it go. Like, just now, feeling nauseous about hurting you. I got that message. I know I don’t want to hurt you.”
That makes a lot of sense, actually. But it also seems too good to be true. “Easier said than done, sometimes.”
“What? Changing?” He nods. “Yeah. But nothing worth doing is easy.”
Hmm. That’s an interesting thought, too.
“What else is on our list?” he says, getting his phone out of his pocket.
“Wait, we have a grocery list?” I say.
He laughs at me. “You come grocery shopping without a list, huh? You really need an alpha, don’t you? Who takes care of you, Lotus?”
I give him a withering look. “I don’t need taken care of, okay?”
“Yes, you do,” he says, and I feel the rumble of his voice in my clit.