Chapter 8 #2
“Quincy, Quincy,” Jack’s panicked voice spoke somewhere above and behind me. “God, Quincy, are you okay? Did I hurt you?”
Slowly, details of everything around me started to seep back into my consciousness. Jack’s knot had gone down and he’d moved away from me. He still hovered above me, though, his large body acting as a shield from things he couldn’t see.
I had post-heat aversion to touch in the worst way, though. I scrambled away from him to the far side of the bed…even while all I wanted was for him to hold me and stroke me and tell me everything would be okay and it was just a bad dream.
“Quincy, please talk to me,” Jack said, shifting a bit, like he was trying to get a look at my face without touching me.
“Go away,” I moaned, pressing my face into the pillow so he wouldn’t see how miserable I was.
“Oh. Okay. If that’s what you want.” Jack’s voice was so lost, so helpless.
He inched back, like he would climb off the bed, but I panicked, not wanting to be alone.
“Don’t leave me!” I shouted, flipping to face him and even reaching out for him.
I must have looked terrifying. All color drained from Jack’s face. He stretched out a hand to me, his face a mask of panic, but as soon as our fingers touched, I hissed and pulled back.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said, eyes glassy with frightened tears. “I don’t know what’s happening.”
I burst into tears and sagged on the rumpled bedsheets. “I’m sorry,” I managed between sobs. “I’m so sorry.”
Jack continued to hover, hands brushing the air a few inches above my body, like he wanted to touch me even though he knew he shouldn’t.
His concern was so palpable and so intense that it kept me crying long after the inner pain began to subside and my omega went back to hugging himself and rocking in the corner of his prison again.
“Jack,” I said simply, reaching for his hand again.
“Can I…should I….”
He lowered himself onto the bed, tentatively reaching for my fingers.
“I need you,” I said, feeling hollower than I ever had.
Our fingers touched, and even though it made me wince, I forced myself not to pull away. Even that infinitesimal brush of skin against skin was simultaneously too much and not enough.
“Please tell me what happened, Quincy,” Jack whispered, resting his head on the pillow opposite mine so that our eyes were level. “I want to help.”
I shook my head, squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, and swallowed, before opening my eyes. For a moment, I just stared at him, drinking in the sight of the first alpha who had mattered to me in five years.
“I have a severed bond,” I confessed in a whisper.
“A—” Jack stopped what had probably been a question.
He swallowed, and the fear and worry in his eyes turned to sympathy so big it looked like pain.
“Oh, Quincy,” he said, daring to caress my fingers more fully, like he was pulling me into the tightest hug ever.
“I’m so sorry. Why didn’t you tell me? That must have been—”
He stopped and sucked in a breath. I could tell from the spark of understanding in his eyes that he knew a bit about what happened to an omega when a bond was severed.
“I didn’t think omegas could—” He paused again, and a guilty look came into his eyes before he looked away. “I did some legal work for a…for an asylum for omegas with a severed bond a few years ago.”
I was still crying. I couldn’t stop myself. But it was strangely reassuring that Jack already knew something about bond severing and its effects.
“I was young,” I explained, barely whispering at first. “Chester, that’s the alpha’s name, was a childhood friend.
We were inseparable, even before either of us started to present as alpha and omega.
He was everything to me, and I thought I was everything to him, too.
By the time we graduated high school, everyone knew we’d be together forever. ”
“But then…if you loved each other….” Jack swallowed. “What happened?”
I wiped my face on the pillow and tried to force myself to pull it together. I owed Mads a thorough cleaning of his RV once this whole thing was done.
With a sigh, I continued my story. “The bond happened by accident, if you can believe it. Chester was the only one who had ever taken my heats, but it was my third heat when it happened. We were at university together. He was studying Programming and Computer Science. I was in Hospitality Management. He’d already started to make a name for himself, not to mention a bunch of money, with an app he’d designed.
And honestly, everything was good at first.”
“At first?” Jack continued to stroke my knuckles, and despite the aversion to touch, it felt good.
I swallowed the bile those memories brought up. “If I’m honest, he had already started to turn distant before the bond happened. Once I could feel him, I realized he didn’t love me the way I loved him.”
“But he must have loved you,” Jack insisted. “Alphas and omegas don’t bond unless there’s a deep compatibility and mutual affection.”
“Oh, we were compatible, alright,” I said. “We were childhood besties. He did love me, but he loved me the same way that someone loved a teddy bear they’d had on their childhood bed.”
“That sounds awful,” Jack said, covering my hand with his.
I shrugged one shoulder and sniffed as my tears finally dried up. “Part of me thinks we could have made it work. We liked and respected each other, or so I thought.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
I sighed, wiped my face against the pillow again, then dove into the last, and possibly worst, part of the story.
“He told me I was an anchor that would hold him down,” I said.
“He had ambitions. Another program he’d designed was snatched up by a big tech company.
We hadn’t even graduated yet, but he was already being tapped as the next wunderkind of the computing world.
He said he could have any omega in the world, if he wanted.
He didn’t want to be saddled with a nobody who couldn’t keep up with him. ”
“That’s…I don’t have words for that,” Jack said.
“He forced me to go through the bond severing procedure,” I said, feeling numb.
“Forced you?” Jack sounded like he wanted to kill Chester.
I nodded sadly. “I was so scared,” I confessed in a small voice.
“The procedure is damaging to omegas, but not so much to alphas. The list of side-effects they gave me was a mile long. I told Chester I didn’t want to go through with it, but he told me if I didn’t, he’d ruin me and my family.
My dad was banking on an important promotion at the time, and I believed Chester had the power to mess everything up. ”
I could tell that only made Jack more furious.
I felt sick, but I finished with, “The doctors assured me that since I was young and Chester and I hadn’t been bonded for more than a few months, the side-effects would be minimal for me. I guess they were right. Most of the time, I’m fine. It’s just around my heats that I…lose it.”
“You didn’t lose it with me,” Jack said. His body undulated a bit, like he wanted to pull me into his arms and had to fight not to.
I laughed. “You think any of the behavior I’ve exhibited in the last twenty-four hours is normal?”
“Well, um….” Jack held his breath for a second, then puffed it out. “No, I guess not.” He sent me a gentle smile, then said, “We sure are having fun, though. Or we were.”
I laughed. I felt like laughing. Jack made me feel joy again. But I couldn’t tell him how much I was hurting. I couldn’t tell him how incandescently painful the best moments of the sex we’d just had were.
With a blink, I was certain Jack knew.
“That’s what that feeling was,” he said, his eyes losing focus for a second. “That’s what the weird, warpy, uncomfortable feeling just when things got hot was all about.”
I nodded sadly. “It’s like there’s a thick, glass wall between me and that liminal space where alphas and omegas bond,” I said.
I lowered my head and told him the thing I’d never told anyone so far.
“It feels like my inner omega had his arms cut off. He’s absolutely desperate to hug someone—” to hug Jack, “—but he can’t.
And he knows he can never embrace anyone ever again. ”
“God, Quincy, I’m so sorry,” Jack said with a swell of emotion.
He slipped closer to me, and regardless of my post-heat touch aversion, he pulled me into his arms and clung to me like I meant everything to him.
The prickling, revolted feeling that I usually felt after heat was minimal.
The comfort and strength of Jack’s body all around me was so much more important.
I needed him like I’d never needed anything before.
It was madness, and it would probably come back and bite me in the butt, like everything else in my life, but I wanted to disappear into him. I didn’t care about anything else.
For a moment, even if it was just a heartbeat before reality set in once more, I closed my eyes and buried my face against my alpha’s chest, pretending that it was possible that he could actually be my alpha…when I knew it couldn’t happen.