14. Cyrus
Chapter fourteen
I'm not saying I'm owed an Omega.
But I am saying I have one, and she is not here, and I'm about to lose my mind over it.
She's supposed to be with me. She's mine. I know that. Maybe, on some level, I've always known that. But I haven't even scented her. I don't even know what she looks like anymore. When we were teens, she was cute, with her too-big eyes and curvy figure. What is that like on an adult?
What does she do for work?
What does she do for fun?
Where does she live?
Why did she run from us in the hospital?
That last one I know. Stubbornly, I don't want to admit I know the answer. But maybe it wasn't the best idea for us to make it so clear who we were when we were trying to see her. Maybe we should have just hung out in the lobby, waiting for her to come out when discharged.
Fuck, that would've been a better idea. Why didn't I think of that? I'm supposed to be the idea guy—the leader.
I don't care what the other two say.
It was the right idea at the time to cut Jordan loose when we did. She never would have given up on us, and the chance of her presenting as an Omega was basically zero.
It's not that she wouldn't have been enough for me as a Beta. Jordan starred in every single one of my fantasies when we were teenagers.
She has always been my dream girl.
But our pack deserved the chance to find our scent match, and truthfully, I don't think the other two would've gone to an Omega mixer and put themselves out there if they hadn't cut Jordan loose. And let's face it, the likelihood of finding an Omega who would be happy with a Beta we cared that much about being in the pack was low.
But obviously, I know now why we never matched with an Omega in passing or at those mixers.
She was sitting across the booth from us at Meg's.
She was curled up at my side while we watched movies.
She was cheering for me from the stands when I raced across the ice.
She was peering at me under thick lashes while we did our homework.
Fuck.
The guys think I'm heartless and not considering her feelings, but it's not that. It's that she's mine. She was always going to be mine, and she was always supposed to be mine.
I know it.
She knows it.
And as soon as she stands in front of me, she'll realize what I am to her.
If she's holding a grudge, which I'm not convinced she will be, it will all be forgotten in the joy of finally becoming what we were always supposed to be to one another. There is no way Jordan, always a hopeless romantic, would hold herself back from that.
But I am not a patient man. At this point, I have to wonder if she's purposefully hiding from us. It's been over two months since Rafe scented her, and we're no closer to finding her today than we were then.
"You need to be patient and start working on your mea culpa, dude," Rafe tells me for the thousandth time. He's interrupting my quiet time. Every evening, I sit out on the back porch of the little home we've been living in with a glass of whiskey and my spiraling thoughts.
"I'm done being patient, Rafe. I want my girl."
"You haven't wanted her for the past thirteen years," he snarks. As if he knows anything about me anymore. "I seem to remember you being pretty clear about not wanting her around." He sits down next to me at the small entertaining table. Sometimes, it feels like this entire house was designed to host dinner and garden parties. The backyard is overgrown, but you can still see the beautiful landscaping design underneath.
"Don't tell me what I did and didn't want," I snap. "I cared for her just as much as you two did."
And I did.
Didn't I?
Truthfully, when I came up with the idea, it was a little selfish. I couldn't handle listening to her cry and beg for us to believe her. Every tear corroded my self-control. I watched her spiral mentally, and it seemed like she slowly lost her grip on reality. I honestly thought cutting her loose was best for everyone. It would allow us to find our scent match and help her heal and move on.
How was I supposed to know she was right? That she'd present as an Omega later on?
"We had no way of knowing she'd present, Rafe. There were no signs."
"No signs? Hmm. I don't know. Let's think about it." He holds up his hand and begins ticking off on his fingers, sarcasm dripping down every word. "She was coordinated and a natural dancer, she was sensitive physically and emotionally, she always gravitated towards softer materials, she craved touch, she had a fucking nest in her bedroom, and oh yeah," he pins me with a seething glare, "she told us repeatedly that she was one."
He hauls himself to his feet and turns his back on me. Pausing with his hand on the doorknob, he looks over his shoulder. "We told her we knew her body better than she did, C. You think our scents will erase everything that happened, but I know you're smarter than that. We missed out on thirteen years together because we didn't believe her. Our relationship with her as our Omega doesn't start when we scent match her. It started when we were nineteen years old and threw her away."
Is that it? Did we throw her away?
He doesn't leave time for follow-up questions. He just walks back inside. I stew a bit longer while I drain my glass before stomping back into the house. Simon is on the couch in the living room, legs slung over the back, resting on the wall, and his head upside down off the edge of the seat.
"Why don't you just sit like a normal person?" I grumble, crashing down on the couch next to him.
"Who is to say what's normal anyways, Cyrus?"
Simon is always saying weird shit. Always has. It's even stranger now that he's got bright green hair and a group of people calling him Slime.
He's dressed down today. There is no leather jacket in sight, just a black muscle tank that shows off his thousands of dollars in ink and a pair of black linen pants. No matter how much he washes up, he always smells vaguely of grease from his job as a mechanic.
"How did you end up with the club, Simon?"
"It's so weird to be called that after all this time," he groans. "No one but Momma Fran calls me that anymore."
I haven't thought about Momma Fran in ages. Simon has two moms, Betas, who adopted him when he was two. Momma Lucy passed away when we were twenty-one. It's been since the funeral that I've seen Momma Fran. She was like a second mom to all of us over the years.
"How is she?"
"Oh, just as meddling as ever. The club is obsessed with her, of course. You should see her on a bike, holy shit, it's so funny." His face lights up when he talks about her, but try as I might, I cannot picture that straight-laced lady with the short grey hair on the back of a motorcycle.
"I joined the club shortly before we parted ways. I showed up at the shop looking to get a used bike and eventually ended up talking to Nitro about, well, about everything. I love my moms, but it was the first time I had some fatherly attention, and it felt good. I didn't realize how much I needed someone to look at everything from ten thousand feet." He sits up now, his face red from the blood flow, and crosses his legs on the couch cushion.
"So yeah, he convinced me to buy this rust bucket of a bike, and then I was there every day working on it with him. Before it was done, he made me family."
He looks proud of himself, and I get it. Those years after we cut Jordan loose weren't easy for any of us, but especially for him. He's always been the most sensitive of us. After he left, Rafe retreated farther into himself, and somewhere along the way, I became a bitter mess.
But something about Simon's story is still bugging me.
"Why do they call you Slime, though?"
He groans, scrubbing his face. "You know in that eighties movie, with the gross green ghost made of slime who ate all the time?"
"Yeah, of course."
"Well, the family noticed I'd do just about anything for a good meal, so they named me after him. That's how I became Slime."
I chuckle softly. "Gotta say, that's not as bad as I thought it would be. Does it bother you that I call you Simon?"
"It does, and it doesn't. It makes me remember that shitty time. When I became Slime, I could distance myself from my heartache. Slime didn't spend his nights crying because he missed his best friend. He didn't struggle to find a reason to get out of bed on days when they would've had a video call. And Slime didn't betray the love of his life and break her heart. Simon did all of those things."
Is that how he saw it? A betrayal? I knew he struggled. Knew he missed her. But I don't think I realized that it completely wrecked him.
I thought anger was what drove him away from us.
But it was heartache.
"I thought I was doing what was best for everyone," I say quietly. "We'd be free to find our scent match, and she'd be able to move on from her hope of being an Omega and grow into her true designation."
"Well, it certainly wasn't better for us, was it? We all cared for her. Why couldn't we bring her on as our Beta? Why did we have to ditch her?" He's changing positions again, but this time, he's standing, pacing slowly in front of me like a cat. "You just wanted an Omega and didn't think one would have us if she were in the picture."
"Is that so wrong? An Alpha needs an Omega, or he could go rut crazy. Why am I the bad person for looking out for us all?"
I'm so tired of being scapegoated. I'm tired of them both acting like I made this decision alone.
We all agreed.
Of course, it fucking hurt. There is no denying that. But I wasn't the only person on that video call. The idea may have come of me – and yeah, it was a bad idea, of course I know that now – but they went along with it!
"What would have happened, Slime, if we kept her around as our Beta and stumbled upon a scent matched Omega, and they didn't want her around? What then? We would have spent years with her just to drop her. It would've hurt more than it already did."
"But that wouldn't have happened! Don't you get it? If we believed her, listened to her, and trusted her, we would've been by her side the moment she presented." He runs his hands through his hair, the green slightly faded. It sticks out a bit once he's through abusing it with his fingers. "That's the thing. We can't even begin to know the damage what we did caused her. She knew, and we lied to her. She must have thought she was crazy. We made her doubt herself, and she was always the most self-assured person I knew. And now, she will find out we lied and that she's our match, and she will hate us even more because we made her question herself."
Simon buries his hands in his pockets and shrugs in a move that ages him down sixteen years. "Maybe you need to rethink your approach to this, Cyrus. Your approach is what got us here in this mess, to begin with."
He stalks out, leaving me chewing on the sourness of his words.
Maybe I did get us into this mess.
But I'm going to get us out.