29. Jordan
Chapter twenty-nine
Cyrus's face is blank, but the clench of his jaw reveals how hard it is for him to keep his mouth shut. His curly hair is piled high on the top of his head in a knot, and his outfit gives me deja vu from when we were kids. Sitting in a chair across from me, his arms crossed and his ankle loosely resting over his knee, he looks like the king of his domain.
All of that attention on me makes me feel a little weak in the knees.
Rafe is as brooding, dark, and handsome as ever. He's the only one I haven't scented, and I am purposefully keeping my distance. I don't need one more opportunity to get sick, but I can't help but wonder what he is going to smell like. In his dark clothing with his hair pushed off his forehead, I can see that boy I fell in love with all those years ago. The memories attempt to assault me, but I push them down.
He grimly looks down at Simon from his perch on the edge of an armchair. They've always been close, and the way Simon looks up at Rafe for support is like going back in time.
Simon is the most changed of the three. His previously platinum blonde hair is neon green, and it looks freshly dyed. He's got more tattoos than I can count on display from his rolled-up sleeves. Despite how broken he looked when I saw him after my heat, he looks almost dangerous now. Icarus mentioned that he was in a motorcycle club, and at first, I thought that was far-fetched. How could sweet Simon join a MC club? I wouldn't have ever thought he'd even end up with tattoos.
And yet here he is, looking savage in appearance but gentle in expression.
Icarus squeezes my hip encouragingly, and my eyes drift closed.
Am I going to do this? Throw my trauma out there to them like it won't destroy me if they don't accept responsibility?
I have to. Icarus and I talked about this in the car on the way here. We have to figure out a way through this, and this conversation is the first step.
"You left when I was eighteen," I say with a tight voice and an even tighter grip on my wine glass. "After that conversation in the diner where you pushed me away, I wasn't sure you'd stay in contact at all. When you did, I operated under the assumption it was because you'd changed your minds."
"We just couldn't-" Rafe begins.
"Stop." I set the wine glass down, bracing myself on my knees and shuddering with a repressed breath." If I am going to get through this, you have to listen and not interrupt. Please."
After a few moments of them looking anywhere but directly at me and saying silent, I continue.
"My mother was so embarrassed I hadn't presented that she started taking me to the doctor. She'll deny it, that was the main motivator, that I was a 'Beta,'" I make quotes with my hands, "but I know the truth. She wanted to see if they could force the presentation." Icarus grunts his dissent behind me and pulls me a little closer. He knows better than anyone that it can't be forced.
An unwelcome and unexplained embarrassment covers me in a flush. "The consensus was that I was potentially too heavy to present." I hear a sharp inhale from one of the Alphas, but I ignore it and push on. "Mom was happy to hear that there was something we could do to get me to present. So my food intake was monitored, and I lost weight."
Memories of food scales and measuring spoons as I made salads assault me. Of bites snuck from the fridge in the middle of the night. Candies hidden in my bedside table, the wrappers shoved between cracks of the furniture so they wouldn't be seen in the trash.
"Anyways, obviously, it didn't work." I snort a sarcastic laugh, but I'm the only one. "By the time I was nineteen, my mother had given up on trying to get me to present because, like you, she had read the statistics."
For the first time since I started talking, I look up, making eye contact with Cyrus.
His expression doesn't reveal much, but his eyes aren't as hard as I thought they'd be. His hands, however, tell a different story. His knuckles shine white around the crystal glass in his hands.
I wrench my eyes away from his hands, and they land on Rafe. The quiet Alpha's dark eyes are turned down as he looks at me with open sorrow. "I became the shameful Beta daughter. I was working my ass off at Meg's to save up enough money to move to Lunarcrest to be with you guys. I just thought everything would work out if I could get here."
Pausing, I sip my wine and lean into Icarus's body, burying my face in his neck. I inhale deeply, letting his soothing eucalyptus scent wash over me. The Stargazers don't push me to continue, giving me a moment to collect myself.
I don't want to tell them this next part. I don't want to see the judgment bound to color their faces. They're going to know how weak I am, how I couldn't hold it together.
"After the call where you three told me you found your Omega," my voice cracks on the last word, and Simon starts to get out of his chair. Rafe pushes him down with a firm hand that stays resting on his shoulder, fingers digging into the smaller Alpha's flesh. "After that call, I stopped eating entirely. I thought for sure I just wasn't thin enough. It spiraled out of control, and eventually, I ended up in inpatient treatment for an eating disorder."
A soft swear leaves Cyrus' lips, and he stands up, moving swiftly like he's going to walk out of the room.
"Sit down," I snarl. "You don't get to walk away from this."
His gaze snaps to me. "I'm not walking away from this. But I can't just sit there." He slaps himself in the chest a few times, and I notice how dilated his pupils are and how fast he's breathing. "I'm trying to calm my Alpha instincts down so I don't rip you off that couch and hold you to my chest."
I ignore that affectionate threat and look at Icarus. My Alpha looks at me with such love and adoration that it emboldens me. I don't look away from him as I continue the story, needing his quiet calm right now.
"While there, they decided I needed further psychiatric treatment because I refused to accept that I was a Beta. It wasn't hard to get me to agree with them. After all, the same sense that told me that I was an Omega was the one telling me I was your scent match. Since that wasn't true, I decided that I probably wasn't an Omega either." I drop my gaze to where my hands twist on my lap. "Or, so I thought for a little while."
I grab the glass of wine from the table again and take a sip, if only for something to do with my hands. I clutch it like a life preserver, wondering briefly how strong the glass is and praying the stem doesn't snap in my hands. "Eventually, I was able to leave the facility after they were convinced I no longer believed I was an Omega, and my eating was leveled out. And for a few years, I tried to tell myself that I wasn't an Omega, but that was just a lie I made to myself and my therapist.
"Dr. K. is great. She is. But she also operated under the assumption that I was a Beta. So I just stopped bringing it up, choosing instead to focus on my issues with food and the grief and anxiety I was struggling with. They weren't contingent on me being taken seriously as an Omega. The pain was still real."
Cyrus has stopped pacing and lowers himself back into his chair, his body brimming with tension. I can practically hear his teeth grinding with the effort of withholding whatever it is he wants to say, and my traitorous Omega instincts want to soothe him with a purr.
I have to look away.
"Once I got to Lunarcrest and started making more money, I started seeking other opinions, but all of it was a bunch of dead ends. And I was getting so old I began trying to convince myself again that I was wrong. That you had your scent match. That there was no way I was an Omega."
"It was always a lie," Simon says quietly. Tear tracks run down his soft, pale cheeks. "We thought it would be easier for you to move on and have a full life if you thought we weren't an option."
My chuckle sounds fake in my ears. "Move on? Like you can move on from me now?" I shake my head and glare at the green-haired Alpha. "No, I never moved on. In the back of my mind, I knew for the past thirteen years that you all were my scent matches. No matter how many times I tried to tell myself I was wrong. No matter how many times I replayed that call we had in my head."
I wonder if they're replaying that phone call in their minds now. The utter despair that radiates from Simon makes me believe he is. Rafe is still silent, but I can see the tension holding his body hostage under the surface.
I'm afraid to look at Cyrus again. Every time I do, I wonder if it'll be the moment I lose the battle with my instincts.
Icarus pulls me into his lap, and I curl into his embrace, the soothing eucalyptus and cucumber scent that is my Alpha wrapping around me. "I tried to tell myself so many times that I wasn't an Omega. That you had your Omega, and it wasn't me. No one believed me until Icarus."
"She came to me to examine her genome for Omega markers, and I found them in spades. There was one curious marker that I hadn't mapped before. I've been working on it with some colleagues of mine, and we've found it in a few Beta women with Omega heritage. I believe that gene hindered her presentation because it needed something to trigger it." His voice takes on the no-nonsense doctor tone he's got that, for some reason, makes me hot. "She shared some of her story while in my office, and my Alpha side reacted so strongly that I purred for her. I believe the burst of my pheromones, with us being scent matched, pushed the presentation later that day."
"You would've presented if you spent time around us," Simon says quietly. "If you'd been surrounded by our pheromones."
"Probably," I say firmly. I don't want to hedge this or make them feel better about what they did. "But as you said, we'll never know. What we do know, what is factual, is that after being exposed to a burst of scent matched Alpha pheromones, I presented as an Omega."
"Yeah, so if we had been around you, you would've presented," Rafe says with a terrifyingly flat tone. It's manufactured, like what an alien would think a calm person sounds like. "We kept you from presenting."
"You said it, not me."
"I just want to make sure I fully understand," Cyrus says in a rough voice. I whip my attention to him, locking eyes and nearly falling into his warm brown gaze. "You wanted to present as an Omega so badly you starved yourself until you needed hospitalization, and while there, you went through repeated gaslighting in the form of therapy to convince you you weren't an Omega, and you had to lie and pretend you understood to get out of it. You then spent the next twelve or thirteen years warring with yourself on whether you really were an Omega until you met your Alpha, and just being around him for a little bit triggered the presentation you had been begging for for over a decade?"
He looks at me with drooping, sad eyes. "Did I get it all?"
"Yeah, that sounds like all of it."
"Okay, good," he says sharply, standing up from his chair. "Thank you for telling us." He turns away, walks across the room, and punches the wall, drywall flying and dusting the entire room.
Cyrus wipes the blood and dust from his hand and turns around, face hollow. "Let's eat dinner."