Sixty-Nine
SIXTY-NINE
Nat
AT FIRST, I’D DONE a pretty decent job of ignoring my parents’ emails and phone calls. My mother was pissed that the house in Jennings had been closed up and empty on the five— five!— separate occasions when she’d driven over there to ‘visit’ me.
The first email had demanded to know if I’d moved out. Subsequent emails had grown increasingly butt-hurt, accusing me of being the worst son in the history of sons for daring to do so without informing them first. After listening to thirty seconds of my father yelling at me through voice mail, I’d started deleting those, as well.
I told myself firmly that I had more important things to worry about, and that was one hundred percent true. Emiel and Zalen had wasted no time tracking down omega hormones for me, from a source Zalen assured me was reliable, if not exactly legal.
I was okay with that part. Anyone who’d had an omega in their life long-term understood that you weren’t going to get the shit you needed legally, a lot of the time. Trusting that the alphas wouldn’t have given me something they didn’t think was safe, I started the injections as soon as the stuff arrived.
And holy shit, had I underestimated what I was signing up for.
Omega heat and fertility hormones were a whole different ball game than beta hormones. It took exactly seventy-two hours for me to start rethinking a lifetime omega stereotypes.
“It’s been like this for you every single time your heat approaches?” I asked Mia, dumbfounded. “And you just went to work like nothing was wrong ?”
“Yup,” Mia said, stretching up to kiss my cheek. “Speaking of which, aren’t you due at the Elderflower Inn in half an hour?”
In the corner of the kitchen, Luca hid his mouth behind his hand.
“You’re laughing at me,” I accused.
“Maybe a little?” he admitted.
I grumbled something uncomplimentary and went to get my keys.
While the mood swings were bad enough, it was the waves of horniness that were the absolute work of the devil. I’d grown used to getting as much sex as I wanted since I’d moved into the Ladue house. Now, I was pretty sure it would be physically impossible to get as much sex as I wanted. Not without an embarrassing trip to the ER being involved at some point, anyway.
“It’s the alphas,” Luca told me, one evening when he was more inclined to sympathy than amusement at my expense. “When you and Mia lived together, she probably just felt irritable in the run-up. But you’re stuck in a house full of tasty alpha pheromones—plus, you’re not used to it. Makes it worse. Let’s go to your room... we can suck each other off real quick before dinner.”
And it helped. For, like, ten minutes.
It helped more when Byron got back from settling Tony in Chicago. Byron was... creative. Even if he also seemed to be a bit weirded out by my sudden crying spells. Which... I mean, I was a bit weirded out by my sudden crying spells, so I couldn’t exactly hold it against him.
When I was at the house, I figured out pretty quick to go to Emiel or Zalen when I was weepy, and Byron or Zalen when I was horny. When I wasn’t at the house... um, yeah. That was a little bit harder.
I’d been on the hormones for almost a week when Shani cornered me in my office at the restaurant.
“Nat, honey, are you okay?” she began. “I’m allowed to ask you things like this now that I own the place, and you’ve got me worried.”
I swiped surreptitiously at my eyes and failed to stifle a wet laugh. “Yes. Sorry. At the risk of slipping into TMI, I decided to take omega hormones for the upcoming pack heat. I... may have underestimated the effects.”
Understanding dawned.
“ Oh . Gotcha.” She made a face of combined amusement and sympathy. “Oof, sweetheart. You might want to take off work early—I think we can muddle through without you until the heat’s over. Pre-heat is bad enough when you grew up learning how to manage it.”
“Oh, god, could you?” I blurted in relief. The last couple of days, I’d been starting to worry that I’d screw up something important with the restaurant’s accounting—double and triple checking every single thing I did.
She chuckled. “I’ll check with Maleeka to make sure, but I think we’re good. Why don’t you go on home today and—”
We both startled as raised voices filtered in from the front of house. After everything that had happened over the past few months, neither of us needed omega hormones to have us jerking upright, whirling toward the sound of the disturbance.
“What in sanity’s name?” Shani said, already heading for the office door.
She met Candy coming the other direction. Patches of ruddy red decorated the waitress’s cheeks, and her eyes were flashing with righteous indignation.
“Boss? Nat?” she began. “There’s a man and a woman out front. Nat, they say they’re your parents? Except, um... they don’t look like you at all? And they’re being super rude. They’re demanding to see you. I told them I’d go get the owner, Shani. I hope that’s okay.”
Shani straightened to her full, if not very impressive, height. “Of course it is, Candy. You did exactly right. Nat?”
Sick panic was twisting through my stomach and intestines, all out of proportion with what was actually happening.
“They’re my parents,” I managed faintly. “I’m adopted.”
The prospect of my father seeing me like this had my breath coming fast and shallow. What if I got emotional? What if they said something cruel and I started crying? What if—
“Nat?” Shani’s face loomed in my vision. She turned toward the door. “Candy, can you give us a minute, please? I’ll be right out to deal with the situation.”
“Sure thing, boss...”
Candy’s voice sounded like it was coming from far away. The door closed with an echoing click.
“Talk to me, Nat,” Shani said. Her small hand closed on my shoulder, a point of reassuring warmth.
“My parents...” I rasped, the words forming at the same time I realized the truth of them. “I’m... cutting them off. They’re vicious, homophobic assholes. But... I can’t see them when I’m like this?”
I hated the way my voice rose uncertainly, making it sound like a question. Shani’s eyes hardened.
“Say no more,” she said. “One pair of bigots, on their way out. In fact, I’m going to enjoy this.” She let me go and rubbed her hands together. “Stay out of sight. You’re not at work today, understand?”
I nodded dumbly, watching as she stalked out of the office with a militant snap in her step.
Humiliation ate at my stomach like acid as I listened to angry voices rising and falling, the sense of the words lost by the muffling door. I should be the ones confronting my parents—trying to defuse the situation so they didn’t make a scene in the public areas of Shani’s business. I shouldn’t be hiding behind an omega—
I cut myself off, a different kind of shame flooding my cheeks with heat.
Shani had wrangled a huge pack for decades, and now ran a highly successful restaurant after less than a year in the industry. Her gender designation didn’t matter one single damned bit when it came to her ability to send a pair of rude, middle-aged betas packing—and it was insulting as hell to imply otherwise.
I sagged into my chair, shaking.
Sure enough, less than five minutes later she came marching back in, not having broken a sweat.
“I sent them off with a flea in their ear, and the threat of arrest if they trespass in my restaurant again.” Her brows knit as she gave me a thorough onceover.
“They don’t know where I live now,” I ground out. “Guess this was the only place they could think to look for me.”
“Well, they still don’t know,” she said. “Although they sure did ask, as though they had the right to know. Give it ten minutes and go home to your pack, Nat. I’ll have Maleeka and Ayden walk you to your car, just to be safe.”
I wanted to protest. Part of me did, at least. But that part was a tiny speck compared to the part of me that just wanted to get home and lock the door against the world.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“Don’t give it another thought,” Shani said. “Call or email when the heat’s finished and you’re available to come back to work. And congratulations in advance on your upcoming mating. It’s a hell of a good one, so enjoy it.”
Shani and I didn’t have a hugging kind of relationship... except now, apparently, we did . I let her wrap her arms around me and squeezed back with a careful grip. Then I let Maleeka and Ayden walk me to the Jeep, even though it took them away from their duties in the kitchen and dining room.
I drove back to the house, checking behind me obsessively for a minivan on my tail. Of course, there wasn’t one.
Mia was the only one home; deep in preparations for one of the increasingly intricate meals she’d been preparing out of boredom, while the cat supervised from one end of the countertop. One look at me, and she turned off the burner she’d been babysitting.
“Nat?” she asked.
I dropped my work bag by the breakfast bar.
“I’m cutting off my parents,” I said without preamble.
She wiped her hands on a towel and gave me her full attention.
“Good,” she said. “What brought this on, exactly?”
I swallowed hard. “They came to the restaurant today, looking for me and causing a scene. Shani tossed them out. I’ve... been ignoring their calls and emails for more than a week now. They’ve been to the Jennings house five times.”
Her expression fell. “Oh, my god. You should have said something.”
I shrugged a shoulder listlessly. “My problem, not anyone else’s.”
She sighed. “Sounds like we need to have another chat about what pack means. You need to get a restraining order against those two maniacs.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Right.” Her tone was no-nonsense. “We’re telling the others about this. Then we can brainstorm our response. Now, get over here and chop these mushrooms for me. I need to make duxelles for this recipe.”
As much as I hated it, I passed on what had happened to the others over dinner.
“What are their names?” Byron asked.
“Thomas and Martha Bell,” Mia said.
“Hmm,” was all Byron replied.
Later that evening, when I crept into Byron’s room with my tail between my legs, in hopes of a quick fuck to take my mind off things, it was to find three other people already in the room.
Mia, Luca, and to my surprise, Emiel, were all crowded around Byron’s huge mahogany desk.
Mia looked up. “Holy crap, Nat—come here. You have got to see this!”
“What?” I asked, crossing to join them.
She pointed to Byron’s laptop screen with an expression of unholy glee. “Seriously, you’re not going to believe this. Your dad has a profile on Grindr !”
I frowned. “Uh... what’s grinder, exactly?”
Byron snorted. “Grindr. G-r-i-n-d-r. As in, the biggest gay hookup app on the internet.”
The words reached my ears, but they just sort of hit a wall inside my brain.
“Wh- what ?”
“Your homophobic dad fucks men on the sly,” Emiel said, translating into simpler words for me.
“It’s the biggest cliché on the planet,” Byron said. “The gay-bashing beta asshole is a secret cock-slut. I came up here to check right after dinner. Did a little snooping, found his address and a couple of photos from some church bullshit posted online, then started swiping profiles in his area. It didn’t take long for him to come up.”
“Some of his forum chat history is, um... interesting ,” Luca added, deadpan.
I blinked at them, my entire history shattering and reassembling itself in a completely different shape.
Byron frowned, tilting his head. “Is he okay?”
“I think he’s rebooting,” Luca said.
It took a few seconds for the reboot to complete. And maybe it was the hormones, but when it did, slow-burning rage bubbled up from somewhere deep in my chest.
“Holy shit. I am going to fucking destroy that man,” I said to the room at large.
And, all right... maybe rolling up to my parents’ house with the entire pack in tow, three days before Mia and Luca’s heat was due to start, wasn’t the most thoughtful and well-planned response.
But as I stalked up to their front door with a pile of printed screenshots neatly organized inside a manila folder, it was pretty fucking satisfying.
Mia was at my shoulder; the others hanging back in their vehicles, but ready to jump in at a moment’s notice. I rang the doorbell, and thirty seconds later the front door opened to reveal my mother.
She gasped, as theatrical as always.
“Nat! You’ve got a lot of nerve showing up like this with no warning! Do you have any idea how long we’ve been trying to get hold of you without so much as an email or a call —”
“Your husband has been cheating on you,” I said, cutting across the litany of martyrdom. I shoved the folder into her hands. “ With men .”
My mother’s mouth fell open and stayed that way, no words coming out.
Mia took up the assault. “He has an active account on a gay hookup site called Grindr.” She coughed delicately. “A very... active account. We thought you’d probably want to know.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Oh, and one more thing. I’m cutting off contact with you. Expect a restraining order to be filed shortly. And don’t you ever show up at the Elderflower Inn again. It’s under new management—nothing to do with us anymore. I’ve told the new owner to call the cops on you without a second thought if you make a nuisance of yourselves.”
My mother had stared blankly at me through all of this, a doll with its mouth hanging slack. She blinked, seeming to come back to herself—looking at the folder in her hands, then at Mia and me, then back at the folder. Her chest inflated like an angry puffer fish.
“ Tom !” she shrieked, turning toward the interior of the house. “ Thomas Raymond Bell ! Come here this instant !”
Mia and I exchanged a look, then we both pivoted on our heels and walked to the Jeep without a backward glance. I started the engine, following Zalen’s SUV as we backed out of the driveway and headed toward the highway—the house where I’d grown up a disappearing speck in my rearview mirror.