Fifty-Seven
Nat
“YOU NEED TO leave now.” The alpha’s tone was low and rough. His broad shoulders blocked the doorway. Tree trunk arms cradled the woman who’d once loved me with the same care one might hold a precious and irreplaceable work of art, for all that he claimed not to be involved with her heat.
There was a heavy pause, during which my mind helpfully supplied an annotated list of every terrible decision I’d made in the last six months. It was... an uncomfortably long list.
There was no place for me here, standing outside this expensive mansion in Ladue, where my wife had fled after I’d made our home too painful for her to bear living in.
My fault.
My choices.
My punishment, staring me in the face.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “Okay. I’m leaving. Thank you for—” My voice cracked. “Thank you for taking care of her.”
I forced out the final words, trying not to stare at Mia’s blissful expression as she rubbed her cheek against the chest of this giant, aggressive looking man with the shaved head and the nice suit.
The scent of elderflowers surrounded me like a cloud, mixed with some kind of spicy cologne that smelled vaguely familiar. It was all I could do not to take a step back... or worse, a step forward —despite the sense that doing so might be the last mistake I ever made.
The alpha’s expression was absolutely blank. Disconcertingly so. His head bobbed up and down once—a single nod of acknowledgement that he’d heard me agreeing to leave, even though I got the sense he’d already dismissed me from his awareness as though I’d never even been here. He took a step back, hooking the front door with one foot.
It swung shut, closing solidly in my face.
I stood there staring at it like some kind of a creeper for far too long after the lock clicked. Inside, the alpha would be carrying Mia back to a bedroom somewhere in the house, where other alphas would be waiting to have sex with her.
My hands began to tremble in earnest.
Ain’t nothin’ gonna harm a single hair on the head of any omega in this house while we’re here , the man holding her had said, as though it was an unbreakable maxim. And of course she’s here because she wants to be .
Of course she was.
She’d fled a home filled with constant arguing and long-buried resentment bubbling to the service, leaving it behind in favor of a pack of protective alphas who treated her like a queen. What omega wouldn’t?
My breath had grown rapid and shaky. The houses in this neighborhood were set back from the road, surrounded by old growth trees for privacy—but I could still picture what I would look like to any nosy neighbor peering out the window through a set of binoculars.
Sad little cuck, staring at a locked door with his wife on the other side .
I could practically hear the words in my father’s voice. And the rest—
A real man would have dragged her out of there by the hair ...
Only a faggot would stand around while other men fucked his wife ...
You might as well have bent over and begged them to take it up the ass ...
I turned abruptly and nearly stumbled down the steps to the front walkway, my feet on a half-second lag from my brain. The door of the Jeep slammed behind me as I sat in the driver’s seat and shook, my body hunched over the steering wheel like an old man’s.
I’d been battered by these sharp moments of clarity nearly nonstop since receiving the text from that Zalen guy. ‘ Mia’s heat came early. She’s all right, but she’ll be unavailable for the next few days .’ Until that message, I’d been working on the assumption that her blocker pill would arrive, and she would take it—just like she’d been doing every three months for longer than I cared to think about.
Since that message, I’d been clobbered over the head by a merciless series of painful truth-by-fours. First , your pain and insecurity drove her away ; followed closely by you don’t know for certain that she’s safe there while she’s in heat.
But the one on the alphas’ porch had been the most brutal. You’ve lost her for good. Mia is gone; she’s not coming back to you .
And now, the realization that my adoptive father’s voice had wormed its way inside my psyche and set up shop there for thirty-one years without me ever noticing.
Mia had tried to make me see it over the course of our marriage, and I hadn’t understood. I knew the man was rough around the edges. I knew he held opinions on some subjects that other people found crude and offensive. Frankly, he was an asshole. But that was him . I’d grown up and moved out. I was my own man now, and I had been for thirteen years and counting. His backward beliefs didn’t affect me .
Except, of course, that they did. I just hadn’t seen it before.
I straightened in the bucket seat, my joints creaking in protest. I had no business being here at this house, now that I knew Mia was safe. The Jeep’s engine rumbled to life when I turned the key.
As I put the vehicle in gear and pulled forward around the circle drive, I couldn’t help a final glance back at the house. The closed front door flanked by fancy carriage lights mocked me.
A toxic stew of negative thoughts churned inside my brain as I drove home, the trip happening on autopilot once I got back to the main highway.
I’d been twenty-five, and Mia had just turned twenty-two, when we originally met. She was fresh out of culinary school; I’d just sold my first business for a quarter-million dollars and was convinced I was hot shit. I’d known a few omegas over the years—most people did—but none had been like Mia.
She had no time for alphas who wanted her to be their little stay-at-home baby machine. We’d dated casually at first, but before long, we were deep in plans to open a restaurant together. We got married as much to become business partners as because we were lovers—but the sex had been okay at first. Sometimes, it had been positively spectacular.
I had a high sex drive, and she didn’t, because omegas either needed to be in heat or use alpha pheromones to get horny. And back when Mia voluntarily had natural heats a couple of times a year, those interludes had been explosive . It was honestly the only time in my life when I’d been able to have as much sex as I wanted, and even then, we’d needed to keep a knotting dildo on standby in case my stamina gave out.
The periods in between were a bit rougher—she’d buy alpha pheromones a couple of times a month so we could have sex, whereas I’d have been happier doing it once a day.
But we muddled along for a few years, and things were okay... until the restaurant’s success exploded, and suddenly both of us were completely consumed by the Elderflower Inn.
Mia stopped having natural heats, even though she knew perfectly well that using blockers for extended periods was a fast track to cancer. I started to resent the fact that I was married to someone who didn’t care if we never had sex again... and to top it all off, needed sex aids in the form of another person’s pheromones to even get wet for me.
It might’ve been stupid. Okay, it was stupid.
But it stuck a knife right into the hidden part of me that wondered if I really might be the little pansy pussy my father had always accused me of being as a boy. Could Mia somehow tell that I wasn’t man enough for her? If I’d been more dominant, more masculine, more like an alpha , would our sex life have fallen apart just as our business life was shooting toward the stratosphere?
Did the fact that I sometimes found myself checking out other men mean that I’d been lying to myself—to her —the whole time, and she’d somehow subconsciously figured it out?
I’d pushed away those intrusive thoughts by turning my fear and resentment outward. I was just another frustrated husband whose wife withheld sex for whatever impenetrable female reason. It happened all the time. It didn’t mean there was anything wrong with me.
This was the twenty-first century. I didn’t have to stand for that shit for years on end. Divorce wasn’t an option—I still loved Mia. We were partners. Business partners. Life partners. But there were other options.
If she didn’t want sex, then fine. She could have the parts of the marriage that were important to her, and I could get the relief I needed elsewhere. God help me, when I was considering the plan, I managed to talk myself into believing that she’d be relieved at the prospect. No more getting pestered for sex. No more irritable, sexually frustrated husband.
Then ‘plans’ became ‘action,’ and everything fell apart.
Not only was Mia not relieved... she was devastated. Before I knew it, she was hanging out with a pack of alphas, proving in no uncertain terms that the voice in my head—the one that sounded like my adopted father—had been right all along.
It was me. I wasn’t man enough to hold an omega’s interest.
The bitter irony was that I hadn’t even managed to sleep with a woman before my smoking hot, hyper-competent and hyper-talented wife had bagged multiple men. Instead, I’d done something much worse.
I’d gone out to bars and clubs, stayed out late—sometimes all night long—and ended up batting zero with the opposite sex. No one seemed right. If a woman flirted back, I immediately started comparing her to Mia.
And then, one night, I found myself staring at a hot guy for far too long, wondering if I wanted him or just wanted to be him. He was effortlessly magnetic; women and men orbited around him like moons.
It was fucking ridiculous. If I was gay, I’d know , wouldn’t I? If I was actually the queer little loser my father had accused me of being, I wouldn’t be attracted to Mia, right?
Suddenly, the uncertainty felt unbearable. I walked up to the guy at the bar and offered to buy him a drink. His sharp gray eyes raked me up and down before he shrugged agreement. Half an hour later, I was following his car to a nearby hotel, figuring that I’d either be repulsed by the whole thing once it started, or I wouldn’t be, and I would at least have an answer about my own sexuality.
Two hours later, I lay on a too-soft, queen-sized mattress, sweaty and spent, without a single circling thought anywhere in my head. When the guy got up to leave, I asked for his phone number before my shattered brain caught up with my lips. He gave the same neutral shrug of agreement he’d given me when I offered him a drink, and then he jotted his number down on a hotel notepad.
Afterward, he walked out of the room, closing the door behind him.
I hooked up with him twice more that week at the same motel. Each time, I didn’t find myself thinking, ‘ Oh, look, this is what I’ve been missing for the last two decades .’ It wasn’t a life-altering experience at all. But for an hour or two, my brain completely shut itself off in a way it never did, otherwise. All the fucked-up stress in my life—so much of it self-inflicted—grew distant and unimportant. And afterward, the guy left without a word or a backward glance.
With the restaurant’s reputation in tatters, our finances deep in the red, and my wife currently getting fucked by rich alphas in a West End mansion, right now my mind felt like an overheating engine on the verge of tearing itself apart.
I pulled into my driveway in Jennings, went inside the house, and collapsed on the sofa with a terrible, tight feeling banded around my ribcage. My hand shook as I pulled out my phone, desperate for an escape.
I brought up my contact list and opened a text window.
Hey , I typed . It’s been a while. I really need a hookup tonight. You free? Super 7 on Broadway, like before?
I hesitated for long moments before hitting send. The phone made its little ‘notification sent’ noise, and I set it down beside me before letting my head fall back to stare blankly at the ceiling.
Minutes passed. An hour. Then two.
There was no reply.
Mia’s story continues in Knot Playing Fair: Book Two .