Chapter Twenty-Two – Raeka
I spend most of the next few days in my room, watching videos.
There are some online courses I could enroll in that might be better in learning sign language, but I want to start off slowly.
I can’t fool myself; I’m not a fast learner when it comes to that kind of thing, so it’s going to take me a while before I can understand a full conversation in sign language, but I want to try, and I’m not going to tell Colter I’m doing this.
I want it to be a surprise. Not sure if it’ll be a good surprise, but whatever. I’m trying here.
Pax does his best to steer clear of me mostly. We don’t have the choice when it’s dinner time—even Colter forces himself to come down and eat dinner with us. It’s like we’re a family. A new, slightly awkward family, but a family nonetheless.
I end up staying up late most nights—something I’m used to, but only because I like going out and having a bit of fun. There are a few omega-friendly clubs in the city I’m missing, not going to lie.
It’s a Thursday night around midnight, and I’m right in the middle of a video about the alphabet when I get a little thirsty.
I’m the type of person that can’t focus on shit when something is wrong, so I pause the video and head downstairs in search of some water.
I’m able to navigate the house without turning on any lights, and by now I know exactly where the glasses are in the upper cabinets.
Soon enough I have my glass of water and am about to return to bed when I see the light on in Gideon’s room all the way down the hall.
I must not have seen it before, giving that end of the hall my back when I left my bedroom.
It seems late for him to be up, the self-proclaimed early bird. I shouldn’t, but my curiosity gets the best of me, and I tiptoe past Pax’s shut door and go straight for the light shining beneath Gideon’s closed door like a moth to the flame.
I lean my ear against the door but don’t hear a thing. Maybe he fell asleep with the light on? Doesn’t seem like him, though. I decide to quietly knock, and when I do, nothing and no one answers me. Only silence.
With my free hand, I gently twist the knob and poke my head in. The ceiling fan light isn’t on; it’s a dim lamp on a desk near the windows on the far side of the room, where Gideon is sitting, more slouched than I’ve ever seen him.
“Gideon,” I whisper his name, hoping to avoid waking Pax up by speaking too loudly. “Is everything okay?”
The alpha sits with his back to me, his shoulders hunched with bad posture. He’s concentrating so deeply on whatever has his focus that he must not have heard me.
I slip inside the cracked door and move a little closer to him, saying, “Gideon, everything good?” Yet again, he doesn’t answer me, though when I move even closer I can hear him mumbling something under his breath.
I stop only when I’m standing behind him, and I can peer over his shoulder at what he’s doing.
A sketchbook sits before him, a pencil in his hand and an eraser in the other.
Numerous pulled pages are crumpled all around him on his desk.
The current sketch he’s working on seems to be two omega symbols mirroring each other as a pendant on a necklace, but he must not like it, because he keeps muttering the word “No” over and over again.
“I don’t think it looks that bad,” I say, causing Gideon to nearly jump out of his skin as he swiftly turns on the chair to look at me. His posture straightens a bit, and even though I’m standing and he’s seated, our faces are damn near level. Gotta love being an omega shorty.
He sets a hand over his design. “What are you… Raeka, is something wrong? Was I too loud? Did I—” His brows furrow, and his eyes are slow to focus on me from behind his glasses. “Did I keep you up?”
“No,” I say, and now that I’m zeroed in on the glasses, they’re all I can see.
He’s kind of cute in glasses. Is that a weird thought to have?
Probably. Definitely, considering who this alpha is.
“Your light was on, and you don’t strike me as someone who stays up all night, so I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. ”
“Oh, that’s nice. Yes, nice—” He almost sounds like he’s rambling. Damn. Is the guy really that tired? He spots the glass of water I’m holding. “Can I have that?”
I’m not expecting that, so I say, “Uh, sure.” I hand him the glass…
…which he takes and then pours right over his sketchbook, on the latest design of his as he mumbles, “This is terrible. Terrible work, really. I hate it.” He sets the glass aside, tears off his glasses, and then squeezes his eyes shut as he pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Yeah, I was totally going to drink that, but that’s okay. Whatever,” I mumble, and right as I do, Gideon sighs the world’s most earth-shattering sigh. It doesn’t look like much water escaped onto the desk; most of it was sucked up by the paper.
“I’m sorry, I just… I’ve been trying to come up with some new designs for next year’s spring collection, and it’s as if every ounce of creativity has been pulled out of my body, replaced by a soulless machine that can only spit out derivative slop.
They should name the next ‘AI’ chatbot after me.
” He puts the word AI in quotations with his fingers.
I don’t say anything, figuring there’s more to this. And I’m right.
“It’s not like they need me, anyway.” They must mean the company, Chase Jewels. “Nothing I do recently has sold well. They might as well recycle my ideas from twenty years ago—they were better than this crap. It’s been downhill ever since…”
I can put two and two together. I know he’s referencing when his sister died.
A pain like that I might not know, but it must stay with you, always lingering in the back of your mind until it demands more attention, such as it is right now with Gideon.
Sometimes sorrow is eternal and it gets the best of you.
He puts his glasses back on and looks at me. “I’m sorry. Did you… did you say you wanted something? I’ve already forgotten why you’re here.”
I give the torn-up alpha a soft smile and say, “I think you should go to bed, Gideon.” When I say his name, his gaze falls to my mouth, where it stays, thereby ensuring my mind travels somewhere it shouldn’t.
“Maybe it’s you who should be in bed,” he whispers, as if it’s an ah-ha kind of moment. “Why are you up, anyway?”
I shrug, and since I don’t want to tell him about me watching videos in the hopes of learning some sign language, I settle for saying, “I was thirsty.”
“Oh.” He glances at his wet sketchbook, and then at the now-empty glass. “Oh. Of course. I should’ve known. I’m sorry, I—maybe I am a bit more tired than I thought I was.”
Staring at the frames on his face, I whisper, “You know, now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t know any other alphas who wear glasses.”
He chuckles softly and slides them off, twirling them in the air just above his lap. “Ah, they’re… uh, well, I’d like to say I only wear them when my eyes get tired, but we’d both know that’s a lie.”
Right. Because then his eyes must be tired all the time… which, I realize, they might just be. Again, he laughs awkwardly, and I don’t know what makes me say it, but the words come out of my mouth before I can stop them: “They look good on you.”
Just like that, his chuckling quiets, and he may or may not blush when he slides those glasses back onto his face. “I appreciate the white lie.”
“It’s not a white lie. I really do think they look good on you. You’re pretty cute.” Man, I’m just digging myself a hole here, aren’t I? A hole I will never crawl out of.
“Oh, well, um, thank you.” He stumbles over his words in the most adorable way. It’s like he’s not used to being complimented or called cute, and I suppose he isn’t, given that he spends most of his time locked in this house with Colter. “Can I ask you something? It might be considered personal.”
What the hell? Why not? “Sure.”
“You put something on your neck. A cream or lotion or something. Why?”
I reach up to my neck, remembering the way Pax licked that cream right off to get to my scent. “Because I… I don’t want to make alphas go crazy. I was told that my scent would be even stronger after my heat since I’m not bonded to a pack.”
“That’s not true.”
“Huh?”
“It’s not. I’m not aware of any medical research that backs up that claim. Your scent might be strong to some alphas, like Pax, but your scent would have been just as strong to him before your heat. It’s not your heat that dictates how strong your scent is. Your scent is simply… you.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. When Pax—” I stop myself from saying when he licked me . “—got through the cream, he just about lost it.”
“You don’t think that, maybe, he would’ve lost it all the same if he would’ve met you before your heat?”
I open my mouth to tell him he’s wrong, but I can’t. I can’t say for certain one way or another… and I never thought about it like that before. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want alphas to smell me and lose all control.”
“And why not?”
“Because I don’t like alphas.”
“Do you not like alphas, or are you simply scared of what connecting with one might mean? Maybe you’re the one who’s scared to lose control.”
I want to tell him off, to tell him that he’s wrong—just wrong, in every possible way—but I can’t. He could be right, but even if he is, it’s not a truth I’m willing to face right now. So I turn away from him and try to walk away.
Try the operative word there.
Gideon’s hand is swift, and his palm curls around my wrist before I can take a single step away from him.
“Wait.” Softer, he says again, “Wait.” This time, there isn’t fabric from a hoodie between his skin and mine.
This time I can feel his warmth seeping into me, and I suck in a hard breath as I turn back toward him, rooted in place by that hand on my wrist.
“Change can be scary,” he admits. “But it doesn’t have to be.
Life is all about it, whether you’re ready for it or not.
You—” He swallows hard, his gaze falling to my neck.
“—you shouldn’t be alone. You deserve to find happiness in the arms of someone who’ll take care of you, who’ll love you…
who’ll do anything for you. Are some people content being alone?
Sure, but as a whole, we are not solitary creatures. We seek company, comfort, family.”
“And what about you?”
His grip on my wrist loosens, but doesn’t let go entirely. “What about me?”
“I could say everything you just said right back at you.”
“I was so lost in my work, and then… then I lost my sister and had to learn to take care of someone else, someone who struggled more than me.” His hand falls away from my wrist, and I feel its sudden absence in every pore. “It’s too late for me, but it’s not too late for you.”
“But it’s not. It’s not too late for you—”
“It is, and that’s okay.”
I’ve never disagreed with anything more in my life.
“No, it’s not. You’re wrong.” I can sense he’s seconds from either telling me I’m wrong or suggesting I should go to bed, so I lift a hand and bring it to his face.
My fingertips lightly run down the side of his cheek, catching the stubble there that had grown throughout the day.
Gideon, the immaculately groomed alpha, is a little disheveled after midnight. I kind of like it.
“You shouldn’t be alone either,” I whisper. “It’s not too late for you.”
He brings a hand to mine, and for a second I assume he’s going to pull my hand off his face, but instead he simply holds his hand outside of mine, turning his nose into my palm and breathing in deeply.
“You know, the glands in your neck are where the scent is strongest. You can apply whatever you want over them, but unless you cover every inch of skin, parts of your scent still poke through.” He breathes in again, and this time his chest rumbles a sound my body instantly responds to by moving to stand closer to him.
I stand between his knees, so close I’m damn near on his lap, and he doesn’t seem to mind at all.
I should take my hand away and step back, put more space between us. I should do something other than stand there and watch him breathe me in through my palm, but I can’t. I’m frozen, immobile, completely spellbound, caught in a web I can never hope to free myself from.
And the weirdest part is, I don’t mind one bit.