Chapter 2
Chapter Two
TEN YEARS LATER
It’s been ten years since Calvin passed, and I still don’t know how to live without him.
But I can do anything for thirty seconds, so I count in my head as I breathe in and out, before I loop back to one and start again.
Everyone says that grief isn’t linear. I never expected it to be. However, I did think that it would lessen, if only a little.
I’ve been told that grief never shrinks. It bumps up against the sides of you, taking up every inch of space within your body and making itself known. Supposedly, I’ll grow around the grief, so that it only hits my sides every once in a while, but it’s still the largest part of me.
It’s not that I should be over it by now, because I don’t think anyone can get over this type of loss, but I should know how to live with it better. I shouldn’t still be locked in my home, drowning in my grief.
But it’s been so long now that I don’t know if I can step outside my door into the real world.
Eight years.
It’s been eight years since I left my house by more than a few steps.
Sax says I only need to take one step. I have to breathe deep, count to thirty, one step, then another, until I’m on the sidewalk. Once I get on the sidewalk, he says it’ll be no big deal to take a few more steps until I get to the corner store.
And if I make it to the corner store, why not try for the coffee shop?
He hasn’t said as much, but I know that if I ever want to meet him, I will have to leave my home. He deserves so much better than an Omega who hyperventilates at the idea of bumping into an Alpha on the sidewalk.
Sax and I met on a forum for the paranormal television show Unexplainable and Bizarre, which followed a team of paranormal researchers investigating reports of extraordinary activity.
It was canceled after four seasons, almost nine years ago.
I was sharing my theories of places I thought they’d visit in season three, when Sax jumped into my post to argue with me that it was all fake.
This was shortly after I presented as an Omega. Less than six months later, my brother Calvin died of Foresaken Omega Syndrome. In my grief, I basically lived on the forum as a way to escape reality, and Sax was right there, going toe to toe with me.
Eventually, Sax must have grown tired of our back-and-forth conversations, which were getting increasingly off-topic and public, because he messaged me privately, and that was all she wrote.
We’re no longer teenagers sending messages back and forth whenever we could scrape time together. Now we’re adults with cell phones who can make video calls.
I still don’t know his name, and he doesn’t know mine either. After spending so long calling each other by our screen names, our real names don’t seem to hold any meaning anymore.
Part of me tells myself that if I don’t have his real name, I won’t have to tell him my very real feelings for him.
I’m in love with a man on a screen.
I think he may be one of the few people left who haven’t given up on me. My family almost has. All that’s left is Christmas, and after inviting me for years and me not showing up, they started coming here.
It’s one of the only times my house feels alive.
What they don’t understand is that just because I don’t leave my house doesn’t mean that I am without friends.
Sax doesn’t count. He’s more than a friend now. He’s family. Even if he never feels the way about me that I do about him, he’s in my life for good. He’s made that more than clear.
My best friend, Marlie, visits me all the time. We met in middle school and have been close since. She tries to get me to go out, but she also accepts my no and doesn’t push me. It would have been easy for her to cut me out of her life, but she never did.
I love her for that.
I also have my gaming buddies, Victor and Julie. Victor became a bit of a public figure earlier this year when he went on the reality TV show Knot What You Expected after posing as an Omega named Tif to get revenge on his high school tormentor.
Except he caught real feelings, and was terrified that Kit wouldn’t forgive him for the duplicity.
Spoiler alert: he did.
Marlie came over every Tuesday and Thursday to watch the episodes as they aired, and damn, it was good TV.
Knot What You Expected is one of the most popular shows in the nation right now.
The hosts, Bridgette and Bradley Wilcox, a married Beta couple, bring together people who chatted online but have never met in person and put them in a house together for a week to find out if the person on the other side of the screen is who they claimed to be.
While some cast members have been exactly who they say they are, most were keeping major secrets. Victor was lying about his gender, there was a contestant who was the best friend of the person they were talking to, and one where it was even the Alpha’s own mother.
It’s all very salacious.
I can’t imagine finding out someone I thought I knew was lying to me and then being trapped in a house with them. It’s a nightmare. But damn if it’s not entertaining when it happens to someone else.
I have had brief thoughts about applying as a way to meet Sax, but there is no way I can do that. Going from a shut-in to being on national television? Absolutely the fuck not.
And I don’t need a TV show to meet him. If I wanted to, I think he’d meet up with me in a heartbeat. He’s stopped asking because he doesn’t want me to feel bad about it, but I know he’d be happy if I came to visit.
Except I need to get out of my house and travel to him.
Besides, I’ve seen him. We talk on video calls at least once a week. We know what each other looks like, what we sound like. He’s not hiding his identity from me. We’re using nicknames for one another. It’s sweet.
Calvin called me little Onion from birth. He said my head was shaped like one when I was a baby, and when I’d scream, I’d turn all purple like one. I hated it for the longest time, but I embraced it as I got older. Now that it’s what Sax calls me, too, it feels as much like my name as Ariana is.
The doorbell rings, and I shoot Julie a message that I’m going to be away from my keyboard tonight, and I’ll catch up with her tomorrow.
“Wake up, bitch!” Marlie slams my door open before I have a chance to answer it. She’s had a key for years. I don’t know why she bothers ringing the doorbell, since she never waits for me to open it. “I’ve brought tacos!”
I roll my eyes at her as I pull her into my arms. “Tacos on a Tuesday, what a revelation. You’re a real trendsetter.”
“Hey, if you don’t want it, you can go pick up something else.” She fists her hips and glares at me, trying to puff her chest out to look more intimidating. She couldn’t scare me if she tried.
Marlie is an Omega, like me, but she’s tiny. I’m not exactly tall, and I still tower over her slight frame. She’s adorable, with sun-kissed skin and bleached-blonde hair, looking more like she belongs in Hollywood, California, than Hollywood, Florida.
“You know I’m just kidding. I love tacos.” I grab a couple of beers from the fridge and two plates. “Let’s eat. I’m starving.”
“Oh my God, you wouldn’t believe what happened today.” She talks through a mouthful of carne asada. “That student I told you about, Robby? He presented at lunch and was mortified. Before I could get him out of there, he scent matched with Jackson.”
Marlie loves telling me high school drama, but sometimes I think she embellishes it a little, because there is no way her school has that much going on. “Isn’t Jackson the captain of the football team?” Memories of my own less-than-stellar presentation come to mind, but I shove them down.
“Yeah, and the one who has been teasing Robby mercilessly about how he was definitely going to be an Omega, so he shouldn’t bother doing anything other than learning to be a homemaker.”
“Ew.” Backward attitudes toward Omegas still exist, but I was hoping they would be few and far between by this point. Except kids who are raised with prejudiced parents end up spewing those ideas themselves until they are shown that what they’ve always believed is wrong.
And sometimes they refuse to see it, even when the truth is right in front of them.
“What happened then?” I squeeze a lime over my carnitas taco before adding more cilantro. I don’t care what anyone says, cilantro is the best thing in the world, and if someone thinks it tastes like soap, then their tongue must be broken.
“Well, Jackson immediately scooped him up and ran out of the cafeteria with Robby in his arms. We had to go after them, of course, because, like hell am I letting an Alpha run off with a newly presented Omega. I found Robby ripping Jackson a new one. I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing at how heartbroken Jackson looked.”
My best friend takes a long sip of her beer and burps so loudly I’m surprised my windows don’t rattle. She may look cute and dainty, but she has five Alpha brothers and acts like it.
“So Robby rejected him?”
She waves her hand. “For now, yeah. You know it won’t last, though. How fortunate for them to meet their scent matches at such a young age. They’ll have their whole lives together.”
The food sours on my tongue.
Marlie holds the romantic ideal that meeting her scent match will be the greatest day of her life. She’s been putting herself out there, attending speed-dating events and even signing up for a new service that stores Alpha pheromone samples for Omegas to smell, in hopes of finding her match.
She’s been unsuccessful thus far.
As much as Marlie loves me, I know she doesn’t understand why I am so against finding my matches. She couldn’t possibly, since she has never lost someone to Foresaken Omega Syndrome.
She doesn’t understand how serious it is. How bad things got for Calvin at the end.
“Look, Ariana.” Her voice is soft as she touches the back of my hand. “I love you. You know that, right?”
Looks like it’s time for our quarterly argument in which Marlie swears she’s met the Alpha for me and tries to get me out of the house, I refuse, and we get into a fight that takes us a week to get over.
I brace myself for the ‘but’ that is sure to follow.
“But…”
Called it.
“You can’t keep living like this.”
She practically has a script at this point. I could stage my own intervention.
“The world is scary. I could get in a car wreck on the way home. You could get cancer. Everything could explode into dust. There is risk to everything. What is the point of being alive if you aren’t really living?”
I bury my face in my hands, using my index fingers to rub my temples. “Marlie…”
“No, let me finish. Anything could happen. You’re twenty-six.
You have one life, and you’re not living it.
Your parents are worried. I’m worried. I feel like I’ve been enabling you.
” She gets up from her chair and grabs the legs of mine, wrenching me around and crouching in front of me. “You have to get out of this house.”
Bile rises in my throat. “I… I can’t, Marlie. I’ve tried. I just… It’s safe here, okay?”
She hums and strokes my hair from my face, tucking one of the unruly brown strands behind my ear. “I know. I know it’s hard. And I know you’ve tried, and you couldn’t. I think you can, though, with the right motivation.”
I narrow my eyes. “What does that mean?”
“It means you need a compelling reason to get out and stay out of this living tomb.”
“Hey! My house isn’t a tomb, thank you very much.”
I love my house. It’s cozy and lived in, with three bedrooms and a nesting suite. Not that I need it. I don’t have a nest. I’ve had one nest in my life, and Calvin helped me shop for it.
I don’t want another.
“Not yet it isn’t!” She pushes to her feet and grabs her oversized purse from where she dropped it on the counter.
She starts to dig through it. “You know, with everything being digital nowadays, it’s hard to have dramatic reveals like there used to be.
It’s frustrating, honestly. Colleges email acceptances, they don’t mail those massive envelopes like you see in movies anymore, you know? ”
“I guess?”
She finds what she was looking for and holds a folded piece of paper up triumphantly. “It takes away a bit of the flair of the moment. The drama of it all. You know I live for those big reveal moments.”
I stare at the paper in her hands, nerves on edge as I worry about what she’s building up to. Marlie has always made a production of things, but this time feels much heavier than others.
“What have you got there, M?”
“I love you, Ariana. You know that, right? I would do anything for you. I want nothing more than for you to be happy.” I try to snatch the papers from her, and she runs to the other side of the table out of my reach.
“You have to remember that, okay? You have to remember how much I love you. Say it. Say you know I love you.”
“What did you do?”
“Say it, Ariana.”
“Fine. I know you love me. Now, what did you do?”
Her face flushes red, and she holds out the paper to me, ducking her head into her arm as she does so. “It’s for your own good.”
I take the page from her and unfold it, my eyes struggling to focus on what I’m seeing.
There is no way. Absolutely no way this says what I think it does.
I’m staring at the printed email, addressed to me, from an address I don’t recognize, but my hands are shaking so much that the words are blurring.
“I didn’t think they’d accept you,” my traitorous best friend babbles. “I figured, if they did, it was a sign that it was meant to be, and you’d forgive me because of fate or whatever.”
My heart is pounding so hard I’m surprised it hasn’t ripped out of my chest.
“How… what?” I stutter, unable to make sense of the words in front of me.
She steps forward, and grabs my wrists with gentle hands. “I applied to Knot What You Expected as you. You’re going to meet Sax, Ariana.”