Chapter 21 Nolan
I step off the bus into grey morning light, my duffel bag cutting into my shoulder, and take my first real breath in what feels like months.
The air is clean. Cool. It doesn’t carry any trace of expensive cologne or alpha pheromones or the particular scent that’s been haunting my dreams since I left.
The bus station is smaller than I expected.
A handful of other passengers disperse into the drizzle, heads down, moving with the kind of purposeful speed that suggests they know where they are going.
I don’t. I have an address scribbled on a piece of paper and four months of savings and a baby the size of a lima bean growing inside me.
No big deal.
I find a bench under an awning and pull out my phone to check the directions to the house share. The battery is at twelve percent. The bus didn’t have any charging ports and I don’t own a battery pack.
At least I have somewhere to go.
The walk takes forty minutes. By the time I arrive, my jacket is damp and my feet ache and I’m pretty sure I look like a drowned rat.
The house is a narrow Victorian painted an optimistic shade of yellow, wedged between two similarly narrow Victorians in shades of blue and green.
A porch swing creaks in the breeze. Someone has planted marigolds in window boxes, bright spots of orange against the grey.
I knock.
The door opens to reveal a young woman with purple-streaked hair and suspicious eyes. She’s wearing an oversized sweater that says PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY and holding a mug of something that smells like chamomile.
“You’re the new guy?” She looks me up and down. “Nolan?”
“That’s me.”
“Huh.” She steps back to let me in, still assessing. “I’m Mich. I’m the one who posted the listing. You okay? You look exhausted.”
“I just got off an overnight bus.”
“Fair enough.” She leads me through a narrow hallway cluttered with shoes and jackets.
The house smells like old wood and coffee and something baking.
“Your room’s upstairs, second on the left.
Bathroom’s at the end of the hall. Kitchen’s through there.
House rules are on the fridge. Rent’s due on the first. Any questions? ”
A thousand. None I can ask right now.
“I think I’m good.”
The room is small. Smaller than Mrs. Kay’s, which I didn’t think was possible. There’s a single bed pushed against one wall, a desk under the window, a wardrobe that looks like it came from a thrift store in 1987. The mattress sags in the middle and the window sticks when I try to open it.
It’s perfect.
I unpack what little I brought. Clothes in the wardrobe. Ellie’s photos on the desk. The pregnancy vitamins I picked up at a pharmacy during a rest stop, tucked into the drawer where no one will see them.
I lie down on the bed and stare at the ceiling and try not to think about another bed in another city, one that smelled like someone I’m trying very hard to forget.
I fail.
The ache hits without warning—this hollow, desperate longing that starts in my chest and spreads outward until my whole body feels like it’s reaching for something that isn’t there. Prime match withdrawal. I knew it would be bad. I didn’t know it would feel like drowning in slow motion.
I curl onto my side and press my hand against my stomach, where something impossibly small is growing. Something that’s half him.
“It’s just us now,” I whisper to the empty room. “We’re going to be okay.”
I almost believe it.
The first week is survival mode.
I learn the bus routes. I find the cheapest grocery store. I locate the nearest clinic that takes walk-ins and doesn’t ask too many questions, because I need prenatal care and I can’t exactly use my old insurance without leaving a trail.
The nausea hits me like a freight train on day three.
I’m in the shared kitchen, trying to make toast, when the smell of someone else’s eggs sends me sprinting for the bathroom. I barely make it. Mich finds me there twenty minutes later, still clutching the toilet like it’s the only solid thing in the universe.
“Food poisoning?” she asks from the doorway.
“Something like that.”
She doesn’t push. Just leaves a glass of water outside the door and disappears.
The nausea doesn’t stop. It’s morning sickness, except it doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo about mornings.
It hits me at breakfast, at lunch, at three in the afternoon, at midnight.
Everything smells wrong. Everything tastes wrong.
I lose five pounds in the first week just from not being able to keep anything down.
At the clinic, a tired-looking nurse practitioner tells me it’s normal. “Some people get it worse than others,” she says, handing me a pamphlet. “It usually eases up around week fourteen. In the meantime, try ginger. Small meals. Stay hydrated.”
I’m at week nine. Five more weeks of this feels impossible.
She also does an ultrasound. I watch the screen without really seeing it at first—just grey static and shapes that don’t mean anything. Then she points to a flicker at the center of the image.
“There’s the heartbeat.”
Everything stops.
That tiny pulse on the screen. That impossible, miraculous flutter. It’s real. This is real. There’s a person growing inside me, a person with a heartbeat, a person who exists because of one heat-drunk week when I let myself believe things might work out.
I don’t realize I’m crying until the nurse hands me tissues.
“First baby?” she asks gently.
I nod, not trusting my voice.
“The father in the picture?”
“No.” The word comes out steadier than I feel. “It’s just me.”
She doesn’t judge. Just nods and makes a note in my file. “We have resources if you need them. Support groups for single parents. Financial assistance programs. You don’t have to do this alone.”
But I do. That’s exactly what I have to do.
Job hunting when you’re an omega stranger in a new city turns out to be exactly as fun as it sounds.
I apply at coffee shops first, because it’s what I know: three different places, all within walking distance of the house. Two of them take one look at me—unregistered omega, no local references, clearly desperate—and say they’ll “be in touch.”
The third is more direct. The manager, a beta woman with tired eyes, actually bothers to explain.
“Look, you seem fine, but I can’t take the risk. Unregistered omega, no alpha, no support system I can see—what happens when you go into heat and can’t work? What happens when some knothead customer decides you’re fair game because you’re not mated? I’ve got liability to think about.”
I want to argue. I want to tell her I’ve been managing my heats on my own for years, that I’m not going to cause problems, that I just need a chance.
Instead I just nod and leave.
I try restaurants next. Retail. A bookstore that’s hiring for part-time shelving. The responses range from polite rejection to barely concealed suspicion. By the end of the week, I’ve applied to seventeen places and gotten exactly zero callbacks.
The savings I thought would last four months start to look a lot more finite.
I’m sitting on the porch steps, staring at my phone and trying not to spiral, when one of my other housemates drops down beside me.
“You look like someone kicked your puppy.” He’s tall, lanky, with glasses that keep sliding down his nose and a messenger bag covered in academic conference pins. “I’m Dev, by the way. Third door on the right.”
“Nolan.”
“I know. Mich told us about the new guy.” He peers at me. “Job hunting?”
“That obvious?”
“You’ve got that look. The ‘please someone give me a chance’ look. I see it on undergrads all the time.” He pushes his glasses up. “What’s your field?”
“Most recently? Barista. Before that—” I hesitate. “Biochemistry research. But that was a while ago.”
Dev’s eyebrows shoot up. “No shit? I’m in ecology, but my roommate’s in biochem. The department’s always looking for tutors. Students will pay decent money for someone who can explain enzyme kinetics without putting them to sleep.”
Tutoring. I hadn’t thought of that. I used to do it in grad school, back before everything went sideways.
“You think they’d hire someone without a local track record?”
“For tutoring? They don’t care about track records. They care about whether you can actually explain the material.” He pulls out his phone. “Let me text my friend. She runs the peer tutoring program. If you can prove you know your stuff, she’ll put you on the list.”
Something loosens in my chest. It’s not much. It’s not a solution. But it’s something.
“That would be—yeah. That would be amazing. Thank you.”
Dev shrugs.
Two weeks later, I have a job.
Not the tutoring. That’s still ramping up, a few students here and there, cash under the table for helping them understand molecular biology or organic chemistry. It’s not enough to live on, but it helps.
The real job is at a dive bar three blocks from the house. It’s the kind of place with sticky floors and neon signs and a jukebox that only plays country. I’m washing dishes, mostly, but sometimes I bus tables or stock the bar when they’re short-staffed.
I got it because of Mich.
She works there two nights a week, tending bar while she finishes her master’s thesis. When she heard I was still struggling, she talked to the owner—a gruff beta who looks like a biker and has the softest heart of anyone I’ve ever met.
“You any good at keeping your head down and working hard?” he had asked during my “interview,” which consisted of him leaning against the bar while I stood there trying not to look desperate.
“Yes, sir.”
“Mich vouches for you. That’s good enough for me.” He’d tossed me an apron. “Start tomorrow. Don’t steal from me and don’t start drama and we’ll get along fine.”
It’s not glamorous. My hands are perpetually pruned and I smell like industrial soap and stale beer by the end of every shift, but it’s money coming in, and my manager doesn’t care that that I throw up in the staff bathroom at least once a night.