Chapter 30
I knock on the door to Jude’s trailer, not waiting for an answer before I open it and stick my head inside. Alex’s scent is everywhere, mingling with that of each of the guys, and it’s intoxicating.
Together, Alex and Quinton smell like a funnel cake drizzled in hot fudge, and it makes my mouth water.
“Alex?” I call out, straining my eyes to see if she’s hanging out in the main area. “Can I come in?”
A muffled sound from the bedroom, which I have to assume is confirmation, reaches my ears, and I slip into the trailer. Once the door is locked, I seek out the Omega.
My Omega.
I don’t know if I’ve had the chance to process that reality yet, given everything that has been happening.
I’ve been so laser-focused on getting Quinton better, on making sure he doesn’t succumb to the Rot, I haven’t realized that, if all things work out, I’m going to have an Omega of my own to take care of, something I never dreamed possible.
I never thought I would scent match an Omega. It’s rare for Betas to scent match at all, much less to an Alpha and an Omega. It makes sense, though, that I’d match with Alex after matching with Quinton. She ties us together.
Our spirit.
When I enter Jude’s bedroom, I find Alex curled up in the middle of his bed, looking so fucking cute, covered in our blankets and pillows that I want to squeeze her and never let go.
“Hi,” she whispers, scooting to the side. “You can sit down, if you want.”
Does she realize she just invited me into her nest? Maybe it doesn’t feel like it’s her nest, since it’s in Jude’s home and piecemealed, but it’s still a nest that she’s burrowed into.
And she invited me in.
Regardless of what Alex says, her Omega instincts are riding her hard, seeking out her pack, and they recognize me as part of it. It’s hard not to puff my chest out in pride at the realization.
I’m part of her pack.
I kick off my shoes and lie down next to her, propping my head up on my bent arms as I stare at the ceiling. “The guys went to town to pick up some supplies.”
“Oh.” She sounds hurt. Before I can ask if she is, to smooth her wounded soul and impress upon her that they left for her and will be back before she knows it, she clears her throat. “So you got stuck with babysitting duty?”
It’s hard to stop myself from stroking her head, so I clench my fist into the surface of the nest. I know she doesn’t like casual touches, and it’s going to take some time to break me out of that habit. “I volunteered to stay with you.”
She furrows her brow. “Why?”
“Because you’re my Omega, and I wanted to spend time with you. ”
She snorts and burrows deeper into the nest. “You have an Alpha, you don’t need me.”
“You seem determined to stick to the belief that scent matches mean nothing, as if our biology is just a suggestion. You’re a doctor, Alex.
You know we can’t ignore this. So why don’t we talk about something else?
Anything else other than how you don’t want me.
Don’t want this circus of misfits as your pack.
” I roll over onto my side to better see her, resting my temple on my fist. “What’s your favorite color? ”
Wiggling out from under the covers, Alex mirrors my position, her face inches from mine. This close, I can feel the warmth of her breath across my face, and count the freckles that are under her left eye.
I can tell she wants to argue my point. Intends to continue being obstinate, fighting me every step of the way. But after a moment, she exhales harshly, and the tension bleeds from her shoulders. “Slate blue. Not quite blue, not quite gray. Like the sky before a summer storm. What’s yours?”
“Yellow.”
She snorts. “Like a lemon? I can’t picture you enjoying that.”
I shake my head, slowly raising a hand to boop her on the nose. “Not like a lemon. Like buttercups. They’re my mom’s favorite flowers.”
“Are you close with your parents?”
I do a waggling motion with my free hand. “My mom, yes. Not so much my dad. It’s not that we have a bad relationship or anything; we just have nothing in common. If we met as strangers, we wouldn’t be friends, you know?”
She nods slowly. “I get that. I feel like many adults probably share the same sentiment, but it’s like an unspoken rule that we don’t say that out loud. You can love your parents for how they raised you and the memories you share, and still acknowledge that you have incompatible personalities.”
I knock my shoulder against hers. “Oh, someone took their psych rotation seriously.”
Alex’s laugh is beautiful, and she throws her head back, looking free for the first time since I met her. “Guilty. Maybe I would have been a psychiatrist if I had found it before emergency medicine. They’re more similar than you realize.”
“In what way?”
She sits up, the blanket pooling around her waist. She’s wearing my and Quinton’s clothes, which does something to me that is hard to explain. It’s like cute aggression, but sexually charged. She looks so adorable, so sweet, and I want to ruin her.
“Okay, so emergency medicine involves triaging the cases, sorting them to see what the most emergent issue is that you need to address. If five patients come in and two have the flu, one has a broken arm, one has an unknown rash, and one has a gunshot wound, you treat the gunshot wound first, right?”
“That would make sense, yeah.”
Her eyes light up as she speaks, and I adjust myself to sitting as well.
Our knees touch, and she leans forward, resting her hand on one of mine.
“Psychiatry is similar. People often have comorbidities, concerns that arise in conjunction with or exacerbate other concerns, and you have to triage and determine which one is the most important to address first. Because if a patient has bipolar disorder and ADHD, and you choose to try to treat the ADHD with standard means, while saying you’ll get that under control and then you’ll handle the bipolar disorder, do you know what happens? ”
I shake my head, and she grips my knee tighter.
“The patient will go into a manic episode. Standard treatment for someone with ADHD is to give them a stimulant, but in someone with bipolar disorder, the stimulants can induce manic episodes. So now your ADHD is treated, but your bipolar disorder is worse. So instead of triaging and treating the body and the comorbidities that come with the injury, like an arterial tear with a gutshot wound, you do that with the mind.”
Her passion as she speaks tells me everything I need to know about why she became a doctor. There is genuine joy lighting up her face, and this is the most alive I’ve seen her since she was exposed to our scents.
It makes me ache to touch her face, to pull her in a soft kiss. There is nothing more attractive than competence, and she has that in spades.
I want to fuck up the Alpha that took her away from the joy of her work. As thrilled as I am that she ended up a part of our circus, because otherwise we wouldn’t have met her, I hate that her “pack” is keeping her from living out her dream.
“Did you always want to be in the circus?” she asks before I have a chance to ask follow-up questions.
“Do kids grow up wanting to be in the circus?” I chuckle and shake my head. “It feels more like a threat whenever they get in trouble. ‘I’m going to run away and join the circus!’”
Alex’s giggle at my childish falsetto lights me up from the inside. It takes a minute for her to calm down before I can speak again.
“No, I didn’t. I thought I was going to end up in some boring desk job. And then I met Quinton.”
The memory of the first time I saw my Alpha is one of my most cherished.
I was in a coffee shop, sketching and drinking a plain black coffee because it was all I could afford, when he walked through the door.
I was miserable, still grieving the death of my girlfriend from two years prior, and feeling untethered.
My family wasn’t bad, but I didn’t feel like I could go to them with the sadness that seemed to coat my body like cheap moisturizer.
It was a windy day, and the first whiff of his scent washed over me, and it was like my heart stopped. As if every piece of my broken soul was being rewritten to include him.
“But the thing is,” I tell her, after describing the day we met, “I didn’t know the scent came from him.”
I thought it came from the woman who followed him into the shop.
His girlfriend.
So, of course, I didn’t approach. How was I supposed to approach this woman and say, “Hey, I know you’re here with your boyfriend, but I think we’re destined to be together.”?
“Quinton, of course, recognized what I was to him immediately. I watched him sit down with his girlfriend over a cup of coffee and break things off with her. After she ran from the coffee shop crying, he sat across from me at my table and pulled my sketchbook out of my hands gently, forcing me to look at him.”
Alex gasps, her hands over her mouth. “And then what happened?”
He was so fucking handsome I could hardly breathe, and when he shifted in his seat and his sweet scent enveloped me, I realized how wrong my initial impression was. It wasn’t her.
It was him.
My world began to refocus. The grief I felt over losing Paula was still there, but it was quieter. More manageable .
I will always have love in my heart for her, but we both knew we weren’t endgame. It was very much a “here for a good time, not a long time” relationship, but then she died in a car wreck, and she never got to find her long-time person.
At the beginning, I felt so guilty for being immediately drawn to him. There were moments of back and forth where I questioned if I deserved to have Quinton in my life, if I could move on from Paula.
But of course, my Alpha helped me see that she wouldn’t have told me to put my life on hold for her. She would’ve asked for a threesome, patted me on my back, and told me she was happy for me.
I don’t burden Alex with stories of Paula. Maybe one day, when she’s better and our relationship is on solid ground, I’ll tell her about the woman who came before her. But for now, I tell her about the moment I fell in love with Quinton Black.
“He reached across the table and took my hand. He told me that he expected nothing of me, but that he needed me to know that he was all in.”
“From one smell?” she shrieks. “How could he know from one smell?”
My smile has to be blinding. It always is when I think about that first day with him.
“That’s who Quinton is. He acts first, asks questions later.
He’s passionate and weird and so fucking sexy that it’s hard to function around him.
As soon as the words left his mouth, I knew that no matter what, that man would be in my life. ”
Alex reaches out for my hand, and I wrap my fingers through hers, falling with her when she throws herself into a supine position on the bed. “I can’t imagine being so sure about anything.”
“That’s Quinton for you. He could make the biggest skeptic believe in fairy tales. He’s so romantic that I have no doubt he’s going to knock your socks off on your date with him.”
She stiffens at my words, and I regret them immediately. But she doesn’t give me a chance to pull them back, and she carries on as if I never said them. “So Quinton was in the circus?”
“No, he was working at an electronics store. But he was a regular at one of the kink dungeons and loved being suspended. I started going with him and learning the art of shibari. The first time he saw body suspension, he begged to try it out. Of course, that’s not something you just jump into.”
Quinton has a history of depression and self-harm, and masochism and kink gave him a controlled outlet for that.
I’ve always wondered if his mental health struggles made him more susceptible to, or if they are a precursor to, the Rot, but it doesn’t matter either way.
He was a brat that needed taming, and a pet that needed a master in other moments.
I was happy to learn to provide him with the pain that he required in a controlled, safe manner.
There is a possibility she doesn’t know she’s doing it, but as I talk, Alex is rubbing her face on my arm and shoulder, scent marking me. A small way of claiming me that has my stomach clenching. I don’t want to move for fear of her noticing and stopping.
“Oh, so you thought, ‘sure, but let me throw some knives at you first’?”
I crack up and shrug casually. “Kind of? Knife play was something we dabbled in, and I felt comfortable around the blades. He knew I would never give him more than he could handle. Eventually, we started looking up thrill acts online and taught ourselves one. Quinton can do anything he puts his mind to, and he decided that he was going to learn how to perform these dangerous stunts, if only so he could say he knew how. Then, when Cirque de Mordu came through town, he begged me to audition with him.”
“And you just did? You dropped everything to audition for a traveling circus on Quinton’s whim?” She absentmindedly starts playing with my fingers. “I’m not judging, I’m just shocked that you were able to change your life so quickly.”
I give in to my urges and reach across to brush hair from her face.
She doesn’t flinch.
“What did we have to lose? Neither of us had a job we cared about or family ties to the area. What was the harm in trying to throw something together to audition? Jude was hard to get a hold of, and eventually we had to travel to the next stop and corner him after a show and demand a chance to show him our act.”
“Oh my God,” she laughs, her eyes twinkling. “I can imagine he did not take that well.”
“He did not,” I confirm. “But he let us do our routine, and hired us immediately. It turns out that he had an act that was retiring at the end of that circuit, so our timing was impeccable. We’ve been here ever since.”
She scoots a little closer to me, eventually resting in the curve of my body. “Do you ever think about the butterfly effect? Like what would have happened if Quinton didn’t break up with her at the shop, and waited until they got home or whatever?”
“All the time. But I also try not to dwell on what ifs or could have beens.” As I’ve been reminiscing, her scent was growing, like a cake fresh from the oven, and I can’t hold myself back anymore.
I lean forward slowly, giving her a chance to back away, and press my lips against hers. A soft inhale of breath against my mouth, and then she’s melting, her lips moving against mine in a tender, romantic moment that is branding me forever, just like the first time I met Quinton.
When I pull away and rest a hand on her face, I’m shocked to find her eyes cloudy, her face twisted, almost as if she is in pain.
“Are you okay?” I ask her quietly.
“That was a mistake.”