22. Everett
Everett
It takes a few days for me to wrap my head around the fact that Harper and Cash hooked up, and once the truth of it settles like a stone in my gut, there’s nowhere to hide from the fact that I’m attracted to this pretty, curvy Omega who lives in our house and works in our bar.
It’s obvious Lincoln and Cash want her too, so that’s all of us under her spell somehow.
There’s a day in there where Harper comes home, flushed and smelling familiar under her own scent, and then Lincoln arrives a few hours later, smelling like her.
Whenever the two of them are in the kitchen or the living room together, Harper flushes and looks away, and there’s a new, charged energy whenever we’re all in the same room.
Something happened between them, then.
I can’t blame Lincoln for it. There’s something about Harper lately that makes her seem more vivid and bold than she was when she first came to Silver Falls. It’s like she’s coming back to life after whatever tried to dim her light in the past.
It’s nice to see her like this. When she was all wilted and shrinking back, that didn’t seem like the person she was. This version of her feels more real, like the way she was before was just a pale shadow of the bright person she’s meant to be.
It also makes me feel protective of her. It’s like an itch under my skin that makes me watchful and wary. I don’t want her light to go back out. I don’t want her to go back to being afraid to accept help or convinced she has to do everything on her own.
I don’t want her to get hurt by this thing that’s clearly building between all of us.
One night I’m downstairs late, drinking whiskey and thinking.
It’s not something that happens all the time, but there are nights when I can’t sleep, and lying in bed with the weight of my thoughts pressing down on me is just a recipe for making me restless and agitated.
So I always get up and come downstairs quietly, careful not to wake anyone up.
It’s usually quiet, just me and the bottle and my thoughts, but after an hour or so, I hear footsteps on the stairs and look up to see Harper coming down.
She startles when she sees me, a flush creeping over her skin. She’s wearing an oversized shirt and some shorts that don’t do much to hide her soft curves, and the collar of the shirt slips over one shoulder, showing off skin and a smattering of small, faint freckles.
I swallow and toss back the rest of the whiskey in a rush.
“Sorry,” she murmurs softly. “I didn’t expect anyone else to be up this late.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I tell her with a shrug. “You’re allowed to skulk about at night, just like the rest of us.”
She huffs a little laugh, shaking her head. “I’m not skulking. I just thought I’d make a cup of tea. I was having some issues sleeping.”
“Makes two of us.” I toast her with my empty glass. “Even though tea never does much for me on nights like this.”
A small smile flashes over her pretty face, and she tucks some sleep-mussed hair behind one ear. “I think if I started drinking whiskey to sleep, I’d just be awake even more. But to each their own and all that.”
I watch her as she moves around the kitchen, putting the kettle on and selecting a chamomile tea bag.
It’s a familiar scent by now, the floral smell tickling my nose but doing nothing to mask Harper’s own sweet scent, which is somehow amplified by her still being warm from bed. Either that or I’m just too attuned to her now, not able to block out anything about her.
She pulls the kettle from the stove before it can whistle and fills her cup with boiling water and honey, stirring and keeping an eye on the clock on the stove before discarding the tea bag and cradling the steaming cup in her hands.
I stand up, stretching enough to crack my back and then jerk my head toward the living room. “Come sit with me,” I tell her.
She only hesitates for a second before nodding, following me to the couch.
Harper takes one end, fitting herself against the arm of the couch and turning so she’s facing where I sit in the middle. One leg gets tucked under her, and she holds her cup carefully, lips pursed as she blows across the hot surface before she can take a sip.
Something hot stirs inside me to see that. I swallow hard and look anywhere but at her mouth.
My eyes instead drop to the expanse of her neck and shoulder that are on display, and the bite marks that mar her otherwise beautiful skin.
Any Alpha can tell what they mean, and I know Harper has her own hangups about them, but we’ve never really discussed it before.
It’s always seemed kind of fucking rude to bring it up, but sitting in the quiet of the living room with her, I finally broach the subject.
“Do they hurt?”
She looks at me, and I nod to her neck.
“Not—not physically,” she murmurs after a bit. “It’s like I could almost forget they’re there if it wasn’t for the rest of it. The emotional pain, I guess.”
“What happened?” It’s a bold question. A big question. She’d be within her rights to tell me to fuck off and mind my own business, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to know.
She turns her cup in her hands, pressing her palms against the hot porcelain before sighing.
“I thought they were going to be it for me. I thought… I don’t know.
They were a pack of three, and for a while, they seemed like the best things that ever happened to me.
But that all changed, and it caught me off guard so bad.
They rejected me, and that hurt more than anything else.
Because I’d been so sure they wouldn’t. So sure they’d be on my side, and they’d accept me and Cora and all that came with it, because that’s what you do, right?
When you’re bound to someone and you want to keep them safe. ”
“They didn’t protect you,” I say.
Harper shakes her head, staring down at the cup. “No. Instead they told me to leave. Our bond was never completed, and I was left… like this.”
Just hearing her talk about it makes my blood boil.
There’s an inherent power dynamic that comes along with Alphas and the Omegas who put their trust in them.
To be an Alpha means protecting your Omega.
Making sure no one hurts them and putting the fear of you into anyone who tries.
That’s part of the whole fucking deal. But there are Alphas out there who just relish the power.
Who let it all go to their heads and decide that they can do anything they want because who could stop them, right?
I grit my teeth, anger and fierce protectiveness warring inside me. I bite back the urge to demand the names of these bastards who left Harper and her four year old niece alone in the world. That won’t help, and I don’t want to force her to go through bad memories any more than I already have.
“Those are the worst kind of Alphas,” I tell her instead. “The ones that only see the power and not the responsibility.”
“Like your father,” she murmurs, and it’s only half a question.
I nod. “Yeah. Some Alphas are not fucking cut out for the power and they get corrupted by it. Some of them were corrupt from the get go and just let the power make them worse. It’s disgusting, and it shouldn’t happen. That shouldn’t have happened to you.”
Harper swallows and nods. “Thanks.”
It doesn’t seem like enough to say that, and the urge to drag someone to a jail cell is still there, but I breathe through it and look for something else to talk about.
“What was your sister like?”
Surprise flashes in Harper’s eyes, followed quickly by something that looks like grief. But a smile touches her lips a second later.
“She was the best,” she says. “We looked a lot alike, same hair, same eyes, and our parents always said we got the same sly smile when we were doing something we knew we shouldn’t be doing.
She was smaller than me, but she took up so much space in the best way, you know?
When she laughed, you could hear it from anywhere in the house, but no one minded. Everyone was happy when she was happy.”
She takes another sip of tea, staring off into the middle distance.
“There was this time when our dad dropped us off at the mall, so we could play at the arcade they had there. We just had a few dollars in quarters between us, and we burned through that pretty quick. I started getting upset because we had another two hours to kill and no money, and Jade decided to take matters into her own hands.”
“How?” I ask.
Harper smiles. “She found this group of boys who were probably a bit older than us, playing Skee Ball, I think? Anyway, she bet them that she could get a higher score than whoever they put up against her, and if she won, they had to give her the rest of their quarters. And they looked at this girl who wasn’t even five feet tall at the time and figured that was a safe bet, right?
But she wiped the fucking floor with them.
They weren’t going to make good on the bet, but I guess one of their moms was there and had been watching, and she gave them a lecture about not making bets you’re not prepared to follow through on and made them give it to us. ”
I laugh at that, imagining a tiny, younger version of Harper and her sister at an arcade. “Sounds like she was fierce,” I say.
“She was. She made me brave a lot of the time. Brought me out of my shell because I was trying to keep up with her.” Something dims in her eyes. “So it was pretty obvious when the Alpha she was with started making her small. It was impossible to ignore it.”
“What?” I frown.
Harper blinks, looking like she didn’t mean to say that. “It’s—let’s just say that he was even worse than the ones I was with, and leave it at that.”
There’s something hunted about the way she looks now, and I can put two and two together well enough to fill in some gaps.