Chapter Nineteen
Espie
The quiet wakes me. No spike of fear shoving me awake. Just silence and afternoon light slanting gold through the curtains, dust drifting through the beam.
Past three, by the look of it.
My fingers are wound in Aubrey’s hair. My leg is slung over his hip, and his knee presses between my thighs, a solid warm anchor. Aubrey’s palm splays over my ribs, right on my heart. The other has fisted loose in the hem of my shirt, grabbed on in sleep and held.
The duvet has tented over us both, trapping our body heat, making a warm cave where the air smells like days of us.
Somewhere below us, the house moves. Water runs through the pipes in the walls.
A floorboard creaks. Coffee and leather downstairs, faint, Kev in the kitchen.
Oakwood and whiskey threaded through, Lex close to him.
Earl Grey and sandalwood drifting from a different direction, old paper underneath, Ezra in a room with books.
Basil and blood orange closer than the others.
“You're doing the thing.” His voice is muffled against my collarbone. Barely there.
“What thing?”
“Counting the alphas.” He exhales slow. “Your shoulders go tight when you do it.”
His eyes flutter open, pale blue finding mine in the dim light, sleep-blurred, sharpening as he surfaces into wakefulness, his face unguarded. His gaze roams my face for long moments, and I can’t get enough of seeing his face. Being in his arms. He’s…essential.
“Is this...” He starts. “Do you think this is unbalanced? What we're doing. How we are with each other.”
I know what he means. The desperate clinging. The inability to let him out of my sight. The way he reaches for me in his sleep like letting go means drowning.
“That we can't stand to be apart?”
He nods small against my collarbone, his breath warm on my skin. I dig through the dark corners where fear lives, searching for the voice that should be screaming at me.
Needing gets you caged, Omega 7. Needing gives them power over you. The only safety is in needing nothing, wanting nothing, being nothing they can use against you.
The voice is there but distant, shouting from somewhere far away. My hand moves over his chest. His heart beats steady under my palm. I know this heartbeat. I know the difference between his sleep-breathing and his awake-breathing. I know the shape of his ribs by touch.
“No. It feels too right,” I say.
“Yeah.” He breathes it against my throat, and his scent softens, chamomile blooming. “That's what scares me. It shouldn't feel this easy. Nothing in my life has ever been this easy.”
He searches my face.
“So we don't fight it? We just... let ourselves have this?”
“Yes.” A small laugh catches in my throat. I want to keep the good. I’ve been denied it for too long and Aubrey is good.
His hand spreads over my ribs. “Alright.”
We can't be any other way now. His hand flexes against my ribs. His breath quickens against my throat and a frown forms between his brows.
“Are you okay?” My thumb strokes the line of his jaw. “After yesterday. Do you want to talk about it? You don't have to. I just... I want you to know I'm asking.”
He goes still. “It was a nightmare. One minute I was fine and the next I was there...”
He trails off. Swallows. Starts again.
“You don’t have to tell me. I understand what you felt.” Like Aubrey, I want to forget most of the past few years, but my brain keeps throwing up the worst of my experiences. Just remember, we don’t want to go through that again.
No shit, brain. Thanks a lot for the reminder.
Aubrey exhales. “I… want to tell you. I want you to know everything about me. The good and the bad.”
I spear my fingers through his hair. The strands are so soft. But that’s what omegas are. Soft and vulnerable. And again, fuck you very much, biology.
Aubrey shifts against me and I concentrate on his words.
“I was at an auction. Six years ago. Maybe seven, I've lost track.
Axel was selling a young omega. Too young.
No name. Lot 37. That was her number. Three minutes.
That's how long it took to sell her. She was sobbing. That was the worst part. They dragged her off the stage. She was sobbing for mercy. Begging for help and nobody gave it. The alpha who bought her barked at her to slick in front of everyone. She did and… they laughed. They stood over her and laughed.”
I want to break something. I want to get in a car and drive to wherever the poor omega is now and pull her out of whatever is left of her life. If she is still alive. I keep my hand on his heart and keep breathing.
“After.” A fine tremor runs through him, shoulder to hip, there and gone. “After the sale, Axel, Mick and Kylie. They were happy about the price she'd gone for. They wanted to celebrate.”
My gut sinks. I don’t let it touch my face. Nausea burns hot and bitter, and I swallow hard against it.
“They drugged me.” His hands are shaking now. “Heat inducer. While I was on the floor writhing in pain. They made toasts before they...” He doesn’t have to tell me what they did. The scars on his body are a road map of abuse. “Before they…”
“I wish it never happened to you.” I lock my arms around Aubrey. “I only want the best things for you, Aubrey.”
He rises on his elbow and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “I only want the best for you too.”
“If only we weren't omegas. Then we wouldn't need alphas. We could be on our own and no one would look twice at us.”
His mouth curves and I’m taken aback by his beauty. Male omegas aren’t ruggedly handsome, like alphas are, but they’re ethereal and Aubrey is everything ethereal. “They’d look twice at you, Espie. Maybe even three or four times.”
I’m sure I look like a sweaty mess. It’s hot under this duvet.
I’m about to tease him when his smile falls and he drags his gaze from lips to my eyes.
His touch stills where he was circling my skin.
“I liked kissing Sera. I liked her mouth.
I liked the way she tasted. I liked that I got to choose it.
I haven't liked kissing anyone in years, apart from you. I thought that part of me was... gone. Cut out. And then she was there and she was careful with me and I liked it, Espie. I liked it.”
I stay silent because there’s more he needs to say, and I want to know everything about him.
“I had a pack of good alphas once. Before Wallace. They were good. They treated me like a person. I'd almost forgotten good alphas were a thing that existed. And then Sera.”
And then Sera.
The splinter in my chest is still there. I can't pretend otherwise. He might have had a good pack once, but I’ve never known anything other than pain at an alpha’s hands.
But Sera held me through my withdrawals. She kissed me too. Kev, Lex and Ezra have been kind to the point of annoying. And now… now I just don’t know.
They've been giving us space, bringing things to the threshold and leaving them there. Clothes. Food. Blankets. Always an offering, never a demand. Always asking with their actions if not their words.
I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.
For the patience to crack. For one of them to decide they've waited long enough and it's time to collect what they're owed.
It hasn't happened yet. That's the part that scares me more than violence would.
Violence I understand. Violence I can prepare for.
This patient, relentless kindness sits wrong in my chest, a splinter I can't dig out.
Something else is happening under the sticky perspiration and the soreness in my muscles. I want him closer. The shirt I'm wearing is one layer too many between us. I want it gone. I want water. I want his skin under my hands with nothing on it.
“We need to shower,” I say.
He laughs, small and broken and real. “Yeah. We really do. You smell like a wet raccoon.”
“You smell worse.” He doesn’t. If he didn’t shower for a year it wouldn’t bother me.
“I do not.”
“You do. You have fever-sweat in your hair, Aubrey.”
“Rude.”
“Honest.”
His mouth curves, ghosting into a smile. “Come on, let’s get us clean.”
He shoves the duvet off us and we both move off the floor like eighty year olds and make our way to the bathroom. Aubrey turns on the shower. Water hisses hot, steam rolling up at once, filling the small room.
Aubrey reaches for the hem of my shirt first.
“Okay?”
“More than okay.”
He lifts my shirt and drops it on the tile. His gaze tracks down my throat, over my collarbones, across my breasts. He doesn't hide what he's doing. He regards me like I'm the first good thing he's seen in years.
I reach for his shirt and peel it up his ribs, over his head, off his arms. His hair sticks up in the back. I don't smooth it down. His hands drop to the waistband of my sleep shorts. He pauses. Waiting.
“Yes.” My voice comes out thicker than I mean. “Take them off me, Aubrey.”
He hooks his thumbs under the elastic and slides them down my hips. His knuckles brush my thighs on the way down. He steps back enough for me to step out of them, and I do, and I'm standing in front of him dressed in nothing, and I don't want to hide.
I reach for him. The tie of his sleep pants comes undone easy. The fabric drops. He steps out of them and kicks them away.
We stand for a second, just looking. Steam curling around our ankles. Water pounding the tile behind him. He's beautiful. Thin and scarred and alive. He's mine. I'm his.
Aubrey pulls me under the water with a smile. The spray hits my shoulders, washing away the fever and grief, turning my skin pink. Cedar and chamomile bloom richer in the heat, mingling with my gardenia and clover until the whole bathroom smells like us. Only us.
“Your hair looks like something died in it,” Aubrey murmurs. “Several somethings. Possibly a whole ecosystem.”
I bump his shoulder with mine, enjoying this playful side of him. “Yours isn't exactly a shampoo commercial either.”
His mouth curves. He reaches for the shampoo, squeezes some into his palm, and holds it up for me to see. “Turn around and I’ll do you the favor of washing it.”
“Just... be gentle with the knots. There are a lot of them.”
“I noticed.” He gestures for me to turn. “Tell me if I pull too hard.”
The water streams down my back, and then his fingers sink into my hair. His fingernails scrape lightly against my scalp, finding tension I didn't know I was carrying. I close my eyes. My chest vibrates with a soft purr.
His fingers tense and his cock hardens in the crease of my ass. “Fuck. Your purr. Espie. Don’t stop.”
His breath has changed. Slower. Deeper. His chest expands hard against my back as if he's trying to pull the sound into himself, hold it. His scent blooms chamomile-sweet, reaching for mine before his chest begins to vibrate with a purr. It’s a lower register than mine.
Nothing like an alpha male’s purr, but no less tempting.
He reaches for the conditioner, works it through the length of my hair, coating each strand. His fingers slide down to my shoulders, pressing into the muscles there, and massaging my tight muscles. I make another sound I can't quite control.
I turn to face him. His eyes meet mine, pale blue gone dark, wanting. “My turn. Let me take care of you too.”
I reach for the shampoo. He bows his head. His scalp under my palms. His hair in my fingers. He's giving me this.
I work the lather through it, mapping the shape of him with my palms. The curve of his skull.
The soft hair at the nape of his neck. My hands travel down to the sharp ridge of his collarbones, too pronounced, the skin over them stretched thin.
Scars lace his chest. A long white one runs below his ribs.
A cluster of round marks across his shoulder looks like old cigarette burns.
The faded blur of an old brand sits low on his hip, and I don't look at it closely.
His wrists carry the thick ropy scarring of years in restraints. Every bone is too close to the surface.
He shivers under my hands. He drops his shoulders.
He slows his breath. His scent shifts. Cedar deepening into something richer, warmer, want bleeding through despite his best efforts to control it.
Slick gathers between my thighs, warm where the water is warmer, sliding with the spray down my inner legs.
The scent of it opens through the steam.
Gardenia sweeter at the honey note. Clover deepening into something plush and ready. He turns to face me.
“Espie. I want you. I want you so much I can’t think straight.”
The same want moves through me. His cock is hard against my belly, throbbing against my skin in time with his pulse.
Every beat of him presses into me. He doesn't step back.
He lets me feel him wanting me, lets me watch his breath go ragged, lets his hand curl over my hip like he's barely keeping himself from pulling me closer.
I reach for him, pull his mouth down to mine, and kiss him. The first kiss is soft, testing. He makes a small sound against my mouth, caught between a gasp and a sigh, and it vibrates through my whole body. In my chest. In my belly. In the warm ache building between my thighs. I want more.
I slide my hands up his chest. He breathes harder, grips my waist, pulls me closer until no space is left between our bodies, only heat.
His mouth opens and I taste him deeper. He kisses the way he touches, slow and thorough, learning me with his lips and tongue. His teeth graze my lower lip, the barest edge of them, and my knees go soft under me. He spreads his hand wider at my waist to hold me up. Mapping me. Memorizing me.
He's hard against my hip. Heat rushes through me. More slick spills down my thighs. His scent catches immediately. His pupils blow wider. Black swallows the pale blue. The sight of him wanting me undoes something low in my belly.
“I want this. I want you. Not because of biology. But because I want you.” I fist my fingers in his wet hair. “I'm choosing this. I'm choosing you.”
His gaze burns into mine. “We can stop right here and it would still be the best day of my life, just this, just you letting me wash your hair. I don't need more than you want to give.”
“I want to give you everything. I want to choose this. I want to choose you.”
He makes a sound against my mouth I'll remember for the rest of my life.
I kiss him again. Deeper this time. Slower.
I spread my hand over his heart, his pulse kicking hard beneath my palm. He locks his arms around me like he can't help it.
His mouth drags down my jaw. My throat. The pulse in my neck. I tip my head back and let him kiss me wherever he wants to.
“Then you shall get what you choose.”