Knot the End (Secondverse)

Chapter 1 One Door Closes

One Door Closes

JOHANNA

My world fails to end when Max Shallot dies. My heart keeps beating, blood circulating, brain thinking, and all other things necessary to maintain life.

I’ll survive.

Even thrive, somehow. He’d be disappointed in me if I didn’t, not to mention I have no desire to follow him to the grave when I’m only in my fifties.

I always suspected he’d go first. Suspected, feared, worried, for Max was a human comet, blazing across the sky, touching and changing all who came within his compass, along with multitudes who never knew him.

Search any encyclopedia or anywhere on the internet for the definition of genius mad scientist, and you’ll find him.

As with many geniuses, he never paid enough care to himself.

He was too busy chasing this new discovery or that innovation or some new or improved way to allow omegas more control over their complicated biochemistry.

He wanted the freedom to define himself separately from biological mandates—and, for the most part, he got it.

At the cost of his health and well-being.

Watching over him and his health and well-being was my unofficial job—as his best friend, life companion, and as-needed lover.

Beloved.

I didn’t set out to make him the center of my life. Neither do I regret it. He was worth it, and he made certain I knew how much he valued me.

Though he didn’t make caring for him easy.

Still, he flared for more than a half-century before all those days of burning the calendar at both ends—not to mention missed or rescheduled doctors’ appointments—caught up with him.

A few weeks of complaints about a cold he couldn’t shake.

A collapse.

One month later, he was gone.

However, because I’d known this might happen someday, too soon, I was ready. Not that I wanted to be, but I spent that last month tending him while mourning hard and weeping in the lengthening hours when the pain meds meant he wouldn’t know.

At his memorial service in early November, in a carefully chosen downtown Cleaveland hotel, I don’t weep. I’m raw and empty. Numb, apart from a restless foot tapping against the pale-blue carpet which muffles the brush of my shoe.

Numb and itchy. My black dress hides red lace lingerie: one of Max’s last gifts, for he loved red, where I prefer rose pink.

I’ve never worn the lacy bra and panties all day before, and they chafe—especially the panties—when pressed against the inadequate padding of a hotel conference center chair.

From the front, I can’t see the family members, acquaintances, and coworkers filling the other rows, but rustles, coughs, and sniffs make it clear the big, echoing chamber is filling up.

Even with the industrial strength scent filters blowing overhead, carrying scent neutralizing droplets, the press of so many bodies gives the air weight.

Harder to breathe with the hints of so many alphas’ and omegas’ personal odors mixing together, apart from the chemical perfumes most betas enjoy.

In my youth, I had the usual ‘beta’ sense of smell—not good, not bad—and could shrug it off. Betas don’t tend to catch more than a whiff of people’s aromas, unlike alphas and omegas.

Some women’s senses of smell improve as they age.

Mine has, which is not a blessing. I can’t always pick out individuals, but I can usually tell an alpha or omega by smell and identify one or two notes of their perfumes.

Thus, even neutralized, the collected grieving scents form a heavy odor, coating my tongue with bitterness.

So many people.

So many eyes on me. One of my honorary nieces grabs my hand and holds tight, but the welcome warmth fails to dispel my nerves.

Max kept most of his personal life personal, rarely speaking about it when interviewed for umpteen million articles, which only makes overly nosy people more curious.

We met in college, after we’d both come into our secondary sexual designations, his omega and mine beta.

The majority of people, around three-quarters of the populace, experience little change from before when we present as betas.

We’re calm, cool, and collected compared to the other designations.

Alphas, maybe a quarter of the population, become more dominant and forceful.

Omegas, the smallest of the designations, are cuddly, emotional, and highly-sexual.

They rely on instinct, perfuming at the least hint of stress or arousal.

Stereotypes and assumptions, all of it.

Except the population breakdown, which manages to stay pretty consistent, despite shifting patterns of interaction and reproduction.

The bare truths that folks agree on boil down to: omegas and alphas undergo physiological changes, most—but not all—related to personality, sex, and sexual interactions.

Some of the changes can be changed, lessened, or mimicked with modern medicine or technology; others can’t.

Some people embrace their designation, some believe nature got it wrong, some feel neutral.

Of course, a distinct handful fight tooth-and-nail, and Max was a poster child for that group.

He loved a lot about being an omega—he loved noticing and analyzing people’s perfumes and adored being able to purr—but the things he hated, he despised with the kind of cold rage that burns for centuries.

Even with all the modern pharmaceutical assistance available, omegas still endure the stereotype of being walking, talking sex machines.

Since Max rarely went out for fun—too busy dreaming up his next innovation—and I kept to a small circle of connections, he and I had the reputation of spending our private time fucking like bunnies.

Which we mostly didn’t, except for the rare occasions when he couldn’t avoid it—in other words during the sexual heats which all omegas have every six to nine months.

When in heat, barring super-strength birth control, female omegas generally became pregnant and male omegas tended to trigger ovulation in their female partners, regardless of usual cycles.

The public generally knows we had a close relationship. It’s also generally rumored, never denied, that Max practiced what he preached with respect to the use of suppressants and carefully-timed sexual heats.

A much smaller group, almost all alphas, know what happened—or didn’t—during his heats, because while omegas can survive heats without alphas, things tend to go better if they don’t have to.

Much as Max hated it, he preferred to get through his sexual hazes as quickly and efficiently as possible, which meant involving at least one person other than me—we tried going it alone once, never again—preferably an alpha or two.

Then there’s me. Beloved in life, chief mourner in death, finally faced with the task of figuring out what life might offer me after the roller coaster that was Max.

I shift in my seat, trying to ease the itch along my buttocks. Up at the front of the room, the last speaker’s eyes fasten on me.

Corin, Max’s cousin and one of the few relatives he actually liked, rocks a black suit.

Every pressed seam remains crisp despite the late hour of the afternoon, even while draping the gentle bulge of his dad-bod belly.

His salt-and-pepper hair stays perfectly-arranged without product, and his beige skin contains coral undertones highlighting his sharp-lined features that project calm grief—except when his gaze strays to me.

Then, it’s heavy with a lingering glint of warning, or maybe anger, alongside sympathy.

He's yelled at me several times over the past month, over Max’s care and why he’d spent so much time the past year skipping doctor’s appointments.

Each time standing closer than before, until at the last, Corin loomed over me with his half-a-head greater height.

His usual scent, a mix of cedar and cider scent, grew so strong and bitter, so sour, that even I caught it.

It made me cough until, finally, he had to stop yelling to get me a drink of water.

Then, he stroked my back, holding the glass for me as he apologized.

To be fair, my temper broke, and I screamed back at him as many times over that same horrid month. He kept bothering me with questions about the future and what needed to be done to get everything in order before Max’s death when all I could manage was keep from falling to pieces.

The number of scenes we made attests to how awful it was. We never yelled in front of Max—only at the far end of the house, where he couldn’t hear or see, where we could break down safely in front of someone we knew would understand.

All for Max’s sake.

Everything revolved around Max.

Corin and I created the consulting firm that let Max do his work with minimal guardrails. We’re business partners, though that means we wind up arguing over everything as I fuss about sustainability and environmental impact while Corin worries about the bottom line.

How did Max reward us? By going out and spending our first big bonus check on a pack-style six-bedroom townhouse for us all to live in—me, him, Corin, his then-wife, and their three now-grown children.

Max didn’t so much as give us advance warning or even an opportunity to look over the place before he closed on it.

Though it proved he’d heard my occasional wistful memories of growing up in a pack house, it wasn’t what any of us expected.

Just gave Corin and me more to argue about—but not with Max. Max had a way of wiggling out of arguments or breaking them up by making us laugh.

Max won the house battle. We still live in it to this day. It’s where I’ll retreat after the memorial service and all the nods and pressing of hands is over. Thankfully, we did the big family thing and had everyone who came from a distance out to dinner last night.

I need tonight away from all the mourners.

Longing sweeps over me to rip off the lace lingerie and throw it away. To lock myself in the bathroom and run the shower until all the grief and anguish hanging in the air washes away.

Speaker after speaker rises to share memories of Max. Their voices blend into a beatific vision of saintliness.

Don’t get me wrong: he did a lot of good.

Dedicated his life to making as affordable and accessible as possible any and all innovations that help omegas, and, to a lesser extent, alphas, control their hormones and biochemistry: suppressants, heat timers, rut blockers, scent neutralizers, all manner of sex aids, and more.

Max tangled his fingers into improving the manufacture and distribution of all these resources, to the betterment of society.

All while being funny, albeit his wit sometimes cut to the quick. Always up front about sharing his opinion, although he never rubbed it in one’s face when he was right—though he did pout when proven wrong.

He had a cute pout, too, though he hated being told that.

Of all the speakers, Corin does the best by Max. He starts the service and ends it, after giving up on dragging me up there to share the spotlight.

Something else we argued about.

Still, he’s the one memorializing the real Max, the only one who truly acknowledges Max’s complexity. People loved or hated Max, and those of us who loved him put up with so much because what we got was worth it.

It was.

It is.

I refuse to look backward. I do not and never will regret the sacrifices I made to stay by his side, sharing his joy when something went right.

I accept and acknowledge the actions I took to ensure to support him, ensuring he had what he needed. Even when it involved a bit of blackmail or other underhanded means. I built my life around him, and I’ve reaped rewards.

Yet I’ve spent so much time caring for him, and, at the last, fearing and worrying that the worst would happen and he’d go—and now that he has, I’ve no idea what comes next.

For the first time in decades, my future is an almost-blank slate.

An empty void.

Yet, for all that I knew Max body, heart, and soul, even as late as the service, I hadn’t realized that he, too, realized he might go first and, with his usual irritatingly mad genius, made arrangements.

Meddled with my life one last time.