6. Holden
CHAPTER 6
Holden
I shrug my gym bag on to my shoulder and head to the hotel ground floor. The band’s just checked into our rooms for opening night tomorrow night here in Glasgow. Tomorrow there are meetings and press stuff, but that’s tomorrow.
Tonight, it’s me and the gym. And the baggage in my head.
This hotel is pretty posh but the gym is lacking. Small, low-ceilinged room with some free weights, a few treadmills, and one really knackered-looking exercise ball. I give it a gentle kick as I walk past it to one of the benches.
“I feel ya, mate.”
I straddle the bench and suck on my water bottle, then adjust my earbuds. This playlist will never get old. Usually it’s my go-to chill, calm, contemplate list. But right now it’s all I can listen to. Nothing else will do.
I grab some dumbbells and start with overhead presses followed by rows. The mirror in front of me is slightly smudged about a foot off the ground with tiny handprints. Someone’s toddler joined them for a session, I guess.
I smile. Someday, pups would be sweet. I’d love a little mate I could train up and bring to the gym with me. If he or she enjoyed it, that is. But little kids enjoy everything, really. A whole world of newness, every experience a wild adventure. Most days, I still feel like that. But on the days I don’t, it’s hard to remember what they’re like.
I focus back on the inhale and exhale. This tour’s going to be a wild adventure, especially if we even make it past a week. We have to, really. No backing out. Not for our opening act, either. But ever since Kai told us Jez’s status as an unattached Omega, everything has felt on a knife’s edge.
I crank my volume as I switch to rows, but grab heavier barbells for these. I wince at the dark circles under my eyes from lack of sleep, and a fairly conflicted-looking expression in the mirror.
The truth I’ve kept from the others is digging into my gut. Admitting it now wouldn’t change much, but the reason behind it would. Everyone always thinks the chill, calm guy is the one with no worries, no anxieties, nothing to lose sleep over. And in my experience, we’re just the ones who stuff if all down the furthest.
I never felt the same about Nyah as Kai, Nico, and Thomas. I mean, she had a rocking body, and she was extremely clever and conniving, which I could sort of appreciate. But she sure as shit pulled the wool on us.
I never wanted her. And I wasn’t sad when she left—sad for the guys, but not for me. Because I wanted to find a scent match, not just an Omega who could drink us under the table, play guitar like a fiend, and take our knots all at once.
It was great, don’t get me wrong, but it was a season I could’ve done without. In honesty, it was a relief when it ended, because it felt like wearing a mask I couldn’t remove without hurting my pack.
Then when we all met in Ash’s office last month with Jez Jacobs and her old manager-slash-school friend, it was like someone had carved out my insides like a jack o’lantern. Just left a big fucking pile of my guts on the floor. Like the very thing that was supposed to fill me up—the thing I was meant for—was the thing we had all destroyed three years earlier.
I have barely slept these past four weeks, but I don’t know how to tell Kai. I don’t know whether Jez has any interest in a pack. Hell, for all I know, she could even be our scent match. I’m still on suppressants, like we all agreed, even if Kai isn’t. Now I wish I hadn’t bothered.
But either way, my heart’s drawn to that woman like no other, just as it was three years ago.
I adjust my earbuds and turn up the volume on the playlist that I haven’t stopped playing for three years. It’s Jez’s songs. Her confessional style, her yearning vocals. To me, it’s everything. And I don’t know how I’m going to hide it this time around.