Chapter Seven
I manage to avoid the classes I share with Connor for another week with a note from Dr. Kanata, but I can’t keep missing lectures. No one’s notes are up to my standards.
The suppressants make me foggy and uncoordinated, like my depth perception is the slightest bit off. In art, my hand shakes when I try to draw, and focusing in class is harder than ever. I’ve taken up counting ceiling tiles and staring holes into the paint to pass the time.
Each glimpse of Connor’s tall frame in the hallway sends panic shooting through my chest. Any time I spot him, I turn around and take another route to class. But the gnawing ache of the bond is muted now. Tolerable.
That wasn’t to say that Connor lacked persistence. He showed up at my house before school every day, just like he did before everything changed, holding a large coffee from my favorite spot.
After watching him sit in my driveway until long past the late bell two days in a row, I started leaving out the back door, climbing over the chain-link fence, and walking two miles to the next bus stop. Two weeks after the ceremony, he finally manages to pin me down.
It’s gym, my last period of the day, and I’ve been late getting out recently.
I used to be fine changing in front of the other girls, but I’m covered in circular bruises from my daily suppressant shots, and my mating gland on my shoulder is red and swollen—a tell-tale sign that I’ve been through a heat recently.
I’ve taken to running a few extra laps around the track after Coach blew the whistle so I could shower and change by myself.
Today, I shower and sit on the perforated metal locker bench in my towel, staring into space with an unfocused gaze.
Just a little dissociation while I air dry.
I hate putting clothes on when my skin is still damp, and the bench reminds me too much of the one in the tent on the ceremony grounds.
I blink when the motion-activated lights flicker out, casting me in darkness.
I’m tempted to see how long I can go without reactivating them.
Eventually they’d find me here, calcified to this bench like one of the victims of Pompeii.
The click of one of the heavy fire doors at the gym’s entrance pulls me out of my trance, and I quickly dress. I’m leaving the changing room, pulling still-damp hair out of my collar, when I see him.
My stomach clenches. He’s supposed to be at swim practice.
Connor’s leaning against a squat rack, arms crossed over his chest. He’s wearing his trademark dark wash jeans and a clean white tee that hugs his biceps and highlights the golden tan of his skin. He looks fucking delicious, and it isn’t fair.
“You’re ignoring me, Crane.”
I don’t respond. Before, I would have quipped at him. Something snarky, like, ‘astute observation.’
But that was before.
I keep walking toward the exit. I can’t do this. I’m not ready to talk to him, to pretend like everything is okay. Right now, it doesn’t feel like I’ll ever be ready.
“Oh no you don’t.”
He crosses the space between us in an instant, grabs the strap of my backpack, and spins me around. “You’re not leaving until we solve this. Never go to bed angry, remember?”
It was something we said when hashing out minor conflicts in the past, often accompanied by jokes that we squabbled like an old married couple. Now, it stings to hear.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath, then immediately regret it. My fogged-out omega hindbrain stirs at his scent, woken from her drugged slumber. Alpha?
NO! I spit back at her.
“Is this about the claiming? How long are you going to ice me out?”
Forever .
Our friendship was over the second I scented his shirt. Tears begin to gather in my eyes, and I stare at my feet. His shoes are bracketing mine.
Connor cups my jaw in his hand and tilts my face up. I tremble beneath his fingers. His rough thumb against my skin is a panacea.
“Don’t ignore me. Yell at me, cry, tell me to fuck off and go to hell—but don’t ignore me.”
"This one's beyond fixing, Connor."
His frown deepens, his eyes scanning my face.
“You smell different, and you look like shit. What’s wrong? Did something happen?”
I suck in a deep breath, trying to calm my racing nerves. “I needed you to be there. I called you, texted you—” My voice cracks. “And you ignored me.”
“I talked to every alpha that came of age this year,” he snaps. "You didn’t match with any of them.”
I pull away from him, but he follows me, backing me up toward the gym wall until my shoulders hit brick. He's too close. He's all I can smell, all I can feel.
Anger rolls off him. "Did someone bother you? Touch you? What happened? Mac won’t tell me shit.”
"It's none of your business, Connor."
He snarls. “Give me a name. I’m going to fucking kill him.”
I try to duck beneath his arm, and he pins me to the wall.
He takes a deep breath. "Wait. Just wait." He looks me over, scanning my face, then leans in and inhales deep.
My heart tries to escape its cage. Does he feel something? Smell something?
Dr. Kanata assured me he wouldn’t recognize me as his mate with my scent blocked. Were we a fucking statistical anomaly?
“I don't understand what's going on, Lana. I know I fucked up, but I can’t lose you. Don't let this ruin things between us."
“You chose her over me. You broke your promise. I’ve never said anything about your relationships. The way you treat girls like temporary toys. But I trusted you to be there for me when I needed you. I thought I was different.”
“You are different.”
“Apparently not.”
He breaks eye contact with me. “Fuck. I’m sorry."
“It’s too late for that.”
The familiar jingle of his ringtone breaks the silence. Connor curses and pulls his phone from his pocket, one hand still pinning me to the wall. Cassandra’s name lights up the screen.
He flicks his thumb to end the call.
Rage and jealousy bubble in my gut. I raise a brow at him. “Aren’t you going to get that?”
“This is more important.”
“Just let me go,” I whisper. It’s the last thing I want. I want him to fight for me, for us. But I don’t have a history of getting the things I want.
He pulls away from me, looking stricken. His nostrils flare.
“Alanna, please…”
His phone rings again. I take advantage of his distraction and duck under his arm, and this time he doesn't stop me.
It’s a struggle not to break into a run. To turn back around and fight with him. To see if he’s following.
I hear him say "Hey, Cassandra," as the gym door swings shut behind me, and something inside me dies.
When several weeks go by without Connor seeking me out again, I start to trust the suppressants.
He doesn’t text.
He doesn’t call.
He doesn’t come to my house to pick me up in the mornings or wait for me in the parking lot after school.
When I bother to eat lunch, I do it in the library, hiding in the stacks upstairs.
I’m a shadow of my former self, haunting the halls of the high school until I can fade out of existence entirely.
Part of me resents him for giving up so quickly.
Part of me is grateful, because I probably would have caved by now.
I spend my final months of high school focusing on my studies. I inject my suppressants. I nod and smile at my peers. I apply to several new colleges.
I’ve never been so productive.
I’ve never been so lonely.
Senior yearbooks come out, and Connor and Cassandra win cutest couple for senior superlatives; even their names sound cute together.
I didn’t waste my meager savings on one—the academy goes all out with the pricey 100-page, full-color hardbacks—but one arrives on my desk anyway. Mac’s doing, no doubt.
My peers scour the pages for pictures of themselves. Any shots the yearbook staff managed to take of me after the ceremony are dead-eyed, vacant. I’ve lost weight, and there are persistent dark shadows under my eyes.
A friend—an acquaintance, really—named Molly asks me to sign her yearbook.
When she hands it to me, it’s open to the glossy student-sponsored pages in the back.
A full-color photo of me and Connor sitting on the hood of his car greets me.
I’m mid-laugh, and he’s beaming at me. Looking at me like I’m something.
The page is full of photos of him throughout the years, and I’m in several.
They’re all memories he was a core part of.
I helped Mac pick out the photos a month before the ceremony.
I snap the book closed and shove it back to Molly without signing.
I don’t walk at graduation, even when a cap and gown I didn’t order is delivered to the house. I opt to receive my diploma in the mail.
Connor and Cassandra keep dating.
I should be more pleased by these things than I am. At least I lost my mate over something more than a fling, right?
I stop worrying that someone will out me to Connor.
The unmatched omegas and alphas left the ceremony grounds before I was in the full throes of heat.
And the elders will keep my secret. An experience like mine was a black stain on the whole tradition—the kind of thing that made people swear off attending claiming ceremonies at all.
Invested parties were all too eager to sweep my experience under the rug.
Mac Masters is the only weak link, and the guilt eating him alive has secured his silence.
Besides, no one with a designation would believe an alpha wrote off an omega— their omega— for a beta. It was simply unheard of.
There must be something wrong with me, for such a thing to occur.
He doesn’t want you. He wants another. A beta, of all things. What a terrible omega you must be. You must be defective.
Mac begged me to reconsider once, on one of our drives into the city to see Kanata.
“He’s not the same without you. You didn’t know him before you moved here…but you lit something up inside him that all but extinguished when his mother passed. He’s sinking back into that darkness, Lana.”
I ignored him.
“His grades have plummeted. He’s getting into fights.”
“Not my problem.”
“He misses you. You’ve been best friends for years.”
“I can’t be his friend anymore.”
“He’s going to school across the fucking country now, Lana! Is that what you want?”
It was perfect, actually. I didn’t accept any of the college offers I received yet, waiting until I knew where Connor was going. I guess the rumors that he was offered a full scholarship to a prestigious West Coast university were true.
“This isn’t my fault, Mac. You can’t blame me for his decisions.”
This was how, rather than having to move across the country for college to avoid Connor, I ended up staying right here in Crestwood.
The local university, Crestwood U, wasn’t particularly prestigious, but it was affordable and close to Dr. Kanata and the man paying for the ever-growing suppressant regimen required to keep my heats at bay.