Chapter 10 – Declan
Chapter Ten
Declan
Cove isn’t puking the next morning, and I can’t decide if it’s a good or a bad sign. Their sound check goes off without a hitch, and we eat food from tour catering in one of the greenrooms.
I find myself watching her a little too intently. She is my primary client—Griffin made that clear—so it’s well within my job perimeters to keep eyes on her at all times. That likely doesn’t include scrutinizing every bite that slips between her lips.
Fuck me.
This is a problem.
The longer I spend in the confined space of the tour bus with her delicate orange creamy scent, the more my system yearns for it.
That can’t be healthy.
This is why it’s not recommended to cram unbonded alphas and omegas together in small spaces.
When she walked in on me in the shower the other night, the look on her face about did me in. Some days, I don’t know what the hell I’m still doing here.
Watching Darkest Nights on stage is impressive. Even if it’s not their dream, Ravvi and Damian are natural performers.
My nephews eat up every second of attention they get from the fans, but I’ve always known Riot and Creed are in the industry for the long haul.
Cove is in her element on stage. She’s charismatic, playing to the crowd in a way the audience goes crazy over.
It’s also plain to see how exhausted she is.
Touring isn’t easy.
I saw it as a teenager, but I got lucky with Pops. He originally came to live with Issac, Dexter, Love, Vince, and Jude to be my brother’s sponsor.
God knows Dexter needed one.
I didn’t technically meet Dex until he’d cleaned up his act, but I watched his antics on TV for years before we ever met. I was never interested in being a musician or going on tour with my brother and his family pack. If Pops hadn’t been around, I probably wouldn’t have had a choice.
Pops was a hard-ass, but I loved the hell out of that old man. He may have joined the family to keep an eye on Dexter, but that quickly changed to helping me not end up a degenerate. His words, not mine.
Vince’s grandfather was older than dirt when I met him. Somehow, he was stubborn enough to live long enough to watch me graduate basic training. He died three days later in his sleep.
I told him not to travel. With how old he was, it wasn’t worth it, but again… He was a hardheaded pain in the ass.
When I found out my mom OD’d, I didn’t shed a tear. When Pops died, I sobbed like a goddamn baby. He was tired and missing his wife when we met, but he said I gave him a second wind.
He gave me as normal of a life as was possible, considering the family who legally adopted me were rock stars. And like every year, the anniversary of his passing hits me just as hard as it always does.
Rarely do I drink.
Almost never, in fact.
It seems like some twisted sense of fate that I’m drinking a beer in Pops’s honor, when he spent the majority of his life sober.
Maybe it’s fitting.
Hell if I know.
Without him, I likely would have ended up an addict, exactly like my mom and brother. Not that I can blame Dexter. He emulated what he saw when he was a kid. If our mom hadn’t died when she did, I would have been just as screwed up.
I almost laugh.
Hell, maybe I already am.
Damian lies stretched out on the couch across from me, drinking a beer of his own. He’s not twenty-one, but I’m not about to parent his ass. I figure, if you can serve your country at eighteen, you can have a beer.
Then again, I’m the fun uncle—not the parent—and for a damn good reason. Kids are a hassle I want no part of, and it’s not like it’s hard to figure out why.
My childhood was enough to traumatize anyone. I’d rather not risk fucking up the next generation.
Cove shuffles out of the bedroom at the back of the bus with a blanket tossed over her shoulders. The entire space is basically her nest, so I only go in there when I need to pass on information or if she invites me.
Okay, she’s never actually invited me in, and I frown at the coffee table.
Damn, I had a second and third beer while commiserating about Pops.
She peeks at me and focuses on Damian, who seems entranced by whatever bullshit plays on the TV.
I’ve mostly tuned it out in favor of getting lost in memories, but I think it’s a documentary about bands in the early nineties.
“Can I snuggle with you?” the little omega asks Damian, coming to a stop at his side.
His head rolls around the pillow he’s leaning against. “There’s not much space, but you can wedge between me and the back of the couch.” He chuckles. “Or lie right on top of me.”
Cove scurries forward, shoving herself between Damian and the back of the sofa. It leaves her facing me, and I lean forward, scooping up my beer and taking a long swig.
I must be buzzed from not having had a sip of alcohol in over six months since this ill-fated tour began. There’s no other reason an uncomfortable pang of discomfort sits heavy in my stomach.
Seriously, Cove and I do nothing but bicker.
If she came to sit in my lap, I’d have to check in to see if something was wrong, so I have no clue why my system rebels at the sight.
Damian wraps his arm around her, and she snuggles close with her head on his shoulder. Cove’s long hair falls around Damian’s chest as he fluffs the blanket, making sure she’s tucked in.
They sure look cozy.
I’m not jealous a bit.
The intestinal upset I’ve developed must be beer gas. I probably need to burp. I swivel my chair to face the television that I’ve been ignoring and pat my stomach.
Nothing comes up, and the ache is still there.
That’s inconvenient.
“You comfortable?” Damian asks, clearly talking to Cove.
“Yeah, thanks. You’re really warm.”
I frown.
The bus isn’t as well insulated as a house, but it does have heat and air conditioning. If she’s that chilly, she could have bumped up the heat.
“Your feet are like ice. Jesus, woman,” Damian says, and there’s some shuffling on the couch. “There. I’ll warm them up for you.”
It takes everything in me not to swivel my chair to check out what’s happening.
“Does Ravvi live on the other bus now?” Cove asks, keeping her voice low. Maybe she was hoping I wouldn’t overhear, but I have acute senses, even when I’m slightly intoxicated. “How am I ever supposed to fix stuff with him if he can’t stand to be around me?”
My teeth grind together, and I sigh.
I’m not feeling sorry for her tonight. She’s been downright awful to Ravvi the last couple months. If she was anyone else, I would have had a conversation with them about it, but Cove and I aren’t in a place where that would have helped anything.
“He’ll come around,” Damian replies, equally soft. “You just have to give him the chance to cool off. His feelings are hurt.”
Cove sighs. “I don’t know why, but I swear, he gets under my skin like no one else can.”
“He can be a lot,” Damian says.
This entire conversation is none of my business. There’s every possibility that I should see myself to my bunk.
“Do you have any advice for how I can go about fixing things between us?” she asks. “Even getting back to a point where we can stand to be in the same room would be an improvement.”
Damian laughs. “You know how much he cares about you. Apologize, tell him you love him, and he’ll sweep all that past shit under the bridge. That’s a guarantee.”
“Love?” Cove sputters.
“Don’t you get tired of pretending you don’t?”
“Jesus Christ, Damian,” she squeaks.
“Let’s be real here, Clover,” he says, calling her by her nickname.
“If you were to see my brother flirting with a chick, you’d lose your mind.
” There’s some rustling, and he goes on.
“No, don’t try to deny it. I mean, you can lie to me, but can you really lie to yourself?
What’s the good in that, anyway? You say you don’t want him, but you don’t want anyone else to have him either.
And if he did date, that would only prove to you that you were never meant to be.
Do you see what I’m saying? There’s no way he can win, so he stays stuck in limbo, hoping at the very least, he won’t make things worse. ”
That shit has to be torture.
I remember what it was like to live with someone I could never make happy, no matter how hard I tried. Granted, that was my mother, and the situation is completely different between them, but it’s emotionally exhausting.
When you’re constantly on alert, conscious of everything you say or do because you don’t want to risk setting the other person off…
It’s like being in triage mode all the time.
It wreaks havoc on your brain chemistry until your system rewires.
Or that’s what the shrink said when Dexter and Love forced me to see him when I first went to live with them.
Hell, I’m drunker than I thought. Projecting my fucked-up childhood trauma onto their dynamic when it’s not even remotely the same thing.
Ravvi is an adult. He might not like it, but he could walk away if he was truly tired of trying to make amends. They’ve both built up some toxic coping mechanisms, and even if they’re miserable, neither is willing to walk away completely.
They’re still young, busy figuring out what it means to be an adult with adult relationships. Not that I was in any better shape at their ages.
I’ve never had a serious relationship that lasted longer than six months. Maybe I shouldn’t be judging how they deal with one another.
There’s silence for so long that I start to wonder if he’s still blocking her mouth or something.
“No, you’re right. I wouldn’t like that at all,” Cove finally says. “I really do care about him.”
If I was sober, maybe I could keep my jaw from falling, but in my current state, I don’t have a hope in hell of covering my reaction.
“He cares about you too,” Damian says softly. “At the end of the day, I just want you both to be happy. I guess the question is, do you think it’s fixable, or is it past the point of even trying?”
Dammit. I wish I could see her reaction.
“I want it to be something we can work out. I’m going to apologize if I can ever convince him not to run away at the sight of me,” Cove says with a huff. “Then I’m going to do my best to stay calm while we have a real conversation.”
Several hours of tossing and turning once I make it into my bunk produces no actual sleep.
Missing Pops is nothing new, but being on tour, I can’t help but wonder what he would have thought of Cove.
He would have been quick to set her straight about her spoiled ways.
Though, he was never cruel, just honest. He had a way of seeing who someone is at their core and not the facade they show the world.
I’ve put up a solid wall between the two of us, but even I can admit that Cove isn’t who I thought she was when Griffin first assigned me to her service. Well, the first few months, I wasn’t impressed by how she acted, but I think she’s finally tired of trying to be a one-woman island.
I’ve got a bad track record with omegas, which is a shitty excuse, even if it’s all I’ve got. I saw how my mother put her wants above what anyone else needed, but I also don’t think it’s fair to judge an entire designation off one person.
If it was only her, I probably would have let go of that stereotype years ago. Then again, there’s that old saying fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
I’ve already been burned twice in two very different ways.
I like to think I’m intelligent enough to learn from my mistakes, but Cove shows a sliver of vulnerability, and it triggers every instinct in my body to protect her.
This shit is not healthy.
There’s no fighting it, though. It’s just how alpha and omega dynamics go.
The curtain on my bunk pulls back, and I roll to appraise what’s happening.
Cove leans over, frowning at me, and I jolt.
“What are you doing?” I ask, blowing out a heavy breath.
She doesn’t answer, climbing into the bunk.
“I felt an ache,” she whispers, sliding a hand over her heart.
“I knew someone was hurting.” She leans over me, moving toward the inside wall.
“I didn’t expect it to be you, but I couldn’t sleep.
” She faces away from me, her ass snuggling up to my hip bone.
She rests her head on my bicep, pulls my arm down, and interlocks our fingers while I blink incredulously.
What the hell is she doing?
I knew omegas were sensitive to the emotions of others, but I didn’t think that worked fifteen feet away. I was also under the impression that omegas only felt the need to comfort their chosen alphas.
Am I remembering that wrong?
Hell, maybe it’s wishful thinking.
My feelings about Cove are obviously complicated. I’m too old for her. The fact that her tight little ass is plastered to my hip while she secretes soothing pheromones is dangerous for both of us. I’m not her alpha, meaning she shouldn’t be comforting me.
That ache that Cove followed in here radiates even stronger as I’m drawn more into wondering what Pops would think if he could see me now.
Vince’s grandpa was the first adult I trusted. He’s the one person whose opinion mattered more than anything.
Dexter and Love tried to build a relationship with me, but I was an angry little fucker. My mom instilled a whole lot of hate in my mind regarding my older brother.
It’s taken years, but we’ve finally gotten to a better place. I always knew Dex loved me, but I hated his guts for leaving me with our mother. He didn’t know I existed for a while, and on some level, that messed me up even worse.
Despite all that, I had Pops.
The crotchety old fucker.
Jesus.
What I wouldn’t trade to be able to give him one last hug.
Cove continues pumping out those damn soothing pheromones, and it isn’t long before everything feels warm and fuzzy.
“Are you okay?” She doesn’t turn to face me, and maybe that makes me feel less on the spot than if she was watching my face.
“I will be,” I grunt, making sure the blanket is wrapped around her. It gets cold next to the wall when the temperature outside dips. “Are you warm enough?”
“Yeah, thanks.” She wiggles even closer to my side. “Can I ask what happened? Is everyone okay?”
I sigh.
The last thing I want to talk about is how badly I miss Pops, but I don’t want her spending half the night thinking someone died.
I mean, he did.
“Today is the anniversary of Pops’s death…” I only mean to tell her the basics, but I somehow end up rambling the story of how my mom died, I met Dexter, hated him, and ended up Pops’s primary mission in life.
Hell, I’m not even sure she’s still awake when I stop talking.
Not until she says, “He would have been really proud of who you’ve become.”
I laugh, shaking my head.
He would have asked me how the hell I got roped into living on a bus with rock stars.
Cove keeps dumping out those soothing pheromones, and the rocking of the bus is actually peaceful. My eyelids get heavy, and I don’t fight sleep. I breathe in deep hits of Cove’s sweet scent and let myself rest.