Omega Reimagined volume 1 Page 4

  “No, I…” There were too many double negatives in that question for me to figure out how to answer it, so I started over. “You have the right to do whatever you want. I mean, you should have that right.”

  “But I don’t.”

  “Well, I haven’t done a survey of all five packs, but not in my pack you don’t, not the legal right. And I’m assuming not in yours or you wouldn’t be all defensive about it.”

  “I’m not defensive; I’m angry. This isn’t a theoretical legal matter to me. It’s my life. He was going to kill me.”

  I didn’t know Leo well enough to know if he was dramatizing or serious, but it didn’t much matter.

  “Omega murder is still murder in my pack,” I said.

  “And mine too, but not a lot of good that would do me once I’m dead. And maybe he wasn’t going to kill me, not on purpose. He was just going to do a lot of damage on his way towards killing me. Killing me would have been kinder.”

  “He was abusing you?”

  When Leo nodded, I grimaced to myself. Omega abuse was an ugly secret. It wasn’t illegal, because it didn’t happen. Omegas were meant to be protected and adored. Alphas—real alphas—or so the story went, would never intentionally harm their omega—not beyond what was required to discipline them. And there lay the ugly secret, the border that sometimes got crossed and the crossings that were generally ignored.

  As though Leo could read my mind, he inserted himself into my thought stream.

  “Discipline’s a load of shit anyway. We’re grown people, not pets or property. No one should have the right to beat us, not even for refusing to bend to their will. And before you tell me that if I’d have been eagerly submitting to his will like a good little omega he wouldn’t have needed to discipline me, I was. At least, I started that way. I had the same dreams any omega has. My refusal to submit came out of his habit of hitting me, not the other way around.”

  “Leo.” I reached my hand across the table to cover his but he jerked it back. “I wasn’t going to say any of that. I’m in New During for the same reason you are.”

  “Hiding out from an abusive alpha?” The sneer in his voice made it evident he didn’t believe me.

  “No one was abusing me,” I admitted. “Let’s just say I don’t agree with certain pack rules any more than you do.”

  “You say that now, but when you’re fucking me, you say the same shit Bruce used to say: ‘take it’ and ‘good boy’ and—” He shuddered, not the way he’d shuddered when I’d said those things but like he was repulsed by me.

  “I’m sorry. I won’t. Those things, they feel right to say at the time and I thought you were getting off on them too, but I don’t mean anything by them.”

  He dropped the hard stare he’d been pinning me with, his eyes skittering around the room as though someone might be watching us. I saw him swallow and understood his conflict. He’d both enjoyed my alpha-commands and hated himself for enjoying them.

  “It’s like that thing humans do,” I suggested. “Role playing. If two people agree that they’re playing a game, then it’s OK if one of them is —” I reached into my mind to pull out the word humans used to describe my sexual behavior “—toppy and the other one likes it. We leave the bed, we leave that behind. I cooked for you, didn’t I?” An alpha who wanted to retain the respect of his fellows would never do something so classically omega as cooking. Alphas hunted. Omegas served.

  “It’s up to you,” I said, because he looked, if anything, sadder and less certain. “I’ll keep it gentler next time.”

  “No,” he blurted, then grimaced with self-censorship. “I liked you being toppy in bed.” He used my word as though that made it easier to bear. “I just—” He shook his head. “Never mind. Too late now.”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant about it being too late, since the smell of heat was still on him, but I didn’t push. Instead I got up and cleared away the dishes, trying to walk the talk I’d just given about leaving traditional caste roles behind us in bed.

  “Does it bother you that I belong to someone else?” he asked from his spot at the table as his eyes followed me around the room. “Or is it a sexy thing—to be taking something that doesn’t belong to you?”

  “Definitely not a sexy thing. My wolf doesn’t like you smelling like him. And anyway, we established that you don’t belong to anyone and that you’re not a thing.”

  “Are you worried about Bruce?”

  “That he’ll come after me? Nah. I can hold my own in a fight.” Though it had been a long time since I’d fought, and never in earnest, only in play. “I take it he doesn’t know where you are.”

  “If he knew, he’d have come for me. He found me once after I left. I was lucky and scented him before he scented me and managed to get away. That was when I moved all the way over here to New During. It was as far as I could get from him and still speak the language. I keep my nose out though.”

  “I guess that’s how you picked up my scent before I picked up yours.”

  “Yeah.” He did that ducking, blushing thing again. It was adorable but I’d have liked to know what was behind it. Had he been having alpha fantasies about me before he even met me?

  With everything tidied up, I considered our next steps. “You want to try to get in a shower before….”

  “I think it’s waning,” Leo said hopefully.

  I crushed the hope that it wasn’t. Leo would want to get back to being himself rather than my sexual plaything, and I had a job to show up for and tasks that needed accomplishing in my own personal life. This weekend together was a holiday, but like all holidays, it would have to end.

  Chapter 4

  I didn’t get the whole weekend with him. Late Saturday night, before my knot had fully receded, Leo fell into a sleep deeper and longer than the power naps he’d been catching between flashes. Rubbing my nose along his neck, I could no longer smell the fever on him, only damp skin and that lingering taste of Bruce. I shifted him so that my nose lay along the other side of his neck, where he only smelled like healthy Leo, a scent I’d forever know.

  I was tired too. I hadn’t had the pull of unrelenting hormones dragging me down, but the near-constant adrenalin high, the furious fucking action, and not being able to sleep in longer than three-hour increments had taken its toll. As my dick flopped free, I crashed into sleep.

  I woke up alone. The sounds drifting down the short hallway suggested Leo was in the kitchen, scraping together something for breakfast. He’d unearthed my clothes from whatever corner we’d last kicked them into and left them in a tidy, folded pile on the chair next to his dresser. I put them on, the fabric scratchy and human against skin that had spent most of the last few days wild and bare.

  Leo looked up when I came into the kitchen and gave me a polite good morning. “Your timing’s good. Breakfast is just about ready.” He nodded at the place-setting laid out in front of what had become “my” chair at his kitchen table.

  Next to the napkin he’d heaped a pile of money. I couldn’t remember what I’d done with the receipt for the groceries I’d bought, whether I’d dropped it in one of the bags or stuffed it in a pocket, but Leo had found it and set it out along with the exact change to cover it. I started to protest—it was no big thing to pick up some groceries and I’d eaten half of them myself—but thought better of it. I had an idea what it meant to him to pay his debts. So instead I scooped the money into a pocket with a muttered thanks and sat down to sip at my coffee while he served me.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” he said, rising quickly to forestall me from clearing the table. It seemed that my brush-off would start with my being treated like a guest in this place we’d intimately shared.

  “And now I should go,” I said a little sulkily. Of course I’d only been there to help him while he was suffering, and we could never be more to each other than we were, but weren’t we already?

  “I’m not trying to rush you. I’m just saying you’ve really been great. I mean it, Angel.” He sat down again and covered my hand with his. “Not just the sex—the food and the care-taking and being here at all when you didn’t have to be. And for not humiliating me for needing what I needed. It would have been easy to do.”

  “I wouldn’t have missed this,” I told him, though there was that vacation feeling to it, like all the rest of my days would be so noticeably less good in comparison that I’d have been better off never knowing. I picked up his hand and kissed it. “And I really should go,” I said, without the sulks this time. “I’ve got work to catch up on.” I hadn’t logged into my laptop in two days, which was some kind of human record and might get me fired.

  “I’ve got a lot to do too,” he said. “Like laundry.” He made a disgusted face in reflection. We’d re-made the bed with his second set of sheets after he’d become coherent enough on Friday to identify which closet they were in, but the new ones were as nasty as the originals by this point.

  He walked me to the door where I lingered over saying goodbye because I didn’t want to. “Maybe you should take my number,” I said when he’d almost got the door closed on me.

  “In case I need to get laid again?”

  “I was thinking in case Bruce showed up. Or just, you know, to have a friend. There aren’t that many wolves in New During. We should stick together more.”

  Maybe a support group? Yeah, I’d made zero attempt to befriend the few wolves I’d run into here. We were naturally pack animals, but my pack was somewhere else and I’d left it for a reason. I only knew that walking away from Leo was hard and perhaps Leo felt that way too because after a half-hearted, “I can take care of myself,” he went and got his phone and we exchanged numbers.

  This time he stopped me.

  “There’s no reaso
n why we couldn’t fuck around,” he said, swinging the almost-closed door back open with a jerk. “Even if I’m not in heat, we still could.”

  “We could?”

  “Like you said, there aren’t that many wolves here.”

  “You don’t like fooling around with humans?”

  He shrugged.

  “Not alpha enough for you?” I joked.

  He scowled at me, but I could tell it was put on. “Don’t get full of yourself. Just ’cause I enjoy a good knot doesn’t make you all that.”

  “I could give you a good knot,” I said. “If you’re sure—” I hesitated.

  “You think I’m not allowed to have casual sex because I’m an omega?”

  “I think you’re allowed to. Or ought to be anyway. I just don’t know if it’s right for me to lead you on that way. I can’t claim you.”

  “Obviously.”

  “I mean, even if I could, I wouldn’t. Nothing personal, just… not really in my plans to take an omega and…”

  “And I’m used.”

  I blew out a rough breath. It was a completely moot point. Leo had an alpha, and the happy little home life with the submissive omega waiting on his knees by the door wasn’t for me, but he was right. There was enough pack left in me that the idea of taking another alpha’s used goods rankled. I didn’t know why I was bothering to be honest when being honest meant losing out on some fine omega ass. Maybe it was because Leo meant a little more to me than ass or maybe it was because I didn’t ever want to be even a little bit like my brother.

  “Sorry.”

  “Maybe you should go.”

  “Yeah.”

  I left Leo’s and returned to my normal life, except normal life post-Leo felt very flat. I’d left the pack because I didn’t want to live in a world where differences were frequently settled through violence and people were born into unescapable roles. I liked how humans had society laid out, how they put rules in place to protect those who were physically weaker and how everyone got an equal shot at success. Their ideas were very good and their world was very orderly. It was just… flat.

  Those couple of days with Leo had reminded me that I’d been born to eat blood-red meat with my hands, not to poke dispiritedly at whatever that was that had just come out of my microwave. I’d been born to fuck furiously, to run wild through moonlit snow, to be clothed only in fur. I’d been born to rule. I hadn’t been born to stare glassily at a backlit screen while my clumsy wolf-fingers tried to enter figures into a spreadsheet.

  I pushed my laptop away from me.

  Outside my apartment, a truck idled at the curb. The white noise blanketed whatever muted sounds of nature might normally filter through—a bird in the scraggly tree three floors below or a squirrel scurrying up a drain pipe—and the exhaust fumes won out over the faint traces of new growth that Spring had been trying to send through the six inch gap of my cracked window.

  A good fuck would clear my mind, but Leo had spoiled that for me too. He might be smaller than I was, but Leo was all wolf and that meant tough, hardy. I didn’t have to hold back with him, not in the strength of my thrusts or in the wildness of my lust. I’d tried, sort of, after he’d told me I reminded him of Bruce, but Leo had taunted me out of my caution by asking if I’d rather he fucked me if I wasn’t feeling up to the task. I’d thrown his legs over my shoulders and absolutely railed him, telling him exactly how to take it, until he’d arched beneath me with giddy excitement and pleaded with me to let him come.

  After, while we’d enjoyed the softer, quieter strokes of knotting, he’d kissed me seriously and said, “I do like it when you’re toppy in bed. I do.”

  Remembering Leo was so not helping me concentrate on this boring-ass work I was for some reason spending my Saturday doing. I had to get out.

  Grabbing my phone and keys and wallet—all those accoutrements of human life—I escaped out into a sunny day, still cool enough to feel good to a Northern Pack wolf, but bright with promise. Determined to make this time away from work somehow productive, I headed towards the grocery store, my nose rifling through the smells that surrounded me as I walked.

  Now that I knew Leo’s scent, I caught it from time to time when the wind shifted from west to east. I hadn’t run into him though, even if I had maybe started doing my chores at stores and banks and Starbucks on his side of the park instead of further east where I used to go.

  I picked him up at the butcher counter, his scent clear and fresh above the equally delicious smells of blood and flesh. He’d been here so recently he might still be in the store. I followed my nose, tracing back to the checkout lanes at the front of the store and then, not exactly meaning to, I was ditching my basket and leaving the store, a victim of my predatory instinct to hunt.

  The great hunter tracked his prey to his prey’s address of record. A mighty feat.

  Before I could decide whether to knock or to slink quietly away, Leo had the door open. He looked like I felt, caught somewhere between wary and relieved.

  “You said we could maybe—”

  “Now is good.” He grabbed me by the wrist and yanked me into the apartment, then pushed me back up against the door.

  I’d spent a lot of time in the last few weeks jerking off to the memory of Leo’s body beneath mine, but it turned out it felt just as good to have mine beneath his. This was a Leo not hampered by heat, and if I’d spared any thoughts for what that would be like, I might have imagined him as less hungry or the experience as less intense. I’d have been wrong. Because this was a Leo who could take, not just be taken.

  He had my pants around my ankles and my cock in his mouth with surprising speed and he didn’t stop sucking, not even when I was well past the point of no return. Only the door at my back and his arm around my thighs kept me upright when the climax he’d teased and tormented out of me burst free. It was the first time I’d come down his throat—it had been all knot, knot, knot during his heat—and I liked it, liked the way I got to lay back and let him do it, liked the sight of his throat swallowing down my load, liked his eyes looking up into mine and the rough texture of his hair under my hands when I came back to myself.

  He rose, bringing my pants up with him. Then his hand went to his own fly. His cock thrust out of his partially lowered shorts like an obscene seedling growing young but strong from the mossy forest floor. I growled at the sight and the hackles went up on the back of his neck and his ears moved down and back in a way that human ears don’t. He ran.

  I caught him easily, what with his pants drooping down over his butt the way they were. I scooped him up into a fireman’s lift and carried him into the bedroom and dropped him onto a bed that was tidily made-up with sheets that smelled only like detergent. I aimed to change that.

  I wrestled his clothes off him while he squirmed and squealed and pretended that he wanted something other than his cock down my throat exactly like I wanted. He might not be in heat, but we could still have fun, so I barked at him to behave and he settled back against those clean sheets with an approving sigh. Then, not to be completely pliant, he wrapped his hand around the back of my skull and pushed me closer to where I’d been headed anyway.

  “I’m getting there,” I told him. “Patience.” And just for that I took a more circuitous route than I’d planned.

  Fact was, Leo hadn’t let me do a whole lot of exploring in our time together. Not to say he’d only been interested in one particular part of me—

  Well, yes, exactly to say that. Today, aside from the whimpered urgings, he let me go where I wanted to go and touch what I wanted to touch. Which was everything.

  It’d only been three weeks, but his body was firmer, more filled-out, than I remembered. He’d put on a few of the pounds he’d lost in those early days of his heat. His ribs no longer rose so sharply against the lightly-furred skin of his chest, but his abs still pressed hard against my cheek, rising and falling with his panting breaths.

  “You’re gorgeous,” I told him, and he wiggled his hips in pleased acknowledgement. I licked everywhere I looked—now along his balls, now across his nipples, now around the head of his pretty cock.

  “Angel.”

  I laughed at his pleading attempt to sound commanding. The low rumble made him shudder so hard that his answering giggle morphed into a squeaking moan. He was ready and I was readier. My own cock was starting to have thoughts again, so I got serious with his, and I didn’t stop, not even when those pleading Angels changed to Alphas telling me he was deep, deep under.