Page 4 of My Begrudging Scent Matches

Winter is only getting colder, but Alice feels constantly that she can’t cool down. Every symptom is getting worse, the itchiness in her skin, the need . . . It’s all a constant reminder of the inevitable.

She hates it.

Alice

I’ll be home for a few days for Christmas, though!

While she waits to see if her assurances will be enough to dissuade her mom from pushing further on the subject, Alice jots out a response to her team’s Slack message, but of course, her mom is just getting started:

Mom

You just have so many wonderful qualities.

Any Alpha would be so lucky to have you, they’d be fighting to court you if you gave them half the chance.

Alice Walton

And what’s my best quality, my empty womb?

As soon as Alice hits send on the message, she realizes that in switching back and forth between messengers, she’s accidentally sent that to the work marketing chat.

“Shit shit shit,” Alice quickly tries to unsend the message, but Scott sends a baby emoji and she knows the damage is already done. She deletes it anyway after smacking her palm against her forehead five times, much to the concern of the stranger squished in the seat next to hers.

Alice Walton

Please disregard if you saw my previous message.

The bus’ robotic voice intones the name of Alice’s stop just as her phone lights up with an incoming call from her mother that she promptly declines. Three more texts from her mom fill the screen as she descends from the bus onto the sidewalk, all of which are about her daughter’s heat, and how using the suppressants and deodorizers after age twenty-five is not only bad for her health, but a ticking time bomb that will lead to Alice going into heat in public where she’s not safe.

She’s heard this all before, even as recently as last month from her Omega doctor when she was getting her prescriptions refilled. The doctor was not discreet in handing Alice brochures to five different heat clinics in the city. They’ve been sitting crumpled in the bottom of Alice’s purse ever since.

Alice would love to tell her mom that this is reasonably none of her business and that she has enough grandbabies already with how many Alice’s older siblings have created, but she sighs and types something softer out instead.

Alice

Headed into work. Love you, Mom. Tell dads I love them too.

Her mom means well, her whole family does. She recognizes that they all just want Alice to be happy. Her parents have been sickly, head-over-heels in love for almost four decades now. When all of their kids had been designated as Alphas or Omegas, they were thrilled that their children could experience the deep commitment, love, and comfort of a pack.

Her older siblings all got the memo. The two Omegas paired off before their twenty-second birthdays, the two Alphas a little later, now mated to 1-3 someones, and love to point out how woefully behind Alice is. It would be easier if she'd been designated as an Alpha. For an Alpha, twenty-six is a totally reasonable age to not still have a pack or an Omega. Nobody would bat an eye.

As the building elevator glides towards her floor, Alice repeats in her mind that her family means well—they really do, they are nice and kind and they do mean well—until she’s mostly calm enough to face her coworkers.

Alice can’t talk to any of her work friends about this since not a single one of them knows she’s an Omega. Of the whole company, there’s one happily mated Alpha on the executive team and two Omegas on the third floor who work in customer relations, but Alice keeps her distance from all of them.

Labyrinth Solutions is composed almost exclusively of Betas and she works hard to appear as one of them. Her mom would cry if she knew she’d been hiding her true self, but it's easier this way. That revelation would only bring more paperwork and gentle, knowing expressions than Alice cares to deal with.

That’s the thing about being an Omega; it’s novel, and everyone looks at you like you might go into heat at any moment. It would be mortifying enough to know that, by knowing she was an Omega, Mark from accounting would also be hyper-aware of her biology and would probably believe that she wants to have absolutely feral, ungodly sex with Alphas to create a minimum of 4.5 babies.

Horrifying.

On the list of attributes she wants her colleagues to know about her, sexual needs is not one of them.

Alice makes a pit stop in the bathroom to change into a shirt that she hasn’t already sweated through and forces herself to face her reflection instead of avoiding it like the plague. Her concealer covers the smudges of gray under her eyes well enough and the flush on her cheeks could reasonably be from the cold.

Her neck is only going to keep getting hotter as the day goes on, though, so she pulls her frizzy red hair into a twist and clips it into place. She frees a few strands to frame her face in a way that she hopes looks intentionally messy instead of messy messy. Surveying herself in the mirror one last time, she nods. Despite how she feels, she looks fine, maybe even put together.

Healthy.

---