Page 43 of The Heat of Us

My apartment felt different tonight. I usually liked being alone. But this was the first time it felt lonely. I reheated some leftovers and ate without tasting. Scrolled on my phone while the TV played and paid attention to neither.

It was the heat interviews today. All those awful scents. The uncertainty of what was to come. My omega was unsettled and dreaded going into my nest. She wanted stolen clothes, gifted bedding and most importantly, warm bodies beside her.

Chocolate. Whisky. Lakes.

By the time I had washed my face and changed into pyjamas, my instincts were frazzled. There was a frenetic sensation beneath my sternum like I had been pacing restlessly back and forth for hours.

I opened the door to my nest and my omega hissed and spat. I didn’t blame her.

A single mattress on the floor. A sunken lumpy pillow and a thin, fraying blanket.

It was the same nest I had made the day I moved into the Omega Village and underwent the bond dissolution trials four years ago. I knew it contributed to my awful sleep but it didn’t matter.

It was all I deserved.

13

REMY

I was a fully grown, 27 year old man.

But it sure didn’t feel that way, sitting at my parents’ dining table with my siblings, being served neatly cut-up fruit for dessert.

My beaming omega mother had a fork in her outstretched hand. “Thanks for this, Ma,” I said sincerely. I speared a piece of melon and popped it in my mouth immediately so she wouldn’t fret over why we weren’t eating.

It would also make the final stretch of this godforsaken family dinner go by faster. I would inhale the entire platter if it meant I could walk out of that door immediately afterwards.

I eyed my little sister. Help me. Gray flicked her eyes to the ceiling exasperatedly but ate an orange without complaint.

Lachlan blocked mum’s attempts to hand him a fork. “I’m having a scotch with Dad in his office after this.”

Right. Because you couldn’t eat fruit before drinking scotch?

We were a farce of a family.

Dad considered his alpha sperm particularly masculine and virile after Mum popped out Lachlan and I in rapid succession only one year apart. I think he foresaw a marching band of alpha sons in his future. Gray’s arrival four years later disproved that theory and she’d paid for it ever since.

I had the gall to be the only one to awaken to an alpha. Me, the idiot who never amounted to much. Lachlan, the perfect sycophantic first-born who followed in Dad’s puffed-up lawyer footsteps, remained a beta.

I didn’t care what his designation was. He was a prick regardless.

Mum had only just sat down when she rose immediately. “Remy, I have those biscuits you like too!” she exclaimed, pottering towards the cupboard.

“No, Ma, you don’t…I’m fine, really.” I tried to stop her but it was useless. I knew my mum couldn’t really help it. She’d spent my whole life tending to the needs of my alpha father, doing things exactly the way he demanded. It wasn’t a surprise that she couldn’t help replicate the same behaviour with her alpha son.

“Hana, stop coddling him.”

Dad’s admonishment ratcheted the already unbearable tension at the table even higher. Lachlan made a small snorting noise of agreement and made things ten times worse.

I could see her panicked indecision as she hovered between the cupboard and table, biscuits in hand.

“Actually you know what? I’d love some,” I fibbed.

“Oh, well then—”

“Hana.”

Fuck, I hated when he used his bark on her.

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