Page 40 of Excess

“I think I will. Do you want to come? They have hot desks, you know.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Why would I want to do that?”

Maia laughed. “Social interaction. Isn’t that something omegas crave?”

“Not this omega, I assure you.”

“Have you been avoiding us?” Stasia asked while Ivy bounced on the balls of her feet next to her in the foyer of the Pilates studio.

Brigitte, the only one who’d been in class with me, shot me a guilty look. “I may have mentioned where we were going to be this morning.”

“We’ve got a table at Bite,” Ivy said excitedly, mentioning the eatery around the corner. “So we can go and discuss Saturday night. We wanted to do it sooner, but you’ve been so hard to get hold of.”

“I’m not really dressed for Bite,” I replied, scrambling for an excuse not to go.

“Nonsense, I love this set—you look cute. Plenty of people go straight to Bite after a workout. Come on! We’ve got a surprise for you,” Stasia added in a conspiratorial tone.

Great. I wondered what they’d told poor Hugo to rope him into this.

But no, it was far worse than that.

Instead of encountering a sheepish-but-amused Hugo, I found my parents sitting at the table at Bite, sipping their chai and watching me expectantly.

Well, Papa was watching me expectantly.

Mama looked on the verge of fainting, appalled that I’d come to brunch in my forest-green leggings and matching crop top.

“Sit, sit, sit,” Stasia said, gesturing for me to take the seat opposite my parents. “Have you had the chia bowl here? It’s to die for.”

“Sounds great,” I murmured, not having the mental capacity to even think about reading the menu.

The claustrophobic feeling I’d been trying to shrug off on Saturday night was amplified by a thousand now, with everyone looking at me, the weight of expectation bearing down heavily on me.

It had been surprisingly easy to reconcile the fact that the future I’d been prepared for wasn’t in the cards for me—I was hardly the first of the rich kids set to be dissatisfied with my life of immense privilege. I was just doing it a little later, rather than dropping out of uni and moving to Thailand to find myself after a week-long bender like many of my peers had.

Unfortunately, disappointing the people that I cared about was probably a more challenging ask now that my prefrontal lobe had finished developing and I understood consequences. In hindsight, I should have got all my screwing up out of my system when I was twenty and set the bar lower.

Papa ordered for me while Brigitte valiantly made small talk, her omega urge to soothe out in full force since she was paying the closest attention to me.

What was Blake doing right now?

He was up on the scaffold probably, hard at work. I’d mentioned that I wouldn’t mind if he used a speaker to listen to music, noticing that he didn’t wear headphones and wondering if he found them uncomfortable, but he’d declined. It was another thing that made him oddly attractive to me. I needed external stimuli to distract me from the relentless stream of noise in my head. Blake was content to just be.

“You can’t put it off any longer,” Ivy laughed, giving my hand on the table a light squeeze. “We want to hear all about Saturday!”

“You were there,” I pointed out mildly.

“We weren’t,” Papa countered. “But your friends have told me all about this Hugo fellow. Inika, he sounds very good. A nice young man.”

Mama nodded, absently rolling Om-Guard on her wrists and staring at my workout top like she could transform it into a modest silk blouse if she just glared at it hard enough.

“He is a nice young man,” I agreed, suspecting that Hugo was staring down the barrel of forty, but that would be considered young in Papa’s eyes. “We got along very well. We could be great friends I think.”

It was almost impressive, the way disappointment fell around the table like a veil descending. My ability to ruin the mood might have been my superpower.

“Friend?” Ivy repeated with a nervous giggle. “I mean, all the best matings are rooted in friendship…”

“You know that’s not what she meant,” Brigitte mumbled, stirring her tea a little more aggressively than necessary.

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