Page 17 of Finding the Forward: Part One
“Well, she’s a little tall to be an omega,” I smirked.
“I support this. Does she like to share?” Dean gave me a lusty wink.
Would she? Verity might not even like me that way. I was simply someone to soothe a shitty day. Oh, how I hoped she’d worked everything out.
Jonas shook his head. “Let’s find her first. While I want to be supportive, AJ’s right. We need to be careful.”
AJ’s brows furrowed. “Also, a connection doesn’t mean it will give you whatever boost you’re looking for.”
“True. What else can I do to stay on the team other than train harder?” I raked a hand through my hair.
“You’ve been pushing yourself hard,” Jonas replied as we pulled into the parking garage. “Don’t hurt yourself and end up on the injured list.”
AJ grimaced again. “Yes, let’s not do that.”
“I have to do something. I can’t leave you again.” My chest grew tight.
“We’ll figure it out,” Jonas soothed, parking his car. “Let’s go have a drink. After a game like that, we deserve it.”
Chapter Five
Verity
“Mercy. Breakfast,” I called from our cute little kitchen, which was done in yellows and chickens.
We’d filled the common areas of our apartment with cheerful colors and plants. Many, many more plants than the parents ever let me have inside. They spilled out onto the fire escape. It almost made up for not having a backyard garden.
Mercy and I had worked hard to make our place comfortable since for once,wecould decorate howwewanted.
Our house, our rules.
No parents yelling at us. No littles needing our attention. No one borrowing our stuff or telling us we hadn’t cleaned up enough. Our own rooms.
Pure bliss.
We’d been througha lotof changes in the past four months. Most for the better, others bittersweet.
My coffee sloshed on my hand as I slid into my seat. Getting up to get a towel seemed like a lot of work before coffee. I’d come a long way in the last four months–a combination of luck, alpha healing, and sheer will.
But cleaning before coffee wasn’t happening. Licking the wake-up juice from my hand, I watched Mercy grab a towel from the counter.
“Now, that’s how you do it.” Mercy threw me a dish towel and plopped down in the other chair at the table. Her light brown hair was in two Dutch braids, with her usual colorful scrunchies at the ends. She wore a sports bra and some leggings, with a cropped tank, showing off her tanned muscles.
Mercy was five-foot-eight, still growing, and could bench more than most male alphas. While she hadn’t gone full-blown alpha yet, her spiced plum scent indicated that she was in that ‘young alpha’ stage. No doubt it would come soon.
I still had a few inches on her, and it probably would stay that way. We had different biological parents, but they were all part of the same pack. Mine weretall,even my beta mama.
My little sister favored our omega dad. But there was a lot of her mom in her, too, like her brown eyes and hair, the sharpness in her face, and her more classically alpha body type.
We finished breakfast, and she put the dishes in the dishwasher. I stashed my laptop in my backpack and slid into my sneakers because I didn’t have cute shoe clearance yet. Okay, my sneakers were far from ugly, but they weren’t the sort of shoes I used to wear daily.
“It’s our day to bring snacks.” Mercy went into the kitchen and made herself a smoothie.
“It’s in the fridge.” I knew from the moment the team ‘assigned’ me days to bring snacks that they were hazing me. ButIenjoyedit. I was used to making them for my sibling’s teams. It was a good way to quell that alpha need to provide.
In turn, I was hazingthem–seeing how long it took them to admit that they’d made it up.
Coat and backpack on, I grabbed the pink forearm crutch I used for stability when we were out and about. Mercy grabbed her duffle and the snack tote.
