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I bolt upright, ignoring the painful tug in my shoulder. “No! God. No.”
Meg starts crying again, more silent tears streaming out of her raw eyes and dripping down her cheeks. She stumbles as she tries to put her shorts on backward. I lunge up to keep her from falling into a rack of free weights, but she shrieks like my fingertips burn her.
Forcing myself back a step, I shove my hands into my hair and grip it to keep from grabbing for her. Desperation is like a living creature, burrowing a pit into my stomach.
“Meg. Listen to me. Please.”
She finally gets her pants on and clutches her top to her bare chest, sobbing openly. “You aren’t telling me anything!” she cries. “Except that you liked another omega enough to—to?—”
She makes a pained sound that hits me straight in the black hole where my heart should be. “And she got pregnant?” Meg continues, her eyes full of the most honest, heart-wrenching betrayal I’ve ever seen. “You were with her during her—her—heat?”
God, the regret.
It hurts. It’s nausea, a dry mouth, and lungs that don’t remember how to expand. Panic, guilt, and a manic sort of helplessness.
What do I do?
What can I do except continue my suicidal stream of honesty? “It wasn’t her heat,” I rasp. “She was on suppressants. It was?—”
Still wrong.
It was still wrong. Because it wasn’t Meg.
I don’t have the wherewithal to figure out why what I did suddenly seems so obviously fucked up. At the time, I told myself it was no different from Archer volunteering at those clinics. No more shameful than Ronan’s bar hookups.
But that’s all just fucking wrong.
And I was wrong to think any of it. Looking into Meg’s eyes right now nails that particular truth into my middle.
“I’m sorry,” I say. Because it’s true. Nothing else has ever been this true. “Meg. I’m sorry I ever did that.”
She shakes violently, tremors visibly moving over her. Her palms press over her ears while her eyes fall shut, squeeze more tears out. The shrill whine that escapes her shatters the breath in my lungs.
“Don’t apologize to me now! Just tell me the rest of what happened so I can?—”
Leave.
She wants to leave me.
Didn’t I know that this would happen all along?
I expected it. I’ve been waiting for it. Preparing myself for it by refusing to get close to her.
So why is this gutting me?
I know I have to finish the story. She has a right to that, at least. I force air into my tattered lungs, my chest heaving.
“She came back around and told me she was pregnant. She told me it was mine.”
Because she somehow knew about my past. The bitch knew, and she figured out that the best way to get me to turn my back on the pack and choose her would be to pretend I’d knocked her up. The same way my dad carelessly impregnated my mother.
It would have worked, too. I can still recall the crushing, leaden weight of responsibility I felt. The determination to not repeat the past.
I almost didn’t exist. My mother told me every day how much she wished I didn’t. I knew I would never be able to live with myself if Katrina got rid of my child… or raised it with the kind of loathing my mom shoveled at me for sixteen years.
The words stick in my throat, burning. I swallow the story down, opting for the short version so I can let this scared, heartbroken, beautiful omega get the hell away from me and all my poison.
“Archer never trusted her. He insisted on running the tests himself. He figured out she wasn’t actually pregnant right away. Then we found out she wasn’t really a nurse, either. Everything she told me was a lie, but even with all the shit she made up, she had me by the balls. All she had to do was open her mouth and keep lying, but to a reporter. Ronan had to pay out for a non-disclosure agreement.”
