Page 18 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

“Just the same as I feel about you constantly cheating on me.”

“You’re overreacting.”

I laughed. “Go on, then, say the thing you always say. What are alphas? Bastards?”

“They are all the same.”

I sat on the edge of the bed. “I can’t do this anymore, Damien. I can’t help that I’m an omega, or that you’re a beta.”

“You’re twisting it.”

“Whatever makes you happy.”

Behind him a door banged, and a group of guys laughed at something. “Come back to campus,” he said. “I’ll look after you.”

“Look after me.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know precisely what you mean, and the answer is no. You called me a bitch minutes ago and now you’re offering to see me through my heat. Do you hear yourself at all?”

“I’m trying to help.”

“You’re trying to win. Goodbye, Damien.”

“Marli, don’t you dare hang up on me.”

I hung up.

The silence afterward was enormous. It lasted four seconds. Then he rang again, and I went into the settings and blocked his number for forty-eight hours.

The phone went quiet, and my hand shook around it.

“There,” I whispered as I stared at myself in the dark window. “Look at you. Almost emotionally competent.”

But a cramp drove me to my knees.

The towel slipped. I caught the mattress with one hand and pressed the other between my thighs, desperate for anything that would answer the ache. My body clenched around nothing.

I crawled onto the bed and picked up the toy on the bed, slid it over my slick-coated pussy before I drove it inside. “Fuck!” I gasped into the pillow as the knot at the base pressed against my clit, and my mind went to a place it only went to in these moments. Right before the fireworks crackled and my orgasm hit hard.

But unlike other times, the ache came back deeper and angrier than before. My scent poured through the room, violet gone lush and shameless around blackberry and whiskey until I couldn’t tell what was mine and what my memory had stolen out of the hallway.

I crawled around on the bed as I pulled out the second dildo, and then the third.

By the time I fell back against the pillows with sweat cooling on my chest, I was close to crying from sheer frustration. My body didn’t want pressure. It wanted skin, and scent, and the answer it had smelled three doors down.

I curled onto my side around the ache. Nobody puts this part in the leaflets. Heat gets explained in diagrams and intake protocols, as though biology were a tidy guest who knocks before entering. Nobody mentions that it can feel like loneliness made physical, or that a body can decide safety has a smell and then punish you for refusing to follow it.

I should call Maeve.

The thought arrived and hurt. She would answer, of course she would, and use her sarcastic tone while calling me something insulting with love tucked underneath it. She’d tell me to stop being dramatic, but she would send help. She might come herself.

But I had wanted this. Boston, university, a name that arrived without my father’s expectations attached. A normal girl with a normal boyfriend and a normal future in law or business, even if my sketchbooks kept multiplying in drawers.

I’d wanted freedom, and now I had it. A room full of it, three expensive toys, one blocked ex-boyfriend, and two alphas down the corridor who had looked at me like something they were working hard not to touch.

I sat up. The room tilted, then steadied.