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Woke up in the night and she was reading on her kindle

Made me think about courting gifts for her. Been a long time since I worried about that shit.

A long time.

I haven’t paid that much attention to Scott’s personal life, but I’ve heard the gossip that inevitably made its way through the office grapevine. “A fuckboy,” one senior partner called him on the eve of her retirement. She’d been particularly bitter, and was clearly happy to burn all her bridges. “A new beta in his bed every week,” another had said, not bothering to beat around the bush. “But never any omegas.”

Never any omegas sounds about right. After Elaine, I promised myself I wouldn’t entertain even a single night with an omega outside of a controlled heat clinic. Now here we are.

We can talk about it later.

Message me when you’re in Whangārei

On the weekends the used bookstore always has a steady stream of customers filling its rabbit warren of cramped aisles, and today is no different. I walk past the front desk, a faded RING FOR ASSISTANCE sign taped next to an old school silver bell, and duck my head under a low-hanging beam, ignoring the musty smell of the old books and following my nose until I round the first corner. There she is.

Amokura crouches in front of a shelf marked Sci Fi in the terrible handwriting of the store’s elderly owner, a stack of books beside her, lost in the task of shelving them all, her straight black hair falling like a curtain around her. I kneel down beside her and she jumps, brown eyes wide for a moment before her face splits into a grin. “Dad! What the fuck?”

“Kia ora, Bubs.” She leans into my open arms, and I kiss the top of her head, her sweet floral scent filling my nose. I want to tell her to be more aware of her surroundings, that if I can sneak up on her like that then what about the next alpha that comes along, but I bite my tongue because hugs in public have become a rarity since she hit puberty, and the last thing I’m going to do is ruin a cute moment. “How’s work going?”

“Just the same as usual.” The bell at the front counter rings with perfect timing and she rolls her eyes. “Busy.”

Busy isn’t busy at all in this place, and I’m glad for it. She first picked up this job two years ago, the summer after she turned sixteen, and it’s been good for her and good for me, knowing that she’s had a regular little income in a safe workplace down in the local shops. I follow her back to the front, reading the New Zealand History shelf, resisting the urge to buy the old books that I know for a fact are filled with incorrect, outdated, racist information, just so I can toss them in the bin.

It would be an act of public service if I did. Nobody else needs to read a bad take from the sixties about the British ‘winning’ at Ruapekapeka.

“You look like you’re plotting something,” Amo says, popping up at my shoulder.

“Kāhore. Maybe. How much is Ron charging for these, anyway?” I pull one out, opening the front cover, and balk at the $16 written in faint pencil on the front page. “Fuck no.”

“Shhh,” Amo says, rolling her eyes and taking the book from me, sliding it back in place. “Don’t say that in front of the customers!” she whispers angrily. “Jeez.”

“It’s full of lies.”

“Yeah I know. I know. No one buys them, anyway. I always recommend these ones instead.” She points to the shelf above, where I recognise all the authors. Aroha Harris, Michael King, James Belich, Ranginui Walker, Anne Salmond. Good. “Why are you here?”

“‘Cause I wanted to say hi to my daughter. That okay?”

“I guess,” she shrugs cheekily. “But seriously…”

“I have to go up north for a bit. I know you already said you were busy today because you picked up the extra shift, but I probably won’t be back down until the weekend before Christmas. Sorry.”

“Is it for work?”

I wasn’t sure what I was going to tell her, but her question makes it easy enough to lie, and while I feel bad about it, at this stage it’s simpler. “Yeah. Last minute stuff, I had to push back my leave a bit.” She doesn’t know enough about what I do to know that it makes no sense—I’ve travelled for work before, but always south—and nods at my answer.

“Okay. I was gonna go camping next weekend, anyway.”

“With who?”

“Bella H., Bella F., Isabella—Don’t laugh!—Te Aroha and Jaz are coming, too. Mum already said yes.”

I turn my laugh into a fake cough, trying to be mature about her friends’ names. Amo was born during the height of Twilight fever, and it shows in Aotearoa’s population statistics among eighteen year olds. One year there were five Jacobs in her class. “Mum is meant to tell me these things.”

“Yeah, well she’s going to. But also, I’m an adult now so it’s not really your choice.”

She’s not. She’s my baby. She was born yesterday. I can still remember when she took her first steps as if it happened this morning.

“Mum was still eighteen when I was born,” she adds.