Alien Desire by Hannah Haze

Chapter fourteen - Emma

My irritation from our discussion about love, about the treatment of Omegas on his planet, lingers. I can’t shake it.

Even when he lies beside me in the evening and drags me towards him, the doubt is still there, niggling at the back of my mind. A little voice in my ear reminds me he can’t love me, reminds me of the rules of his world. A world where females are claimed and owned.

Why do I care? Why does it bother me so much? I don’t want his love or his future. I don’t need it.

Yes, I enjoy his kisses and being held in his arms. But it doesn’t mean anything. Just a lonely girl needing companionship, craving touch, like a flower needs sunlight and water.

I am not ready to settle down. My adventure across the universe had only just begun. I didn’t train for all those years only for it to end so quickly. There are still so many places I want to go and things I want to do.

But no matter how many times I tell myself this, how many times I remind myself we’ve known each other for two weeks, the irritation hovers around me like a bad smell.

This frustration swamps my body too. I am all hot and bothered. Snapping at Sheila for no reason. Pushing Fluffy away when he comes to sit on my lap.

I want this feeling gone. I want to clear my head. Get a hold of my senses. I want air and space.

Being around Tor is too much of a temptation. It is too easy to fall back into his arms and his kisses, and forget the reasons for my caution.

I need to get away.

“I’m going out to check on the mast.” It is the structure by which our communications are shot into space and it lies several miles beyond the wreckage of my ship. There is no real reason to inspect it.

“We will go after breakfast,” Tor says.

“You don’t need to come. I’m going now.” I begin to collect a few supplies — the medical pack, a blaster, some food — and pack them in my satchel.

He follows me around the station. “No,” he says, “we go together.”

“I’m going alone.”

“I will not let you go alone. It is not safe.”

“You’re not letting me?” I scoff and shake my head, making it abundantly clear I’m not asking for his damn permission. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. That’s not how this works.” I gesture between us.

“It is my duty as your Alpha to ensure your welfare.”

“You’re not my Alpha.”

He winces. “You let every man kiss you and hold you in bed then?” he asks with confusion.

“There are no men here.”

He glares at me. “This is foolish and irrational. Why do you wish to go alone? It is dangerous. You would have been killed out there on the ice if it were not for me.”

“I survived six months on this planet alone without you.”

“But you are not … well.”

His eyes flit over me with concern.

“I’m perfectly fine.” The fall into the ice cold liquid hasn’t caused me any damage. My irritation is not an illness, but it is growing with this conversation. I am uncomfortable in my skin, itchy all over, hot and bothered. I need to get out. The only illness I have is cabin fever.

He takes a step closer, reaching for my wrist. “It is not safe. We will go together.”

“No,” I snap, shaking off his grip and tugging on a snow jacket. I’ve been on my own for ten years. I don’t need him. I don’t need anyone.

I head towards the shed, and he follows me there too.

“Omega,” he growls, “stay.”

The command has me freezing on the spot. “Don’t do that,” I hiss, struggling against my instinct to obey.

“Emma, please don’t go,” he says more softly, “you’re … you’re …”

“I’m what?”

“You’re going into…” His eyes fall away to the floor and he doesn’t continue.

Fluffy slouches into the shed, giving Tor a wide berth. He looks up at me with large eyes and whines.

Not him too.

Huffing, I snap on my goggles and jump up on the seat of the quad bike.

“I’ll be back in a few hours,” I tell them, trying to ignore the look of concern in Tor’s eyes, and the look of betrayal in Fluffy’s, looks that have my heart swelling.

What is the use in that? What is the use in my heart falling for Tor when his can never do the same? When all he wants is to own me? To start an Omega collection of his own.

Fighting the urge to glance back at him, I rev the engine and skate away. The station is but a mere dot in the distance when I realise I’m crying. It’s my irritation and my frustration. That is all. I don’t care. Not really. What does it matter if he can never love me? What does it matter if we can never have the type of relationship I want?

Stupid girl.

I inhale deeply, the frigid air stinging my lungs and a sob rattling in my chest.

Stupid girl.

I take a wide berth of my ship’s wreckage, not wanting to face the dead today, and press on over the flat landscape towards the mast glinting on the horizon. The sky beyond is dark and heavy, a threatening turbulence of grey.

A storm.

I never checked the weather before I left.

Stupid girl indeed.

I’m too far out from the station to make it back before this storm descends. My only choice is to press on and hope I reach the mast in time.

Lightning crackles in the distance, the first I’ve seen on this planet, and it’s followed by great rumbles of thunder, shaking the ground and cracking the air.

Soon the sky turns gloomy above me, its fierce weight pressing down on my skull. When it finally splits, sheets of icy bullets rain down on my head. I bunk down, bracing myself against the assault, eyes locked on the mast.

By the time I reach the mast, I’m battered and bruised. But despite the plummeting temperature, I’m raging hot. Dashing off the bike, I swing my satchel over my shoulder and skid across the ice towards the mast.

The door is frozen shut and I tug and kick and pull at it until finally it gives with a violent swing and I’m propelled backwards onto my arse. The door flaps about in the violent wind and I hurry to catch it before it slams shut. Then I hurry through into the base.

It’s just one tiny room, barely bigger than a cupboard, with no light and no electronics. A ladder on the wall disappears into darkness and I guess somewhere up there is the electronics and the control panel. I’m not going to look. There was no reason to come other than to escape the station, and now I’m trapped here in this cold, dark room while I wait for the storm to pass.

My skin is still uncomfortable, my flesh still burning. The back of my neck itches like an army of ants is marching over it and my gut smarts. My journey here has done nothing to remove my irritation.

I slide down the wall and hug my knees to my chest.

My heart aches in my chest and I rub at it, then roll up my sleeves and scratch at my skin, drawing fine lines of red down my arms. Between my legs throbs and I rub my thighs together.

What is wrong with me?

I miss my mum.

I miss talking to her. I miss her advice.

I wonder what she’d make of all this. I try to picture her face and imagine her voice, try to conjure up the words she’d say. Would she tell me I’m a fool? Laugh at me? I don’t think she would ever do that.

Or perhaps she’d tell me to follow my instincts? To grab what I want by the scruff of the neck?

I simply don’t know. My memory of her seems frayed and old. I was so young when she died. I hardly knew her really. And so I can’t conjure up her words no matter how hard I try. All I remember is the warmth of her arms and her soft voice as I drifted off to sleep.

The storm lasts a day and the meagre food supplies I brought for what I thought would be a few hours’ trip at the most, are not enough. Soon, I’m hungry, weak and even more miserable.

The hours pass creepingly in the gloom, only the sounds of the raging storm to keep me company; that and my thoughts.

Time to think.

Lots of time to think.

Yet, as the howling wind dies away, and bright sunlight filters through the gaps in the door, I am no clearer. No more sure how I feel or what I want.

I should never have kissed him. It has unlocked a storm of my own, and this one has no end in sight.

But one thing I know for sure is that I miss him. We’ve been apart for only a day, I’ve known him for little more than fourteen. It’s crazy, illogical. But I do.

When I emerge from my lonely prison, I find the bike on its side, although otherwise undamaged. Huffing and puffing, I finally right it and am relieved when it starts on the first go.

The snow is all pocketed and the landscape altered, the result of the fierce storm. I find my shipwreck almost buried beneath snow, only a few remaining pieces of twisted metal protruding from the newly moved landscape.

How many other ships have crashed here, then? And are now buried beneath snow drifts or lost in the depths of the ice lakes? Perhaps we were not the first? I am relieved though. The guilt I felt for months, leaving my friends out there in the elements, is gone.

The planet has buried them for me.

This journey home feels endless. If I was anxious to get away before, now I am a million times more desperate to return.

And then I see him in the distance, a large figure trudging through the snow, a smaller fuzzy one bounding by his side.

We are still miles from the station. They must have set out before the storm had finished. My heart swells, and I press down hard on the accelerator, willing the distance to lessen between us.

Time slows. The stretch that separates us refuses to shrink, and I kick at the bike as if it were a horse, geeing it onwards. After an age, I’m close enough to see his face, his stoic look, his determined stride.

He was coming for me. He’s still coming for me.

I jump from the bike and sprint towards him. Fluffy races ahead, leaping up to try to lick my face, and I crouch down and ruffle his head.

Tor stops, waiting his turn, ready to speak, but I don’t wait to hear. I jump up and run to him, flinging my arms around his neck and squeezing him tight. For a fraction of a second he freezes, his arms limp by his sides, and then he wraps them around me and pulls me in close.

Once again, we don’t need words. The strain of his arms, the pressure of his hands, tells me he never wants to let me go.

“I came to find you,” he tells me simply, and I can hear in his voice how tired he is. How long has he been out here searching for me?

“I got trapped by the storm.”

“I was worried you hadn’t made it to the mast. Worried you were lost out here.” There’s more than just exhaustion in his tone, deep relief and desperation too.

“No, I made it, I was safe. I left as soon as the storm passed.”

He cradles my head, pressing it into his chest, and through the layers of clothes I hear that familiar beat of his unloveable heart. “Don’t do that again, Omega. Never again.”

Why does he care? Because I am some precious find he doesn’t want to lose? I step backwards, the warm sensation that had been soaring through my veins cooling rapidly. “Let’s get back,” I tell him.

He insists on driving and, although I can see he is weary, I don’t argue. I think I might lose my mind if he were to encase his hands around my waist. Far better that I hold on to him.

Back at the station, I head straight for the bathroom and lock myself in. I don’t know how to act around him. I know he wants me to sit on his lap and kiss him, but I don’t know if I can, if it is too dangerous.

He has not told me in words that he wishes to own me but his actions, his manner, suggest that he does. Do I want to be owned? I’m so confused and my body is becoming increasingly needy for his touch. It would be easy to succumb to his commands, submit to his will.

So I shower, letting the frigid water race over my body, hoping it will cool my strangely warm body and remove the irritation on my skin. I try, I really do try, not to imagine the water gliding over my skin is his hands, his mouth. But my imagination, my stupid imagination, wants to punish me.

And when I step out in fresh clothes, I can’t help blushing when I see him busy at work on the computer. If he could only see the images flitting through my mind.

I invent jobs to keep myself busy and away from him, cleaning, surveying, logging, rearranging. But I sense his glittering gold gaze on me wherever I go and my own eyes betray me, floating back to him every few minutes.

He is more beautiful than I’d allowed myself to acknowledge when I was stuck out there in the storm. I’d downplayed it in my mind. And my feelings too. Told myself I didn’t feel this pull towards him, that he didn’t make my skin warm in anticipation.

I am a liar though. Because the pull is real, his beauty is real. I am in danger of falling for him. I see it so plainly now. Falling in a way I have never done before.

So I keep my distance. For the rest of the day I avoid him and he seems to know it, not pushing for my company, not demanding to know what’s wrong. He leaves me to my fussing as I tug out the blankets and the pillows in the dormitory and remake the beds, order things differently and more to my liking. He observes me silently, but he doesn’t interrupt.

We circle each other like a planet and its moon, unable to pull too far away, too frightened to come too close, but aware of the other’s existence, of this force that binds us together.

It’s futile though.

Although I succeed in staying away, by nightfall I am back in bed with him, tangled in his arms and lost in his kisses.