Good Girl by Sam Hall
Chapter 27
I crept out into the house when I heard Mum’s voice, hoping it was those really annoying Jehovah’s Witness dudes who wouldn’t take no for an answer, not Orion’s dad, who was likewise, but about selling Mum’s invention to him so he could mothball it. What I didn’t expect to see was a tearful Brendan’s mum on our doorstep.
“Mrs Slattery, I understand your concerns, but Cyn—”
“Cyn what?” I asked, walking over to the door. “Mum, you’ve gotta let me make these calls. Hi, Charlene. Did you want to come in for some tea?”
Mum shot me a dark look over her head as Charlene nodded, wiping her nose with a pretty but ineffectual lace fringed handkerchief. Lady’s ones seemed to have room for like, one nose blow and that was it.
“That would be lovely,” she replied. “Milk with one.”
“Mum?” I asked as I moved around the kitchen, making the tea.
“No, thank you. If you’re OK on your own…” I shot her a look, her hands going up. “I apologise, Mrs Slattery, but I need to get on with some work. I’ll leave you in my daughter’s capable hands.” Mum silently communicated ‘come and get me if this gets too much’ with her steady gaze and then exited stage left.
“Are you…?” I said, walking over with the teas and a packet of biscuits tucked under my arm. “Of course you’re not OK.” My omega senses had been slow to come back online, being almost bruised by the process of mating Rhys. I pushed his name to one side, not wanting my feelings to get in the way of this. Charlene might be Brendan’s mum, but she had been nice to me. “Um…you know I can’t help with the boys? We…split up.”
And then she did something that shocked me. Her hand slid across the table, taking mine and giving it a squeeze. Such a mumsy thing to do, even though my mum rarely did.
“I know, love. Are you OK? Those boys… If they hurt you…” Her voice turned into a low growl that made me smile.
I took a long breath in and out, then sipped my tea, finally bringing my focus up, meeting her eyes. I found that easier to do recently, with all the practise Kai and I had been doing. It made me realise why omegas don’t. Eyes communicated emotion so well, and hers were brimming with tears, red-rimmed from doing so often, her peaches and cream complexion splotchy. I could see and feel her misery.
“Emotions are contagious for a reason,” the new therapist had said. “How can we experience sympathy and empathy, if they aren’t? We’d be locked up in our own heads, stewing in our own feelings, looking out into a world that recognised none of them. That would be incredibly lonely. The wellness gurus today tend to treat negative emotions like a pathology, like a disease. There is no life without anger, sadness, or pain. Our fear comes from how easily our own emotional states can be derailed by someone else, and this is doubly so for omegas.” She smiled gently. “You are the emotional sponges of our world, but you can choose what you soak up. I’ll show you some strategies for dealing with this.”
And so I imagined a clear wall between Charlene and me. I could still see her, perceive her pain, and empathise with it, but it wasn’t mine. This was just a simple visualisation to remind me that I didn’t need to take stuff on.
“They did,” I replied, then frowned. That was blunt, but I needed to be. I couldn’t prop her up with false hope. “I thought we were building something, that they wanted me to be a part of their pack. That they cared about me, wanted me there for me. I’ve been…”
My voice trailed away as I remembered that night at the first Omega Ball. I’d started having nightmares about that again. I’d thought it would be about them, Rhys and his pack, but the closer I got to the ball, the more shitty dreams I had. Over and over, that dark room, that belt buckle, that hand on my shoulder, pushing me down. My new therapist thought maybe it was me focussing on the core of my fear of alphas, not the most recent bad example.
“People have tried to use me and hurt me before. I deliberately avoided alphas, the ball, everything to do with the mating process. I just hung out here, reading and training with Kai. If I went out, it was always with betas, not alphas. If I thought an alpha would be at a place, I wouldn’t go.”
Charlene’s fingers tightened around mine, the tears welling further, one falling free, wiped away by her hankie.
“This was my year to be brave, to face my fears and find a mate. I thought I did, but…”
“So that’s what happened?” Her jaw tensed and she looked angry, but she patted my arm to make sure I knew I wasn’t the focus of that. “Those bloody boys… I always worried for Bren. The others, they don’t seem to treat him quite right—but you don’t need to hear about that,” she corrected herself. “Bren’s gone off the rails, Cyn. That’s why I came. My hubby will kill me when he finds out, but I can’t see my boy go downhill like this and not step in. This isn’t your problem. If he did the dirty on you, then maybe he deserves it.”
She shook her head sharply.
“He’s been drinking, fighting, getting himself constantly into trouble. We forced him to come around and have dinner with the family, and he was a mess. He told us he couldn’t, but…” She shook her head. “He was drunk when he arrived and just got drunker. Ended up fighting with his brother, giving him a black eye. The kids, we shielded them as much as possible, but…”
Her hands trembled as she wiped her eyes furiously.
“If you could just tell me what happened, I promise never to darken your door again. I tried to talk to every one of those boys, and none will answer my calls. I went to that bloody club of theirs and got denied entry. I know that my boy is falling apart, and I don’t even know why. That’s why I came. It’s not right, I shouldn’t be pestering you. You’re hurting.”
Her face creased up at that, the clear wall I’d envisaged in my mind starting to wobble, but I just let out a breath. It didn’t matter, I could do this. I’d talked so much about what had gone down, it was as if it had happened to someone else now. So I patted her arm, took a deep breath in, and then told her.
“They…? He…?”
Charlene hadn’t gotten what she’d hoped for, or more than she’d expected. Her tears had dried for a moment as she just stared, trying to process. I thought we would be done now. I felt hollow, like I did every time I talked about this, but the super hot, super intense feelings I used to experience had dulled down. I’d wear scars from this forever. All of them had left their marks on me, since the first time I saw them, and I’d come to accept that, but scars weren’t necessarily a bad thing. My therapist had helped me see that they were monuments to who I was, who I’d become. So I got to my feet, bending to grab the empty cups, when Charlene jerked up from her seat and wrapped her arms around me.
Mum was not an especially demonstrative person. She wasn’t cold per se, but just…reserved. Everything seemed to sit under the surface, never to rise up. So Charlene felt like a cyclone of intensity and she’d swallowed me up, but as I fought to catch my breath, the waves of her emotions hitting me hard, I found myself in the eye.
She was upset for me, Brendan’s mum. Angry at her son, frustrated that no one would talk to her about it, and then desperate to see if there was a way to put the broken pieces together.
I knew that feeling. God, did I know that feeling. My teeth ground down when I felt it in her because it awakened the sleeping beast inside me again. Pain had dulled, so had anger and fear, but this… A fucking yearning rose up, so damn ready to put all the parts of what had happened on the table to see if they could be rearranged, tweaked in some way to create a different outcome, one where I didn’t stare out the window, searching for a sign of them, jonesing for just a glimpse of him.
I’d asked them to stop coming around, and Mum had threatened legal action when they didn’t respect that. The other homeowners on our street supported her threats enthusiastically, but there was something that I didn’t much like to admit. A part of me died inside every day they didn’t camp out on my lawn, despite everything I did to try and haul myself out of this pit. That was what heartbreak was, I realised. Nowhere near as poetic as they made it sound in songs, it was the slow, painful death of hope.
“I am so, so sorry, Cyn. If I ever… If I’d known… You’re so sweet, and he…” Her babbling stopped, and something hard rose instead. “I’m going to go down to that club and give that boy a piece of my mind. This is not how I raised him. You look after yourself, love. Don’t you pay those silly boys any mind. Find yourself a good alpha, one who will treat you right. I…”
I saw it, the moment the all too familiar hopelessness rose and swallowed her whole.
“I thought that they would do the right thing by you. That this would be the start of something beautiful.” She rubbed her hands up and down my arms, trying to soothe me or her, I couldn’t tell, but she stepped away, visibly pulling herself together. “Thank you for taking the time to tell me. I should go. His father will be ropeable.”
The house seemed emptier, colder somehow after she left, but I could still feel the warmth of her touch long after she’d pulled away. I just stood there, staring at the windows, seeing every blade of grass, it felt like, unable to do anything else. To move was to act, and that need, to have my mate, to have them here beside me, to replace Charlene’s warmth with theirs, was so acute, I could barely breathe. But breathe I did, in little sharp pants, until the urge to stride out that door, catch an Uber, and end up out the front of their club with Charlene started to fade.
Things had settleddown for a while. I’d caught my breath, thought I was back on track again, but really, this had been just a pit stop. Wheels were in motion, and they began to turn again, rolling towards their inevitable conclusion.