Page 8

8

C ayson

I kick my boots off, dropping my bare feet into the water and reveling in the cool sensation as Ezra sits silently beside me. All day, it has felt like my body has been running several degrees hotter. But it’s more than that. I feel like I’m walking on air. Like this is the best day of my life, but maybe tomorrow will be even better, as long as I have Faye by my side.

It’s a crazy feeling, but I can’t seem to shake it.

Normally, being with a woman once is enough to get the urge out of my system, satisfy the curiosity, scratch the itch. Usually, after having sex, any desire I have for the woman is gone, and I regard her like an old friend I’m not tempted to hang out with again. But after having Faye, I just feel like I got the smallest taste of a feast. There’s so much more to be had, and I’m not even through the appetizers.

It’s insatiable, the need to be near her, to taste her, to touch her, to have her.

I can’t stop thinking about the way she looks, the long, lithe way her body moves, the curve of her hip, how she laughs. I picture her long blonde hair tangling through my fingers and her big hazel eyes filled with desire as I thrust into her. I think of me biting her neck, the overwhelming desire to bite harder, to mark her as my mate. And just when I start to fall off that cliff, I think of her the morning after, and the sound of her crying. I remember holding her closely and wanting nothing in the world more than to keep her smiling and laughing forever.

A startling thought occurs to me when I think of how sensitive and kind she is—Faye would make a great mother. Not just a great mother, but a great wife. I can picture her smiling up at me every morning, while we drink our coffee, with little ones running around us like tiny monsters.

My thoughts turn to my father and my pack, and for the first time I don’t want to just run away. As son to the alpha, my place will be leading the pack one day. My father has done everything he can to push me away from that position, to keep the power himself, but maybe I’m done being pushed around. Maybe when I come back with Faye at my side, my father will have to step down a bit and allow me to do what I was born to do.

He’ll have to, with my omega. With the family we’d build together.

Whoa. I feel like my brain sizzles. I’ve never thought about something like that before. What’s happening to me?

Beside me, Ezra seems to be grappling with his own demons, having also kicked his boots off and silently joined me at the edge of the dock. I wonder if he’s also running hot after last night, and about how he feels about having shared the same woman together. We’d done this before a few times, but this was definitely different. This meant something. Seeing Faye’s attraction to Ezra didn’t bring me any jealousy, only made me want to please her further. Like a healthy sense of competition.

Like a work-place rivalry that leads to overall increased performance.

As much as he might want to deny it, last night was out of this world. It was different from any other sexual experience I’d ever had in my life. There was an emotional component that ran through the three of us that couldn’t be ignored.

After we’d slept with Faye, I’d laid awake for hours, my brain spinning. I’ve realized that I want Faye as my omega. There’s no denying it. But so does Ezra. The three of us… it just feels right. When I think about my future, I see the three of us together, a unit, a family.

But doing something like this is a risk. However, it’s a risk I think I might be willing to take. Leaving behind everything I thought I wanted and following a path leading into the unknown… Is Ezra willing to take that risk? Somehow, doing this without him feels wrong.

I turn the thoughts of her over and over in my head, until I realize I can’t keep them to myself anymore. It’s killing me that I don’t know what Ezra is thinking. Maybe he’s not having any of these thoughts. Maybe he doesn’t feel the same way about Faye as I do.

“Have you ever…thought about what it would be like to take an omega?”

Ezra’s eyes snap to mine, widening. I know why. I’m the last guy on the planet he thought would say something like this. Hell, before I came to The Selection I’d been so sure that I’d never want to spend my life with just one woman. Now, I can’t even remember what any other looks like. I’m consumed by Faye.

“ Any omega?” Ezra says, returning his gaze to the water. “No.”

I chew on that for a moment. He hasn’t thought about having just any omega, but maybe with Faye? Hell, of course that’s what he means. He’s just using a technicality not to say how he actually feels.

But this is a subject that needs to be handled gently. “I keep thinking that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. That maybe—maybe it would be good. To take Faye as an omega.”

Once again, Ezra looks at me, his eyes wide. “ Really ?” he asks, his eyes wandering over me, as though he’s looking for the mortal wound or head injury that would make me talk like this. “You’d be willing to give up the other women, the traveling, the freedom? Your ability to go where you want and do what you want? To take an omega?”

“To take Faye ,” I say, taking a shaky breath. “The truth is that I’ve been feeling the connection between us, and I can’t deny that it’s likely the mating bond growing stronger and stronger. Faye is the woman I’m meant to be with. Nothing even feels like a sacrifice, as long as I can be with her. I think that I would. I think we both would. For Faye.”

A fake relationship somehow became… fate. The three of us. Together.

Ezra lets out a long suffering sigh and scrubs his hands through his hair, letting his head fall forward so his chin is against his chest. “I just…I find all of that a little hard to believe,” Ezra says, and at first, I feel a flare of anger at the thought that he doesn’t think I’m capable of being that kind of alpha to my omega, but then I see the expression on his face.

I’ve seen this expression on his face before.

This isn’t about me and what I would or wouldn’t be able to sacrifice to take Faye as an omega. It’s about Katie. Whatever he says next, I can’t take it personally. Those inner demons are chewing him up and spitting him out. He needs a friend who understands that right now.

He continues, sounding angrier with each word he speaks. “Like, this whole time, if you were capable of settling down and staying in one place, wouldn’t you have done it? To help the pack? I always assumed that this was just how you were.”

I blink at him as he continues, waiting for him to get it all out of his system.

“We have commitments ,” he says, gesturing with his hands, and I don’t fail to notice the we . He’s thinking about himself. What it means if he ends up with Faye. “We can’t just make a choice like this out of nowhere. Like—everything going on with the crops, with the river, with the board elections—there’s too much going on back home to handle a new relationship, an omega.”

He’s kidding himself. I’ve spent a lot of time with his pack. If he brought home an omega, everyone would be thrilled. They’ve hated watching their golden boy struggling after the loss of Katie. The day she was found having drowned in that flash flood, a part of Ezra died that I think has stayed dead, until Faye. He could easily go back home with her on his arm and, for once, have someone at his side to help shoulder the burden of leadership.

Maybe with me at his side too.

“Hey, man,” I say, rubbing my hand on the back of my neck, but he keeps going.

“You wouldn’t know, because you’re never there. How could we possibly take on a mate? It’s so overwhelming as it is. How is my father going to react when I return home with yet another mouth to feed? And if we start having kids? It’s just—you don’t have the same expectations. You get to do whatever you want. So of course taking on an omega seems like a good idea.”

“Your people aren’t starving, Ezra. One more mouth to feed is nothing. And everyone would be happy if you found yourself an omega.”

He punches his fist into the wooden dock. “And what? We would all move into the town between our pack lands and just… rule together? With Faye at our side? Come on, man, you’d run at the first sign of responsibility. She’d get pregnant and you’d just–”

“Ezra, don’t take this out on me,” I tell him angrily, breathing hard.

I would never commit to Faye and abandon her. I would never walk away from our kid, and even he knows that. He knows after my shitty dad I’ve vowed to be the kind of father I always wanted. He’s saying these things to hurt me, not because he believes them.

“Take what out on you?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“I really don’t,” Ezra snaps, turning to me, his eyes looking wild. “Enlighten me.”

“You know,” I say, reaching out and putting a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s okay to have feelings for someone else.”

The statement hangs in the air between us, and Ezra lets out a long, shaky breath, his gaze rising up and out, over the water. I know he’s thinking about her, about how fucked up the entire situation was. Katie had just gone out for a swim. It was a day like any other day. She’d asked us to come, but we’d told her we couldn’t. It didn’t seem like it’d matter, and then the pack had come running, and Ezra lost everything. I was there with him, and I wish more than anything that he didn’t have to go through something like that. He’d loved her. He would’ve chosen her as his beta.

But sometimes, it’s just time to move on from the stuff that’s happened in the past.

“This isn’t how things are supposed to be,” Ezra says finally, his voice much quieter, having lost its previous edge. “I was supposed to come here out of duty, skate by, and return to my pack as soon as possible.”

“Yeah,” I concede, shaking his shoulder a bit before dropping my hand back to my side. "I was supposed to come here out of duty, skate by, and return to the South of France with my friends and avoid my pack as much as possible. But then we met Faye."

I look out over the water with him, thinking. The thought of leaving here without her, of going back to what my life was before, all the parties and travel and women, feels empty if I don’t have her by my side. Maybe this is what everyone has always asked of me. Maybe this is growing up.

I pick up a pebble and launch it out into the water. “But can you even imagine leaving here without her, man?”

When I glance over at him and see the expression on his face, the answer is obvious.