Page 15 of First (After the End #1)

THE DREAM

Sofia

Gabriel’s bed doesn’t smell like him because, soldier boy that he is, he never uses it.

The blankets that make his pallet, however, are another matter.

I drag them to the bed after hours of his absence, after trying and failing to open the automatic door and break out, and I quickly fall asleep wrapped in them.

As a cold Omega, my sense of smell has always been abysmal. No more acute than a Beta’s. And yet, Gabe’s scent stands out. It’s immediately distinctive, instinctively recognizable, incongruously familiar. A single sniff, and it embedded in the folds of my brain.

That may be the reason I dream of him.

We’re on the outside during a Low, one that has lasted for weeks, so long that the grass has had time to dry. The marsh has taken on a musty yellow color, and we lie in it, belly up, letting the sun warm our faces.

He is still the general. He has no time for this.

But he snuck away to be with me, and my heart thrashes around my chest as we laugh about someone named Bastian searching for him, about the flock of birds of prey that mistook the engineers for fish, about my colleague who almost mixed up narcotics and vitamins.

The sun paints his skin golden. He reaches out, his hand warm against the skin of my throat, tracing a scar I don’t remember getting, and it’s like a dam bursting, ferocious, tender, sending a rush of electric heat and love through my nerve endings.

With his palm open wide, he caresses up and down my spine, and I close my eyes to savor every second of his touch, to analyze it and commit it to memory and store it deep within me, where it will stay alive, pulsating, forever. For a while, we are silent.

“You can fall asleep,” he murmurs against my forehead. “I’ll keep watch.”

“Gabriel,” I murmur on the tail end of a yawn.

“Yes, love?”

“I’m glad you did what you did.”

He chuckles. Another kiss. “Me too, Sofia. Me too.”

When I wake up the following morning, I am wet between my legs.