Page 120 of Incompatible

They talk to me for a moment, one of them clearly seems to be on something, and at one point he pulls a little pill from his pocket and shows it to me with a grin.

"Want to spice things up a bit?"

"No, thanks, I have a concert tomorrow and I need to be fully functional."

"You sure?" he asks with a tempting smile, and the other omega takes my arm.

I feel irritation rising, pull my arm back, and say,

"Sorry guys, thanks for the offer, but I gotta go…"

I weave through the crowd, leave the club, and return to my hotel room.

Yeah, this lifestyle definitely isn’t for me.

In the evenings I text Alex or we talk on videocalls.

The next days go by the same way, we travel with The Days, we play intros, and then there are parties I don’t attend, even though the guys from my band sure don’t skip them, and they’re not always in great shape the next morning. After a few times of struggling to wake them up for rehearsal, the atmosphere between us gets tense.

It finally blows up into an argument, with only Malik on my side because he’s the most responsible of them. I call them out for partying instead of focusing on why we’re here and trying to make a good impression, and I find out I’m stiff and boring and don’t understand what networking is, and that I should be doing it if I want a career instead of hiding like some prude in my room.

So the atmosphere between us is poisoned.

Malik is the only one who seems to get where I’m coming from, and he tries to cut back on partying, but the rest of them don’t give up even one night until the end of the tour. After the first week, during intro performances it’s basically just me and Malik, because the rest of the guys are useless, so we pick songs with simple backing tracks and play as a duo.

All of this only convinces me that a band is always a liability.

Five days before the end of the tour, I get a message from Alex saying he won his chess tournament. He sends me a short video and then a voice message.

"You won’t believe it, Bay… today for the first time I sensed someone else’s Allure. I think my glands matured. Throughout the whole tournament I kept feeling like everyone smelled awful. I didn’t understand what was going on, and then when I got my award there was no doubt, an alpha and an omega congratulated me, their scents were really strong and completely different, it wasn’t perfume. I think this is it…!"

I listen to the message several times, realizing that maybe I have something similar to tell him, because for the last week I’ve been subtly sensing the scent of my bandmates, of the tech crew, of the fans we signed autographs for, partly blaming it on the fact that I never had such close contact with big groups of people before, and also on the fact that my bandmates weren’t exactly the cleanest.

I hesitate to tell him, deciding to wait a few days to test it and be sure.

The next day after the concert there’s a short meet-and-greet with fans in one of the hotel buildings, The Days sign their albums, and there are photos and merch with us too, and plenty of people want our signatures.

That’s when I start focusing on the scents of other people, learning to differentiate them, studying their personal notes.

And yeah, something is definitely happening, alphas don’t smell attractive to me, a lot of them actually stink, omegas smell much nicer but I still feel a kind of pushback, but the biggest thing is that I can’t sense any unique note from betas at all, just cosmetics or regular sweat or, at most, something super vague.

The difference is striking to me. Of course I still can’t catch the scent of every alpha or omega, some of them use suppressants, especially the staff, but something is shifting. There’s definitely a change.

The last three days of the tour are an explosion of smells.

They hit me from every direction and most people reek to me. I feel like wearing nose plugs because it’s so overwhelming. I remember reading about this once, how the first days of gland activation can be almost traumatic, the sensory overload so intense it can lead to headaches, nausea, and dizziness.

I send Alex a text.

"I think we really are synced, because I’ve started smelling things too and it’s almost too much. Honestly, I get why so many people use suppressants…"

Alex replies with a row of exclamation points.

"I can’t wait to scent you… Grapefruit!"

I stare at that message, feeling a strange twist in my stomach. I really hope everything will be okay.

On the last night before the return trip I can’t sleep. I toss around, stare at the ceiling, and my whole body feels tense, like it’s bracing itself for something difficult.