Page 182 of Incompatible

I’m lost in a fog, confused and dazed, with no real purpose and no direction.

So I simply accept that Dereck has pulled away from me for good.

On Tuesday things get more and more dangerous, because during the first lecture I notice the looks from two alphas who attend it, one of them Tobias, Oswald’s friend.

Their looks are strange, uncertain, as if they weren’t sure whether they were imagining the scent they were picking up from me, a scent that must be slowly intensifying.

During lunch, unfortunately for me, Oswald himself notices me, and when he passes by, his face changes, he crinkles his nose slightly, then turns around and walks straight toward me and sits down at my table without a hint of hesitancy.

"Are you sure it’s a good idea for you to be on campus right now?"

"What are you talking about?" I snap, pretending to be clueless.

"Do you not see what’s happening?" He gestures around. "You’re lucky that there are barely any alphas in your department, but they exist on this campus, and if you keep wandering around the cafeteria and the hallways, someone is going to approach you."

"What the hell is this all about?" I insist stubbornly.

"Your scent changed. In my opinion you’ll enter heat in a day or maybe even a few hours."

"And how do you know that!"

"I’m an alpha…" he says, almost irritated, as if I were blind or stupid.

I just hiss under my breath and look away.

"Most omega students here already have gone through their first heat. It’s normal for someone to start giving off the pheromones that signal a rising heat. It’s an almost daily occurrence here, but people deal with it discreetly; nobody parades around with an active heat scent."

He’s right, most of my peers have already gone through this, I just never paid attention to it, because as an omega the scent of another omega’s starting heat doesn’t stir anything in me, so I simply ignored it.

"Leave me alone, it’s a private matter," I mutter as I lean lower over my bowl of broccoli soup and slurp it ostentatiously.

"For now but it will quickly progress. I’m just telling you that you should go home and deal with it however you want, but staying on campus isn’t safe, and on top of that it’s against the college rules, which clearly state that omegas entering heat can’t cause public disruption. In other words, the only option is isolation."

Oswald tilts his head slightly, watching me expectantly.

He’s right, that rule exists to protect omegas, to keep them safe from a potential group assault, but I only answer with a proud lift of my chin.

"It’s none of your business, you don’t need to worry about me."

Oswald leans a little closer, his pale eyes focusing on my face.

He is absolutely not my type, so doughy-looking, the complete opposite of what I find attractive.

Instead of beautiful dark green eyes he has pale blue ones, his nose slightly upturned and probably once broken, and hisface carries the marks of past acne that healed into small scars. On top of that he has this idiotic style of wearing brown checkered shirts and wide corduroy pants, nothing about that vibe appeals to me.

I finish eating and stand up.

"I have to go, I still have two more lectures."

"If you want, I’ll walk you home after them, you really shouldn’t be spreading your heat pheromones everywhere."

I don’t respond and walk away in lofty silence.

But I quickly start regretting pushing him away, because in the next lecture there are four alphas from another department, and for the entire duration they keep glancing in my direction, and when the lecture ends I see one of them stand up and head toward me, so I bolt from the room and hide in the bathroom.

Unfortunately, I still have one more lecture, and I know there will be several alphas there too, thankfully different from those I just ran away from.

When I enter the lecture room, I see with disappointment that the alphas are sitting in different spots, which means there’s no real place where I can be far from them. I’m within the reach of someone’s sense of smell no matter where I sit. Not that it makes any difference, alphas have an incredible sense of scent and can detect a heat smell from over a thousand feet away in open space; it’s an animal trait of AOs.