Page 17 of Roommates' Alpha
He chuckled. “She’d done something else forbidden in our community: applied and been accepted to college.”
“Nobody was allowed college?”
He shook his head. “It was… highly discouraged for the men, but absolutely forbidden for the women. They were expected to take a husband and start having children as soon as they turned eighteen, if not before. Being allowed to graduate high school was considered a kindness granted to them.
“She’d worked it out though,” he continued. “She’d talked to teachers and given up lunch hours to visit with school counselors. All the correspondence was through the school so that our parents and the church couldn’t interfere. She’d been able to get her—and my—schedules rearranged so that we had no classes with anybody from our community.
“Still…” he blew out a long breath. “It wasn’t easy, and the remaining eight weeks were hell. Word got back to our parents by the end of the first day that we were still attending school, and on the second we were pulled from class by police, insisting that we were runaways.
“Again, Raven saved me. She knew that since we’d turned eighteen, our parents had no standing to demand we return home, and we got to keep that tiny scrap of freedom. But I noticed that it came at a cost. Within a few days, there were no kids from the community attending school anymore. I have no doubt that the leaders were scared that we’d started something and had decided to prevent anybody else from leaving.
“I understood why she’d demanded I accompany her that night. There would have been no way our parents would have let me out of their sight if she’d left alone.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “It’s in the past now.” He stretched. “We left again—for good—a few days after graduation. Raven had won scholarships and had worked it out with her college to start during the summer semester. She’d even been able to pull strings to get us into family housing for the first year, despite the fact that I wasn’t a student.”
“It seems she really thought everything out.”
He nodded. “She did, and if it weren’t for her I’d likely still be living in that community with a wife and a bunch of kids. She helped me apply for college, and get work. We’re both alphas, but she was always the brave one.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
He scrubbed a hand down his face. “We may have left that place, but not all of it left us. It’s taken a lot of work to be able to have a conversation like this. Being open, talking about stuff everybody else considers normal? It’s hard. But the worst is trying to stop doing what you were told you were supposed to want.”
“Hmm?”
He licked his lips. “Remember that I said she’d always liked male omegas?”
“Yeah?”
“That was always looked down upon, but it still had the male-female binary. For years I thought I wanted that too.”
“But you didn’t…” I guessed.
He looked at the ground and nodded. “I met an omega woman not long after I graduated college. We ended up dating for five years. We lived together. I thought I was happy.”
“What changed?”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t as if there was one big thing. More like a slow realization that it wasn’t the life I wanted. She’d talk about having kids, and I realized that was far more sex than I was comfortable having with her. Don’t get me wrong, sex was always pleasurable, but it never felt right and it was hard to knot her, even when she was in heat.
“When she talked about the future it felt more like an obligation than a promise.”
He paused. “Every time I looked at my life, I saw it as doing what was expected, rather than what I wanted.”
I hissed a breath in through my teeth.
He chuckled. “That sounds about right.”
He closed his eyes for several seconds, appearing to gather his thoughts, then opened them again when he spoke. “I realized that it would only hurt both of us the longer I let it go on. So I broke it off last year and moved in with Raven. Part of me still clung to the notion that I wanted a woman, probably an omega woman. I tried dating around, but every woman felt wrong.”
He bit his lip. “It was a conversation I probably shouldn’t have overheard. I was at work, and one of my coworkers was gossiping in the break room, telling another about how he’d fucked a temp. He described having this omega man on his knees, sucking my coworker’s cock in the alley outside a club after work, then yanking him up and fucking his ass until he knotted, with the omega moaning the entire time.
“The conversation was filthy, but it did things to me. Part of me had always known that male alphas got together with male omegas, but I’d heard that it was wrong so often growing up, that I’d never really allowed myself to think about it much. However, my cock was hard as steel as I made my way back to my desk—just from overhearing that conversation. I was confused.”
He paused, and, even in the flickering firelight, I saw a blush cross his cheeks. “I went home, and after a couple hours of talking myself into it, I searched the internet for male-male porn.”
He shook his head. “I’d told myself that it was just an experiment, that all it would do was prove that I was actually meant to be with a woman…”