Omega (Alpha #3) (10 page)

“I get that,” I said. “And I don’t…I guess I don’t hold it against you. Like, I’m not mad. I just…I don’t know. I knew going in that you’d had other sexual partners. But the reality of it, hearing your whole system…” I shrugged again. “I’m just jealous, I guess.”

“They weren’t
partners
, Kyrie. It was just sex. Nothing else—maybe that only makes it worse, I don’t know. It doesn’t lessen your right to jealousy, though. Or mine.” He turned me around, and his eyes were intense, but warm, the eyes of my Valentine once more. “You think I’m not jealous of your exes? I hate all of them for getting you before I did. I hate the thought of anyone else putting their hands on you. It makes me sick to my stomach just to think about it.”
 

I sighed and pressed my forehead to his chest. “There weren’t that many of them, though.”

“So? Is that supposed to make it better, somehow? You’re
mine
. All mine. Whether it was one man or a hundred, I hate the idea of anyone ever having any part of you.” He touched my chin and lifted my face. “But at the same time, I know that each of our respective experiences led us together. Your past makes you who you are, just as mine makes me who I am. And…it’s hard to put this into words.” He paused to think, and then continued. “In a way, I’m glad we didn’t meet each other as virgins. I want all of you, forever. But…that you had experience before you met me…it meant you knew what you wanted, what you liked, it meant you knew what to do with me. And my past meant I could make you mine, it meant I knew exactly what to do with you, how to make you scream, how to make you need me.”
 

“I never thought of it that way,” I admitted, resting my cheek on his broad, hard pectoral.

“Regardless of jealousy or our pasts, how we feel about any of it…there’s nothing we can do about it, is there? We’re here, and what happened, happened. We each have the right to our feelings, to be upset or angry or jealous. But the real question is, what are we going to do about it? Will it change our present together? Our future? Does knowing how I chose which women to engage in sex with before I met you change how you feel about me right now?” He brushed his hand down my back, smoothing and scratching over my shirt.
 

I shook my head against his chest. “No, it doesn’t.”
 

“Good.” He was silent for a moment, and then tilted my chin up so I had to look at him. “And to be totally honest, I sold the…fuckpad
…
as you called it, precisely because I didn’t want to be anywhere with you that I’d been with anyone else. I want us to make new memories together, in a place that’s totally ours.”
 

“That makes me feel a bit better,” I said. “I do have one potentially stupid question.”

“What’s that, love?” He sounded resigned, and slightly amused.

“You never felt anything for any of them?”
 

He was quiet for a moment. “Hmmm. That’s not what I thought you were going to ask.”

“What were you expecting?”

He hesitated. “A number.”
 

“I don’t think I want to know the number.”

“Probably not,” he agreed.
 

I didn’t even like that answer, as vague as it was.
 

“No, I never felt anything for any of them. I didn’t let myself. I…I didn’t let them get close to me, see the real me, and I didn’t try to get to know them. I didn’t want to.”

“Did it ever backfire, the proposal? The contractual casualness of it?”

“Yes. More than once. If they got clingy, started asking too many questions, demanding things that smacked of intimacy, if they got too personal, I’d send them home. That happened…not frequently, but more than I liked. I suppose it was inevitable. This is going to make me sound like an ass, but I’m going to say it anyway: if you present women with the unobtainable, a mysterious man, however unapproachable, however cold or distant, however clearly he may make his intentions, there will always be those who try to…get him. Change him. Make him hers. Someone will always think she’s different.” There was truth in his words, and in his preface to the statement.
 

“And me?” I asked.

“You didn’t try, Kyrie. You tried
not
to. You were you; you played by the rules and just tried to get through it with your own heart intact. But…you were different from the beginning. It was always different between us. I tried to convince myself otherwise, but it was in vain.” He tilted my face up again. Kissed me slowly, gently. “Can we be done rehashing the past, Kyrie? Please? I don’t like to think of that any more than you do. That’s not why were here; we’re here for the future—our future together. Let’s just focus on that, all right?”

I nodded, reached up and clung to his neck. “I like that plan.”
 

“Me too.”

5

LAYLA, THE NOPE-FISH

I found Layla by the pool, lying in a lounge chair, clad in a neon-orange bikini that would have fit in a Tic-Tac box with room to spare. God, I loved her, but she dressed like a skank sometimes. She had huge round bug-eye Audrey Hepburn shades on her face and her hair pulled up in a sloppy knot.
 

I had a glass of sweet white wine in each hand, and I extended one to her as I took the lounge chair beside her.
 

She accepted it, took a sip. “If you gotta be exiled from everything you know…this is the way to do it.”

“Right? Roth has amazing taste.”
 

“This place is awesome. I could hang out here for a minute.” She still wasn’t looking at me.

“Layla.”

“I’m enjoying the sunshine and this really tasty wine. I don’t want to get into it.”
 

“Dude.”
 

She swiveled her head on the chair back. “Don’t ‘dude’ me, Key. It’s fine. I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”
 

“I’m a woman too, Layla. You can’t fool me with the ‘it’s fine’ bullshit.”
 

She laughed at that. “Okay, well then…whatever. It’s not fine, but I still don’t want to fucking get into it. We’re cool, I just need a minute to figure my shit out.”
 

“We’re not cool. I have no clue what’s going on with you.” I grabbed her bottle of sunscreen lotion and squirted a dollop into my palm, spreading it onto my arms. “We can’t be keeping things from each other, hon. We’re all either of us has, right now.”

“You’ve got Roth,” she said, pushing her sunglasses higher onto her nose.

“And so do you. We’re a family, Layla.”

“Fuck that. You and him are a family. You and me are a family. But he’s just your fiancé to me. We’re sort of friends, I guess, but I’ll never be close to him. Not that I don’t like him, because I do. He’s great. He’s supercool. But he’s not my fucking
family
.” She spat the last word with something approaching actual hate.

“Whoa, Layla. What the hell?”

“Don’t worry about it. Just…forget it.” She set her wine glass down and stood up, tugged the bottom of her bikini down and the top up, and then stalked away, storming through the kitchen and out toward the beach.

I followed her, of course. She was a good thirty feet away by the time I made it through the house and down to the beach. She strode angrily through the lapping surf, bare feet leaving fading footprints in the wet sand. I jogged after her, caught up, grabbed her arm and spun her around.

“Layla. What the
fuck
is wrong with you? What did I do?”
 

She jerked away. “You wouldn’t understand.”
 

“I’m your best friend! What wouldn’t I understand?”
 

She backed away, shaking her head. “Me! Why I’m mad! Everything! Anything! Pick one,
bitch
, they’re all true.” The term we threw back and forth at each other in a joking, loving way for once didn’t feel very joking or loving.
 

Tears pricked my eyes. “Layla…what…? I—I don’t get it.”
 

“No shit. You’re so caught up in
you
, in fucking Roth, in whatever the hell we’re even running from that you don’t even know what’s going on with me. We’ve been best friends for so long, but you sure don’t understand how throwing around the idea of family would be hard for me?”

I shook my head. “I know being away from home is hard—”

She laughed bitterly. “See, that’s exactly what I mean. Home? You think fucking Pontiac was home? And family? You can honestly throw that word at me?”

“I’m so lost, Layla. Talk to me.”

She turned away and walked deeper into the water, till it was up to her knees. I went in as well and stood beside her.
 

 
She twisted a flyaway curl between a finger and thumb. “What do you know about my family, Kyrie? My real family, I mean. The one I was born in to.”
 

I shrugged. “I had the impression that it wasn’t…bad, just that they weren’t really…I don’t know—caring. Loving.” I blinked, thinking hard. “I—I guess I don’t know much more than that.”

She sniffled, and I realized she was fighting tears. “You think it’s an accident you don’t know more than that? Jesus, Kyrie. I mean, I love you like hell, girl, but you are
so
clueless sometimes. Like, just…clueless. You can only see what’s going on with you, most of the time.”

That made me angry, and I opened my mouth to say something in response, but then…I thought about it.

And she was right.

I knew little about her because I’d never bothered to find out. Granted, she was prickly and defensive and refused to talk about herself or her past or much of anything personal, but then…I’d never pushed. And Layla…when she knew something was going on with me, she’d turn tenacious, refusing to back down or shut up or give up until I’d spilled it all. And I always did, and she was always there for me.

“Shit. Layla, I—”

“We’ve been friends for over five years, Key. I know a lot about you. I accept it all, and I love you. And granted, the shit you’ve been through over the last two, two and a half years, ever since that douchebag Mr. Edwards propositioned you and then you got that check…it’s been crazy. Totally crazy. Everything with Roth and finding out about your dad and then getting whisked away by mister sexy billionaire and living all over the world, and then Roth getting snatched and whatever else…I don’t blame you for not following up on little old me.”
 

I was crying now. “I’m a shitty friend.”
 

She just laughed. “Yeah, but you’re
my
shitty friend. And you’ve made up for it. You brought me here to be with you on your…your fucking aquatic skyscraper. I get that it’s for my safety…intellectually, I get it. But I guess I still sort of resent being yanked out of my life, you know? But there’s a lot about me you don’t understand.”

“So help me understand,” I said. “I want to understand.”
 

Layla just shook her head. “It’s not that easy. I can’t just…unburden myself. There are layers and layers of shit.”

“For real, though, Layla. You can’t jump all over me like you have been and not explain, not give me a chance to understand what the fuck is going on.”
 

Layla walked out of the surf and sat down in the dry sand, letting the water lap at her legs, and I sat beside her. She stared out at the water for a long time, and then started talking, her voice low, soft, hesitant. “So, I may not have told you the whole truth about me. I let you think my childhood was just…average-shitty, I guess. Like, I think you probably have the impression I grew up with both parents, and that it was fine, just not…great.”
 

I shrugged. “Yeah, basically. Average-shitty sounds about right.”

She shook her head, the loose bun of her hair coming loose. “It wasn’t average-shitty, Key. Not even close. It was…super mega awful shitty, like whoa shitty.”

“How?”

“In any way it could be,” she said, with a bitter laugh. “Momma never really said so right out loud in so many words, but I’m pretty sure I’m a rape-baby. She always seemed to…resent me, I guess. She didn’t beat me or nothing, but she…sometimes I felt like she hated me. Like she couldn’t even bear to look at me. I mean, maybe my father was just a colossal dick and I remind her of him. It could be that. God knows I’m nothing like her, that’s for damn sure. My mom, she’s this tiny, skinny, quiet little Italian woman. She’s an immigrant, actually. Came over when she was…twelve or thirteen, I think. I’m like her in that neither of us likes to talk about ourselves. So I don’t know much about her past. She came over with her folks, I think, but I never met them, so I don’t know if they died or she ran away, or they moved back to Italy. I just don’t know. She had no education. Spoke really poor English. She was a hard worker, though. Gotta give her that. I’m like her in that way too, I guess. She had me, didn’t abort me. Maybe she couldn’t afford to, I don’t know. But she kept me, and I was always fed, always had clothes to wear. Hand-me-downs and shit from Value Village or whatever, Salvation Army, but I wasn’t naked or hungry.”
 

I traced an abstract pattern in the sand. “I sense a ‘but’ coming.”
 

She laughed again. “You got that right. Things weren’t too bad until I was…eight? Nine? It was just me and Mom, doing what we had to do, getting by. And then she met Mario. Yeah, legit, his name was Mario, and he was old school New York Italian, hair slicked back, shiny shoes and windbreakers, like something from fucking
Goodfellas
. I
hated
Mario. But he took care of Mom, and I think he loved her, in his own sort of way. They never got married, but they were together for a long time. He knocked her up, and suddenly I had this little half-brother who they both seemed to like a whole hell of a lot better than me. And again, I gotta say Mario never did anything bad to me. Never beat me or molested me or anything. But once the baby arrived it was as if I was not even there. They just focused on Vic. Like he was all that mattered. By nine years old, I was basically on my own. Got myself to school, took care of my own lunches, got myself home. Got myself dinner and breakfast usually, too, because Mom and Mario would take Vic and leave, go to breakfast, go to dinner, go away somewhere for the weekend and just leave me to fend for myself. They just didn’t care. I took care of myself, no big deal.” She dug her heels into the wet sand, pausing for breath. “Here comes the other ‘but’. Only, it’s more of an ‘and then…’”