Page 81 of Sold to the wrong Alpha
Ren slumped down on the bench next to him. They sat in silence for a moment. The sweat was cooling on his back, sending shivers down his spine. The gym smelled of rubber and metal and the cheap deodorant Jax used in industrial quantities.
“Get me the test.”
Jax turned his head.
“Huh?”
“From the drugstore. Bring me the damn test.” Ren looked at his hands, his knuckles red, the lines on his palms glistening with sweat. “But if you tell Brody I asked you to do this, I swear the next time we train, I’ll rip your kneecap out.”
“You can count on it.” Jax gave him a light slap on the back of the neck with his open palm. Ren stepped back, muttering something unintelligible.
They showered separately. Ren went up to Brody’s room—his room, their room, though he still had a hard time thinking of it that way—and stepped under the hot stream with his eyes closed. The water pounded his shoulders and loosened the knots in his neck. He lathered himself up slowly. He scrubbed his hair until it squeaked between his fingers. He stood there a little longer with his forehead pressed against the tiles.
He thought of nothing. He forbade himself from thinking.
He stepped out of the shower, dried off, and put on a pair of Brody’s sweatpants that were way too big for him and a clean t-shirt that came down to his mid-thigh. The bathroom mirrorreflected a pale image of him, with wet hair plastered to his temples and eyes that were too big for his face. He looked away.
He walked into the bedroom.
He saw it before taking three steps. On top of the bedspread, centered with almost surgical precision on Ren’s pillow, a small white box. No bag. No note. Jax had left it there with the stealth of someone trained to move undetected and the delicacy of someone who knew that this cardboard rectangle could change everything.
Ren sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the box. He turned it over. He read the instructions on the back even though he already knew how it worked. Every omega knew. They taught it to them in school along with the list of things an omega should fear about their own bodies.
He set it on the nightstand.
He lay on his back with his arms outstretched and his gaze fixed on the ceiling.
The box was still there. White. Small. Enormous.
The latch clicked shut with a sharp sound that echoed off the tiles like the snap of a small bone. Ren leaned his back against the closed door and stood there for a few seconds, the white box in his right hand and his left hand still on the doorknob. The bathroom smelled of sandalwood soap and the lingering steam from the shower he’d taken barely twenty minutes ago.
He set the box on the edge of the sink. The white porcelain against the white cardboard. Everything white, everything clean, everything about to be stained by something irreversible.
He breathed. Deeply. From the bottom of his lungs, until the air pushed against his ribs and rose up his throat and came out of his mouth with a tremor he hadn’t expected. Again. One more time. He gripped the sink with both hands and let his head drop between his shoulders.
He opened the box.
His fingers moved with the precision of someone assembling a familiar mechanism; the instructions read and reread so many times that his hands already knew before his eyes did. He took out the stick, removed the cap, and did what had to be done. Each step executed with an almost clinical precision because if he concentrated on the mechanics—open, place, wait—he didn’t have to think about what came next.
He put the cap back on.
He left the stick face up on the edge of the sink.
He sat on the edge of the bathtub.
He didn’t look at the test. He fixed his eyes on the wall opposite, on a line of grout between two tiles that curved slightly to the left as if the mason had sneezed mid-stroke.
“One,” he said aloud. The sound of his own voice seemed foreign to him in that enclosed space. “Two. Three.”
He counted. Or thought he was counting. The numbers melted on his tongue before he reached the next one; they tripped over each other, repeated themselves. Seventeen. Seventeen. Twenty-three. Nine. He wasn’t counting anything. He was filling the silence with noise so that the silence wouldn’t swallow him up.
“Forty and… fifty and…”
He stood up.
The sink was two steps away. He took the test. He looked down.
Two lines. Dark pink. Clear. Parallel like train tracks stretching toward a horizon Ren couldn’t see.
