and if your stomach’s yelling is any indication, you’re getting there.”
I fell half a step behind Craig, our feet tapping against the sidewalk in an uneven rhythm. His shoes went more of a tap tap, and mine had a swishing shuffle to them. Over our beat, the birds sang, the insects buzzed, and the wind whispered.
Before, silence had been a rare gift, stolen in the slivers of morning after the sun rose but before breakfast. Outside of that… well. Brothels were full of the sounds of sex and power, which in my experience were mostly one and the same. Even when I wasn’t being forced to submit myself, I couldn’t escape the sounds of it all around me. The thin walls, so effective at trapping me inside, offered little protection. Silence had been my comfort. My refuge.
Since leaving that hell, I’d come to learn silence could feel… uncomfortable. Heavy. Awkward.
Craig hadn’t put his headphones back on, and I couldn’t hear the music either. Was I supposed to say something? Was it my turn to continue the conversation?
“How long have you been here?” I finally blurted.
The weight of unknown expectation pressed on me, squeezing my chest and cracking my ribs.
“Not long enough.” Craig’s lips twisted as he smirked down at me. “And just a heads up, the unspoken rule around here is that outside of Real Boy classes, we don’t generally ask each other about our pasts. You want to volunteer, great. Nothing wrong with that.”
I flushed. Chance had told me that. “Sorry.”
Craig shrugged. “You’re fine with me. I have no issues telling you or anyone else to fuck off and mind their own business. Just thought I should make sure you knew.”
I nodded, fighting the urge to run back to the townhouse and lock myself in my room. My first full day, and even avoiding people for most of it, I’d still managed to embarrass myself. But this wasn’t the first time Craig had mentioned Real Boys. “What do you mean by ‘Real Boy’ classes?”
“I’m talking about this morning, right? Where they try to get us to open our puppetry wooden hearts and embrace the ooshy-gooshy bloody messy feelings of being real? Haven’t you seen Pinocchio?”
“Of course. I grew up in Ukraine, not a mountain monastery.”
“You don’t need to grow up in a hermitage to be isolated. But yeah. Doesn’t Pinocchio seem fitting for us?”
“I haven’t seen it in a long time.”
“Wikipedia it.” Craig opened the administrative building’s back door. He didn’t hold it open for me, like the Novaks, alpha or omega, had insisted. He swung it wide enough for me to catch and marched in as if nothing in the world would move aside for him.
I admired his attitude. He didn’t shrink from everything like I wanted to. He acted as if the world should shrink from him.
He led the way to the cafeteria. While people looked at him with interest—how could they not? He stood out like a summer flower in the middle of winter—no one spoke to him. Or me.
Which I was fine with. The smell of the room was overwhelmingly omega, which was a relief, but I couldn’t count the different types of shifter scents hitting my nose, especially when combined with the aroma of food.
I curled my shoulders forward, doing my best not to hide behind Craig, but definitely using him as a shield.
The choices for food were limited. Three different kinds of pizza, six different dressings for the salad, canned fruit medley, and the choice of brownies or cookies for desert.
Craig piled his plate with nearly an entire pizza, two brownies, and two cookies, and no one said anything. Were we just… allowed to take however much we wanted?
I was more conservative, grabbing the first two slices in front of me, a scoop of salad with some kind of vinaigrette, and one brownie. I skipped the suspicious-looking fruit cocktail. Then I followed Craig to an empty table in the back of the room, practically hidden by a large fake bush, one of several scattered throughout the room.
“That all you going to eat?” Craig set his tray down. Without waiting for an answer, he added, “I’m gonna grab a drink. You want anything? Soda? Coffee? Tea?”
My mind frazzled at being asked to make yet another decision, even one so minor. “Water?”
Craig plopped two large cups down on the table a few minutes later. I’d practically inhaled my pizza already and was working my way through the salad.
“You know, you can go back for seconds.”
“I