“For something you can’t control? I’m fine. Are you okay?”
“Of course.” She lowered her voice as though it might prevent him from detecting her lie.
He was starting to feel the pressure of needing everything to go right, but he pushed back his own agitation, working hard to gentle his tone.
“Something has been happening to you all day. Do you want to tell me what it is?”
“Just this weird feeling.” She was holding her stomach again. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it. Soft skin wrapping subtle muscle, smooth as silk beneath her touch, water dripping from her fingertips. She had a beautiful body. It was like it had been created specifically to dance. It didn’t seem to matter what she wore or what she was doing, clothes fit her figure like they were made just for her, even when they were five sizes too big.
“Describe it?” he prompted.
“Just … hollow pain. Sharp. I don’t know. There’s just this emptiness inside my stomach.”
“Like hunger?”
“I guess, but different.”
“Longing?”
She paused, but her soft stroking across the gentle muscles of her stomach continued. She must not have realised that he could feel what she was doing.
“Maybe,” she whispered. “Something like that.”
“Close your eyes,” Gabriel ordered, forgetting to make his voice soft.
She flinched in shock, but his vision suddenly filled with darkness, and he let out a relieved breath.
“Good.” He kept his voice no more than a gentle exhale. “I want you to press your hand to the ache and think about what you want, what you need.”
She obeyed him again, like she always did. It made him itch with the need to give her another order, but it also made him inexplicably furious.
Was this how the Omega bitch managed to get her hooks in so easily?
Isobel was a people-pleaser. She was too fucking easy to take advantage of.
He focussed on her body, on the hollow pain that she was sharing with him. It was awful. Sharp and cavernous. Not so much longing as keen desperation.
“I don’t know.” Her words were shaky. “I think …” She pulled her hand away, breathing a broken sigh. The ache eased, somewhat. “Touching myself makes it worse.”
Ah, fuck.
Of all the side effects, she had to get this one.
“I think I know what it is.” He swore softly, shifting on the bench. “But there’s nothing we can do to fix it.”
“What are you talking about?” She was touching her stomach again like she couldn’t help herself.
“It’s one of the more … brutal side effects. A sort of frenzy that only eases when you have sex with your mate.”
She laughed, sudden and hollow. “How many of them?”
“I wasn’t advising it.” A growl tried to ride Gabriel's tone, but he bit it forcefully back. He cared more than he thought he would—not that the Sigma might fuck one of the other Alphas, but that she wasn’t ready, and he knew it.
And maybe he also cared if she fucked one of the other Alphas.
That would be very inconvenient, if true. Because it was inevitable, at least with Theodore.
The two of them were like magnets, orbiting around the edge of a force that snapped them together the second they were close enough. It was like they belonged to each other.
And maybe Gabriel cared a little bit about that.
Maybe he cared a lot about that.
Maybe that made him extremely uncomfortable.
“I know,” she said. “How long does it last? It’s bearable at the moment.”
He felt a muted little pang of something in his own body, but he was too tuned into her to recognise what it was, not that he was very good at recognising feelings in the first instance anyway.
“I can actually feel what you can feel right now,” he decided to tell her.
“And?” She sounded combative. Stubborn. “It really isn’t that bad.”
“It might get worse.” He grunted when her fingers drifted up, over the chain embedded into her skin. “But if I remember correctly, it won’t last more than a day.”
She glanced down, and all the breath left his body. He had seen her naked earlier in the year when she pulled herself from the lake and onto the dock. He remembered thinking back then that she looked like a painting, and the errant observation popped up again.
The alabaster tone of her skin seemed to sparkle, a mist of water scattered across her chest, each little droplet shifting and dribbling with each gentle swell of her breath. Her hair twisted across her skin in wet spirals, looking like an artist had painted them there with adoring brush strokes.
“Shit,” she hissed, diverting her attention from the chain and back to the wall. “Are you still … um, with me?”
“Yeah.” His tone was husky, and he hated it.
“Sorry,” she muttered. “I’ll try and get dressed without looking.” She stood, reaching for the taps.
“Sit down,” Gabriel said, his tone soft but laced with iron. She did, and he drew in a steadying breath. “Now look down. Show me the chain.”
She dropped her chin, one hand delicately covering the junction between her tightly crossed legs, her other arm banded across her chest.
A laugh tried to bubble up in his chest. “I’ve seen it all, Illy.”
“Illy?” she echoed, a note of confusion in her tone.
“Just this once, just while we’re alone.”
“I don’t understand you,” she muttered, before dropping her arm. She kept her other hand on her lap.
“Does it feel like anything?” he asked.
She passed her fingers over the delicate links, pausing on the two gemstones that had appeared. “Only when it changes.”
“I would have torn it out by now,” he admitted quietly. “I never understood people like Cian, people who can inject ink and metal into their skin. It’s disgusting.”
She scoffed quietly, seeming to enjoy the feel of the links dragging against the pads of her fingers. “I think it’s … beautiful, actually.”
Well on her it was. Every-fucking-thing was beautiful on the painting herself.
“Are you asexual?” she asked, conversationally.
It was easier to talk this way. She apparently agreed.
“No,” he said. “Or sometimes, maybe. I’m sure there’s a classification for it, but I’ve never been fond of classifying myself. It takes a special someone for me to go past a certain point.”
“I don’t think I’m asexual,” she said. “I think I’m very, very, very not asexual.”
His stomach tightened. “Weird way to announce that you’re horny.”
She dropped her fingers from the chain, her hand falling to her thigh. She didn’t bother averting her gaze as she stretched her legs out to catch the water again.
“I wish I wasn’t a virgin,” she grumbled. “I wish it wasn’t such a big deal. I wish I could just go get a normal boyfriend who isn’t a mate and just get rid of all these feelings …” She trailed off, and he realised there was a low rumbling emanating from his chest. It was rough and furious, and he could feel the spark of fear that jolted through her.