Page 36 of Packing for Vacation

“I don’t know,” I answer, and that’s the truth. “I have no idea what goes on behind closed doors.”

“That poor woman.”

“She’s chosen her fate.” The words still echo in my head. I can hear myself saying them, fifteen years after the fact.

I’d never seen Matiu so furious before that day. “You’re giving up on her!” he’d argued.

“She wants me to join her. She wants to shut you out!”

“Then shut me out! If that can save her⁠—”

“She’s chosen! It’s too late! She’s in too deep! I don’t want… She’s made her choice! I’ve got fuckin’ law school to focus on, if she wants to go play little house on the prairie, let her!”

I’d been pissed, angry at Elaine for stringing us along, betrayed by the fact that she was choosing such stupid ideology over the three of us together as a pack. That she was choosing them. That she was choosing him, the alpha assigned to her. By that point the pack relationship was already over. I never wanted monogamy. I wanted pack life. And I certainly wasn’t going to join a cult over a woman. “She’s made her bed, she can fuckin’ sleep in it.”

“You’re a fuckin’ coward.”

“I’m a coward. You fuckin’ talk to her then!”

“She doesn’t want to see me! She wants you!”

“She wants her divine pussy to only be knotted by one alpha,” I’d sneered. “She’s lost the plot. She’s gone. She doesn’t give a shit about us! We’re her scent matches and she doesn’t give a fuck! So I’m done.”

I’d meant that I was done with her, but then Matiu had issued the final blow, with a definitive “Then I’m done too,” and that was it, the death knell to our friendship, to our pack life, to the hope of ever finding an omega together.

“Fine!”

“Fine!”

Some days the guilt eats me up inside, though I ask myself time and time again whether I could have done anything different and the answer is always no. We weren’t mind readers. We were two guys in our early twenties with assignments, exams, and internships looming. We had moot contests, applications for profs to fill out, and CVs to make. We had decisions about our career paths sitting on our chests like fucking elephants, and we’d missed the subtle signs that our omega was slipping away from us. By the time we realised what was going on, she already had both feet out the door.

We were young, without a fully functioning frontal lobe. I try to tell myself that it’s not our fault.

It still feels like it is. And it feels like my fault, specifically, because I’d told her I wouldn’t follow her into that place, and now she’s so broken, and I don’t think anyone is ever going to save her.

“Just ignore it, Lizzie,” Matiu says, crumpling the pamphlet in his hand. “Don’t waste any time thinking about that woman at the op shop, or the cult. They’re not worth your attention. Now, how can we help you? Because I know you’ve got a few things on the go.”

“Laundry. I need to get the blankets sorted.”

“Consider it done. Come on, Scott,” he adds, turning to me. I hold my breath as I meet his gaze, feeling like I might just fall apart if he says even the slightest criticism, because I deserve to be treated like shit. I’m the one who was at fault. “Let’s go help our omega finish her nest.”

Chapter Thirteen

Lizzie

We hang blankets and cushion covers on clothes horses, setting them on the deck, allowing them to start drying in the late afternoon sun, Barry squeezing his way underneath each one again and again as if the obstacle course was made just for him. “I need to take him for a W-A-L-K,” Scott muses, “he’s being a menace.”

“He’s adorable.”

“He’s getting fur on your clean bedding.”

“I approve of it, so it’s okay.”

I glance over at Scott, my stomach sinking at the strange look he’s giving me. “What have I done wrong?” I ask, a question I repeated so many times with my last pack.

“Nothing! I mean, apart from rejecting a perfectly good set of drawers. I was just trying to make sense of ya, given dog hair is allowed up there,” he points in the direction of the nest, “but a perfectly good tool for organising clothes is not.”

I laugh, despite myself. “I know it’s stupid.”