“Boo,” he said, doing his best impression of a ghost.
“Hilarious,” Blake replied, voice flat and echoey.
“I am.”
Blake chuckled—a low, sultry sound that reverberated down the phone line.
Pember was about to say something further, but swallowed the words when he realised his cock was growing hard.Again. He gritted his teeth and rolled onto his stomach, laying the phone on the pillow and putting it on loudspeaker.
“Are you sure I shouldn’t go back and check on Val?” he said, staring at the phone as if Blake were actually lying next to him.
“And risk waking Cherry up? You’d be playing a dangerous game.”
“Point taken. Why are you waiting with the body again? Seems a little unfair.”
Blake let out a breath. “Probably because I left the team high and dry this afternoon. And because I don’t trust Mark not to lose the body. He’d probably walk off and forget all about him.”
Pember snorted. “Who’s walking off? Mark, or the body?”
“Very funny. You are doing absolutely nothing to help, Pember.”
Grinning, Pember pushed up onto his elbows. “Maybe you should talk to the body. Take him for a little stroll around the hospital. Don’t they try and encourage those alpha walking groups where you talk about your feelings?”
Blake barked out a laugh. “I don’t think he’s the chatty sort. Plus, Chichi would absolutely fucking kill me.”
“Oh, come on, you told me you were a rebellious kid, where’s that side of you gone?”
Blake sighed. “Yes, the drinking, smoking, shagging everything with a pulse kind of rebellious. Not the kidnapping corpses kind.”
Pember’s grin faltered.How different our teenage years had been.“I refuse to believe it,” he continued, rolling onto his back and pushing a hand through his hair. Raising his hips, he saw that his groin was still very much tenting his black briefs.
Blake hummed, “Believe it. As a teenager I… Let’s just say I made my parents’ life hell. Partying, never coming home. You name it, I did it. I’d been sick for most of my pre-teen years, and then I had—” Blake sucked in a breath, and Pember could hear him scrubbing his fingers across his chin.
“Yes?” Pember replied, holding his ribs as he tipped onto his side.
“I had a heart attack on my twelfth birthday. At a public swimming pool. It was treated with medication, but… emotionally it nearly destroyed my parents. After that I… I had this constant feeling that my life was going to be cut short, you know? It did something to my outlook on life. I was convinced I’d never grow old, never get married or have children. Never fulfil my role as an alpha. That’s when the partying started. I had no notion of what it was doing to my parents, or the rest of my family.”
Silence hung between them as Pember stared at the phone. His chin began to quiver at the thought of Blake as a child,any child, going through that. He’d seen a dying kitten on the side of the canal, once. His sister had jumped in and rescued it, tried to do CPR as the mother cat yowled and screamed for her baby.
“Pem, you there?”
“Y-yeah. Sorry. That’s just… Your poor parents.”
“I know. When I was nineteen, the drinking and partying finally caught up with me and I had another mini-episode. It nearly killed my dad. My omega dad. So that’s when my alpha father gave me an ultimatum. Buck up or get out. At the time, I was seeing Rebecca on and off, but the following year we made it official. She wanted the security of a mate, and I wanted a promotion as soon as possible. Back then, they’d only let mated alphas be sergeants, so it was a win-win as far as we could see.”
The words seemed to surge out of Blake’s mouth as though he’d been holding them in for a very long time. Pember only listened, clenching his jaw at the sudden and unexpected openness.
“I didn’t—” Blake continued. “I wasn’t a good husband, Pem. Maybe in the beginning I was, but as time went on I just worked myself to the bone. I convinced myself that I had to cram in an entire career’s worth of achievements before I died. Rebecca and I—we drifted apart. She knew it, I knew it, but I think we’dconvinced ourselves that staying together was better than being alone.”
Pember let out a breath, swallowing the tightness in his throat. “You were together for a long time. That’s gotta mean something, right?”
Blake let out a tired sound, somewhere between a sigh and a groan. “Sure. Ten years, all in. But there’s no lonelier place than in a house where two people are falling out of love.”
Pember’s eyes drifted shut, the significance of Blake’s admission slowly sinking in. He knew loneliness—thought he knew it better than anyone—but hearing the words, thinking of Val… They were all just fucking lonely. Weren’t they? They’d been clinging to each other since the day he moved in.
“What I’m trying to say is,” Blake continued, “I’m not all torn up about my old mate, Pem. I’m still mad as hell that she cheated on me, but I look back now and realise it was a mercy for both of us. I only wish she hadn’t lied about the pregnancy. Would have saved us both eight months of agony.”
Pember cracked his eyes open, squinting at Blake’s number on the screen. “Yeah. That was shitty no matter how you look at it.”
