At that, the ice cream was left to melt in my mouth, then trickle down my throat before I set the tub down on her coffee table. I took a deep breath, and then I told her.
Chapter 37
I’d spent the rest of the afternoon eating my body weight in ice cream and then drinking the shitty sweet red wine Candy had in the house. She’d offered to get something that I actually liked, but I hadn’t been up for that. I needed support more than a good bottle of gin, so we’d hunkered down in the lounge room and dug deep.
“Are you going to talk to them?” she asked after my verbal diarrhoea had stopped. I’d vomited out everything that’d happened in great big lurid chunks, and she’d winced around her ice cream.
“If I talk to them, they’ll just suck me in like before,” I said, a hysterical edge to my voice. “Maybe they’ve been using their alpha commands the whole time.”
“Riley…”
“No, you don’t get it. You haven’t heard the way they talk. Sometimes it’s like a whip crack. Do this now! But half the time, it’s this sneaky thing. It sounds like a suggestion, but really—”
“Fuck, girl, I’m not saying for a second that this situation isn’t completely shit, but seriously? You’re trying to tell me that you had to be ordered to fall on their dicks and let them hose you with cum like your bush was on fire? C’mon.”
I blinked, then shot her a filthy sidelong look.
“I thought you were on my side.”
“I am on your side. Not mentioning whoever the hell Janine is, that’s a dick move of epic proportions and one they need to explain and provide verifiable facts to support their answer. Even then, I’m pretty sure they all need a collective junk punch.”
I snorted at that.
“But you can only ghost them if you don’t give a shit, and you…?” She shot me an empathetic look. “You care about them.” I hated her voice, soft now with none of its usual acerbic edge. “And that’s the problem, isn’t it?”
“Shut up.”
“You never stopped.”
“Shut up! Seriously.” I frowned then, my head aching in response, so I took another slug of wine straight from the bottle.
“Oh, so we’ve gotten to the ‘glasses are a bourgeois affectation’ part of the evening? Good to know.” She pulled the bottle from my hand and took a big gulp from it without even wiping the lip, and that’s when I knew we were truly besties. “Then if we aren’t gonna talk about the guys, we need to talk about you. ‘Round-the-clock sexual care, with liberal dosing of sparkling alpha ball juice’ I believe was the prescribed regime, and I’m assuming you’re all out of wolf boy spoof. We don’t even know what’s happening to you, what the dangers are, or how to mediate them.”
And that was how she managed to pull me out of my funk, at least temporarily. Problem solving was my jam, so I pulled over a pen and paper and started drawing a cross section of a uterus and vagina.
“So they kept talking all this bullshit about something in their jizz helping me,” I said through gritted teeth. “Probably a total scam and a means to keep me letting them baste me with broghurt.” Candy snorted at that, then forced her expression to become solemn under my inspection. “Whatishappening is I feel like someone’s scraping the inside of my uterus with a rusty spoon and my tits are like bombs ready to go off.”
“I did notice the chest enhancement,” she said. “Welcome to the D club…” She held out a fist for me to bump, but I just stared at it.
“These are involuntary changes to my body that I didn’t sign up for at all,” I informed her.
“Yup, but on the plus side, when you are ready to get up on the baloney pony and ride, those tits on that frame? You gonna get offers.”
She meant it as a consolation, but it just felt like something was dying inside me. In some ways, this was a very protracted, long overdue end of a key relationship. Beforehand, we’d just disappeared from each other’s lives, but now? Now we were breaking up, for good this time, but where the hell did that leave me? I’d been fucking with my latency like it was no big thing, knowing what I did about it. My fingers tightened around the pen, the tip boring into the paper until Candy said, “Prostaglandin.”
“What?”
“Prostaglandins,” she said. “As per usual, you’ve got your head up your ar—I mean, in the sand, and don’t want to deal with what’s going on emotionally, because feelings, ew. You want to focus on what you can have some sort of impact on. Science.”
“I need to get my body back online,” I said sharply. “I’ve just done…fuck knows what to it and now… I need to get back to work, to try and recover from this shit, because I’m gonna have to tell Windsor the study is off.”
“Or you don’t.” She looked at me steadily. “They’re not the study, you are. We’ll get their DNA analysis reports back tomorrow, but…”
She shrugged.
“I’d be willing to bet you whatever you like that they don’t show up anything interesting, that they’re bog standard alphas with all the usual genetic markers. We include them in the study, compare them against the DNA of other alphas to illustrate that point, but you… Your reports will come back tomorrow too. Prostaglandins make our uterus contract during childbirth and a period, relaxin helps the ligaments in the pelvis stretch to take a baby. We’ll head up to endocrinology tomorrow, see if they can run some tests for us, maybe even inquire about some synthetic relaxins they’re trialling and see what they do. In the meantime, we’ll get you on some Midol and see if that eases things.”
I nodded slowly then, seeing the wisdom to what she’d said, but my fingers were still tapping the pen on the pad over and over.