Chapter 36: All The Reasons I Shouldn't be Alpha, Part I
Part One: Bribes, Chickens and Generic Cereal
The pipe was destroyed, snapped in two and sending a deluge of cold water spraying onto the countless chairs arranged around the small basement which was used for entertaining, studying, smoking, a guest room and the occasional secret sexcapade.
I wanted to cry, I hadn't wanted to cry like since…well, since the Melody imprinting fiasco, but at the moment, if it weren't for the fact that I had an hour before I had to be in La Push for patrol, I would have happily laid in the flooding water and prayed for it to sweep me away.
"Mark, we need to get the drugs out before it's ruined! That's two thousand dollars of merchandise!" Emma shouted shrilly from the stairs.
"Mark, the police are coming!" Lawrence added.
"What? WHY?" I scream like a girl when I'm frantic.
"Neighbor Bitch called about the music!" Lawrence said heading back towards the door and running up the stairs.
"Where are you going?" I asked in a childlike voice, I couldn't do this alone.
"Getting dressed and ready for the police, the black man always gets arrested. They sure as hell ain't gunna take the skinny little white girl and I'm not getting arrested while soaking wet in my pajamas." I couldn't tell if he was serious but I turned back to my mission heading for the back entrance.
"Mark, the chickens will drown, do you see them?" Mason screamed down. The basement was flooding hundreds of dollars of water we'd have to pay for later, little bags of drugs floating past. I scurried to grab the tiny bags, like miniature zip-locks, sticking them in my cargo pants pockets. If Jace was here this would not be happening.
The first week in the new house also happened to be rent/bills collecting week. Jace had left an envelope, a large envelope with cash and a bundle of instructions, phones numbers, and a photo to bribe Tripp if he got out of line.
The cash was his share of the bills for all three months which he instructed clearly in his letter needed to be divided into three equal parts and supplemented by the fulltime boarders: Vlad, Tripp, Emma, George, Charlie, Sebastian, Mason and Lawrence. I had no clue how hard that was going to be.
Mason was the only boarder to hand it over right away, even though Jace had posted signs in every room. Emma gave me half when I asked. She was the one I was closest to, so she was the one I was most comfortable asking.
It was so weird trying to play landlord with a group of people that were older than me and that I'd partied so hard with. I'd made out with half of them and, with the exception of Emma and her boyfriend Tripp, I'd seen them all at least half naked. Emma's excuse was that she had to use half her paycheck to buy adderall to push during the summer semester, and her brother George would give me the rest till then.
George made good on the promise but Lawrence had just bought books, so I slinked out of his room empty handed. Charlie paid for him and Sebastian with a sympathetic smile so by the end of the night I had $894 of the $1600 I needed. Roughly five hundred of that was for groceries but the rest needed to be deposited so I could pay the bills by tomorrow night. Tomorrow's mission—besides attending my first class, going to the bank and grocery shopping with Emma and Sebastian— was collecting the remaining $706 and running back to La Push for patrol. I definitely thought I could do it…
"I got the pipe!" Taylor screamed, a monkey wrench in one hand and a wide handful of prepackaged pills and weed in the other. He looked like a stoner-girl's wet dream, half-naked handy man carrying narcotics.
"Do you actually know how to fix it?" I screamed, looking back as Emma jumped from the stairs where she had been staying dry and into the now ankle deep madness that was our basement.
"Yeah, I think I got this," he said passing the packages to Emma as she trekked by.
"Taylor… I'm completely incompetent! I can't do this. What the hell was I thinking?" I was freaking out, rightfully so after almost 24-hours of pure chaos where I bribed a law enforcement official, had rough sex against a wooden desk, got my first real job and phased in front of outsiders.
I woke up early, or at least early for me, because Jordan had a class. He'd decided to teach a few courses seeing as I wasn't exactly allowed to travel with him like he wanted. We played morning kissy face for almost an hour before he pulled himself out of bed and finished the coffee Tripp made before heading to work.
I cooked vegan omelets for the house because I was on breakfast duty this morning. Don't even ask how you vegan an omelet, it sounds more disgusting than necessary, taste alright though.
It was my first day as "commune Mommy" as Jace called it. Everyone had chores, there was an Excel sheet posted on every door, so it was supposed to be smooth.
My first class was Economics, a general education class meant to fulfill my math requirement that I would be taking with Charlie. I looked for a job on campus directly after class, which turned out to be a challenging class at that; the first academic challenge I'd ever faced. I'd always breezed through classes in La Push.
I got lucky, my only piece of luck in a day I was sure would go down in history as my worst. A girl in the bookstore had fond memories of Solace and La Push, and she sent me straight to her manager, a Chehalis Washington native who was an enviromentalist and activist in the Native American community. I was hired on the spot, the first time my brown skin played as an advantage. It all went downhill after that.
"Shit! Shit! Shit!" Emma pulled her skirt off, using it as a net to catch the dime bags that floated in every direction. Taylor blushed, looking away as he fought with the nuts and bolts, trying to get the pipe back together. He was taller now and didn't need a stool to reach the pipes that lined the ceiling. The small muscles along the side of his stomach were soft but defined and the water streaming down on him made him look like a romance novel cover or the lead in homo-friendly music video. He was distracting me as I searched for the key hole on the basement door, hoping to release some the excess water. The back exit leads to a stairway that conveniently had a storm drain, which we were hoping would be our savior in this water fiasco.
"GOT IT!" Taylor screamed, just as the rusting skeleton key slipped in the door and, with a bizarre whooshing sound, I forced the door open with my body. Taylor, Emma, and Mason whooped in victory.
"What, what's happening?" Sebastian called down from the top of the stairs with his lispy-Brazilian drawl.
"We got it open!" Emma cheered, the smiling didn't last long.
"The police are here!" Lawrence called from somewhere inside.
I went to Jordan's office for lunch. We were past the kissing constantly phase of our relationship and into the uncontrollable quickie stage, where lunch often consisted of no food at all. His office was dreary and windowless so it provided an amazing place for this kind of thing.
He took me against the door and bent over against his desk, roughly pounding me into the wood with vigor.
He'd never been so forceful with me, the thrill, the overwhelming feeling of being wanted made me hard and hot. I wanted to scream, to grunt and groan and proclaim my love but I had to stay silent watching a copy of Hamlet on the desk next to me as he hammered me into the desk, before kissing me goodbye and sending me off with a book and a smile.
That smile was soon wiped clean when Emma called me to tell me that she and Tripp had broken up, for good this time. I wanted to be there for her as a friend but right now, first things first, was rent, which he still owed me before he left.
I ran home at half-human speed, barging into Tripp's room without a knock.
"I'm sorry to hear about you and Emma," I said neutrally, they were both upset so I had no clue who ended it.
"Before you leave I'm going to need the rent for this month and the utilities. Don't worry about food," I said with as much authority as I could muster, he hissed.
"I don't even sleep in this hell-hole. I'm not paying another three hundred dollars to live with a bunch of fags prancing around like a Goddamned homo-brothel!"
SHIT!
I went back to my room shaking, inhaling deeply as I paced around the room, it was a habit I picked up from Dad and shared with David. It wasn't the gay remarks, they were shocking seeing as he was encircled with gays for like the last 9 months and didn't seem to mind in the least. No, that didn't bother me, it was the fact that I was preparing to blackmail someone for the first and hopefully last time in my life. Jace had left the picture for a reason and now I needed to be man enough to use it.
The picture a nice 8x10 of Tripp snorting a line of coke off a unfamiliar coffee table while wearing his police outfit.
On the back it was titled, "The Illegal Drug Use of a Public Service Official" in Jace's tidy scrawl. It was and printed nicely in black and white, with a post-it that had the address of his boss and Tripp's full legal name: Reginald Arthur Roller III.
When I barged back in his room he was half way packed.
"I have three copies of this, one of which Lawrence has labeled and ready to deliver to your boss down at the sheriff's office," I said smoothly though my insides were exploding. I would have rather just beat the hell out of him till he gave me the money, there was something so weird about threatening him like a soap opera villain.
He sized me up, looking me up and down a few times before deciding he wouldn't risk a physical altercation with me, smart choice.
"Here take it stupid prick. You'll regret this," he warned snatching the picture out of my hand and pushing Emma hard as he passed her in the doorway. I vibrated from repressed anger—too fast and too powerful to stop myself before I exploded into fur.
The red and blue flashes from the police car made like an ominous light show against the pallid curtains covering the window as I approached the front door. Emma ran up behind me still in her pink undies ripping all of the bags of drugs out of my pocket and bolting out the back door, just as I turned to face the front door and with a theatrical sigh, I opened it.
I was met by a robust African American woman with an air of seriousness and a pimply white dude who could not be much older than me, but it didn't make their badges any less daunting.
"Hello officers, what can I do you for you?" I said calmly as if I weren't half naked, dripping wet and in a house full of drug paraphernalia.
"We've got a noise complaint from next door," the guy said, his voice was nasally and it instantaneously annoyed me like nails on a chalkboard.
"I'm sorry, sir, we had a bit of trouble with a water pipe in the basement, everything is okay now though," I said quickly. I listened as Taylor made his way up the basement stairs, taking out his cell phone to call Solace in Seattle about borrowing a wet-dry vac from his hardware store.
"Water pipes don't play music. This is the third time we're coming about noise this month and that's just during my shift," the female officer said dryly.
"Yes, we'll take care of that too," I answered gravely as Lawrence crept down the stairs in a new set of dry clothes. When Lawrence saw the officers he let out an audible sigh.
"Ain't no music now, Wanda," Lawrence said to the cop who he seemed to know.
"Lawrence, ya'll been causing trouble since Halloween, Imma have to come in and see what ya'll are working with," she said hitching her gun belt menacingly.
"Well, I know that you know you can't really be bustin' in my house without no warrant. But you do what you gotta do. We don't got shit to hide." I cringed, as Lawrence waved them in.
Taylor and I grew up with the most respected citizens of La Push so we never once encountered law enforcement outside of Seth's stepdad Charlie Swan. I was wishing it was Charlie by the time Wanda turned the corner into the kitchen where Emma was standing frozen by the door half naked, like a kid caught in the candy jar.
Luckily, if it could be considered lucky, only Emma was in the room when I phased. She ran out the door, slamming it behind her before bolting down the stairs and into Taylor's arms.
By some stroke of luck my sweat pants didn't entirely shred. I lied on my side, breathing through my snout and out my mouth until I was me again. I ran after her, holding the ripped seams together as I stood looking down at them.
"A bear, a big mother fucking bear thing ate Mark!" She screamed cuddling into his chest as she pulled a joint out of the back pocket of her jean skirt and lit it up.
"You probably shouldn't smoke another one," Mason said grabbing the joint from her and holding it far away from him like it could hurt him as he tried to pry her out of Tay's arms.
Taylor stared up at me for a few seconds, his expressive eyes terrified before I nodded a simple yes. She wouldn't budge, holding onto Taylor like a life preserver as Mason tried to take her away. Taylor lifted her effortlessly, bridal style and bringing her back up the stairs.
He brought her into my room and I slid into the closet shimming into a shirt before I faced her.
"Mark just tell me, I'm not going crazy."
"You're not going crazy," Taylor sighed.
"The story. The story you told Jace about your tribe you—no fucking way!" She shouted grabbing her hair agitatedly.
"Emma, this is very important, you cannot, cannot tell anyone, PLEASE. The government, if they have found out we'd be bagged and tagged," I said seriously.
"Or we'd be taken and used as someone sorta military guinea pigs," Taylor added, he had a wild imagination.
"You too? Oh God! I need another joint," she said pulling up her skirt so that it was around her waist like a belt. Taylor turned, and she giggled, unzipping a little pocket in the front of her underwear and retrieving a small plastic bag with two joints. She pulled the skirt back down before she sat. She was taking this better than I could have expected.
"Okay, the story… so then… cold people?"
"Vampires," we said in unison.
"Cool!"
"Not cool," Tay rolled his eyes.
"Well some of them are," I amended, thinking of Leticia and Edward.
"You've met some?" She gasped choking on her smoke.
"Well yeah, some of them can be okay… but our job, a job we take very seriously, is to kill them," I elaborated, making sure she got the point that we didn't exactly have tea parties with them.
"YOU KILL VAMPIRES!" She screamed which led Mason straight through my door.
"You gotta license for them chickens, young lady?" The pizza face cop spoke with authority, which would have been more effective if he wasn't picking at a zit while he said it.
"Um, no, sir," Emma said standing proud in her blue boy-cut undies.
Taylor grabbed his shirt off of the counter where he had dropped it when he rushed down to help me with the leak. He threw it in her direction but didn't look back, she pouted a little at him as if she wished he would look. She caught it in the arm she wasn't using to hold three full grown chickens. She placed them on the counter and threw the shirt over her head. It was long on her, almost mid thigh so it was pretty much like a slutty miniskirt.
"Lawrence, I know your momma raised you better than to go around having farm animals stompin' around your kitchen," Wanda the pudgy police officer moaned.
"My momma didn't raise me at all. We're all orphans in this house—" Rule number two in Jace's guide to commune living was to play the orphan card whenever there was trouble, Lawrence was well versed in this methodology apparently.
"What? Orphans?" She asked in genuine shock.
"Yes ma'am, living three to a room trying to get an education," Lawrence continued laying it on thick.
"And the new one too?" She asked pointing her thumb at me sadly.
"Dad hates him cuz he's gay," Lawrence answered quickly.
"Aww, baby, my cousins gay," Wanda said sympathetically patting my arm, I nodded with a pitiful pout.
"How many people do you have living here Article 16B of the—"
"Ah, shut up Marvin, they ain't hurting no one," Wanda called pushing him towards the door.
"Ya'll need to get rid of the chickens and keep the noise down alright?" She said giving me the sad look before turning to Taylor.
"You homeless too honey?"
"No ma'am, this is my cousin. I'm just visiting, Lawrence and Mason tutor me." I was surprised at the fluidity of his lie, it was endearing in a sense.
"Well at least he got some family. Get rid of them chickens, can't have them in a private residents without a license since the Avian X flu in 2020," she said reverting to her professional demeanor before she added,
"Ya'll be good to each other," Officer Wanda waved as she made to exit through the front door.
"We can't get rid of Wendy, Peter and Rufio!" Mason shouted with a childlike stomp as soon as they were out of sight.
"Mason, we'll apply for a license okay, I'll look up the procedure tomorrow."
And that was it for me; all the energy I had been using to stay cool while I stood with police officers in a house full of illegal shit seeped out of me. I fell into a heap on the nearest couch, directly on top of Charlie's diorama.
"NO!"
"Is she on some sort of hallucinogenic?" Mason asked nervously, eyeing Taylor every few seconds.
Jordan was very right—he usually was—Mason was crushing on Taylor. He watched him as if any second Taylor would leave and his world would collapse, I knew the look because just months ago, it had been painted all over my face. Taylor was a heartbreaker without even trying.
"Yes, so stay away from me before you get high by osmosis," Emma said dryly, crawling up on the bed and snuggling into Taylor. Mason was a straight edge vegan, no meat, no dairy, no smoking, drinking or drugs of any type. He was also a pacifist but he looked like he could smack her right about now as she casually rolled into Taylor.
She was always physical, I'd seen her in lingerie snuggled between Lawrence and Jace but with Taylor it was a bit different. He was straight and this was the flirty kind of snuggle. I wasn't jealous, I was way past that, it was just difficult to imagine him with a girl now that he was imprinted, and he stiffened a bit when she nuzzled her face in his neck, so did Mason.
Mason threw me an envelope. "It's from Vlad, he's at some Jewish thing tonight," he said giving Taylor one last fleeting look before bowing out, Taylor looked out the door after him in confusion.
"What's wrong with—"
"I think he's in love with you," I answered before he could finish. The room was silent, all of us contemplating different things before Emma inhaled deeply and spoke.
"I won't tell anyone, not even Jace or George," she said honestly. "But… you think you could hook me up with a sexy vamp?" She asked looking up at Tay with big doe eyes.
"Deathwish much? They aren't like the movies Emma," I smiled, grabbing her and pulling her out of Taylor's lap and through the door. Now that she was recovered, had promised to keep our secret and we were fully paid it, was time to do our grocery shopping and deposit some cash, there was no time for dilly-dallying.
"In love with me?" Taylor asked in disbelief from the bed where he sat frozen.
"Grocery shopping Sebastian!" I called down the stairs before closing the door behind me, leaving us alone in the room. "Yeah, Tay."
I dressed for a day on the town as he thought. No shoes, no shirt, no service is serious concern for wolves because it was hot and stifling wearing them but we had to, so I compromised on flip-flops (difficult to find in a size 14) and a white undershirt.
"I… I didn't… do anything," Taylor sighed.
"You did, you just didn't mean to. You can't help being you and you're, you know, fucking perfect," I sighed. It was the first time we'd even tiptoed in this kind of conversational waters since the imprint.
"What should I do?" He asked sadly, I turned back to him. Sometimes I forgot how young he really was because he blended so well with the rest of the Port Angeles gang, but he was just on the edge of fifteen.
"I think you need to take a step back. You can't just… I know you don't mean it, but you don't put enough space between you and your friends. With Jace and me that's okay… but the rest of them aren't used to being treated like that by a straight guy, it mixes the signals," I said without taking a breath. He nodded and I hugged him before running down the stairs.
Sebastian sat next to Charlie on the red and green hideous Christmas couch, leaning his head against Charlie's broad back as he worked on some project that looked like a diorama from fifth grade but with electrical shit, I didn't ask. Charlie was getting his Associates Degree in Business Management, but at night he studied at ITT, a technical school where he learned about automotive-engineering.
"Ay, my work is never done," Sebastian sighed, poking Charlie in the back so he would turn around, and give him a big kiss. They were an oddly matched couple but it worked, swapping saliva for a while before Charlie threw us the keys to his minivan.
"Where we off to, Captain?" Emma asked merrily.
"Umm… Albertson's?" I said unsurely, it was a big supermarket that would probably be easiest. There was a grocery list but it only contained about ten items: shampoo, condoms, cigarettes, tape, printer paper, milk, tampons, peanut butter, tuna and ranch dressing, I was pretty much on my own after that.
I have never been shopping before so maybe this is common knowledge but food is expensive! Vegetable were for rich people, and fruit was a luxury!
"You can't skip tortilla chips, it's an essential," Sebastian squealed.
"We have real food to buy, and the shampoo and hygiene stuff is already up to a fifty dollars," I snapped looking down at our half empty cart. I was trying to keep a close tab and what we had, added up to about a fifty buck and we had yet to add anything edible.
There had to be a way to stock the pantry for eleven people on three hundred dollars a month. Jace did it every month so I just had to figure out how. Emma and Sebastian were no help so I called him but the line was busy.
I called Kim. My dad worked as a bricklayer and brought in enough money for us to live modestly, so my mom was probably as clueless as I was about stretching a dollar, but with four kids, the Cameron's always had to be creative. Kim made Amber's entire wardrobes out of Jared, Ethan and Taylors old clothes, cute clothes too.
"How do I buy enough food for eleven people, for a whole month, on three hundred dollars give or take?" I skipped intros, she had caller ID.
"Well, what are you trying to buy?" She asked with a chuckle.
"Kim, I have a cart of at least a fifty dollars of junk and there isn't food in it yet, just shampoo and shit."
"That's where you're messing up. You've got eleven people you gotta buy generic or bulk or both," she said expertly.
"Generic as in not real?" I asked ignorantly.
"Yes honey, Toaster Pals instead of Pop-tarts, it does the trick," she sighed.
"Kim… can you come with me?" Kim had walked me through quite a few firsts in my life, if I could choose anyone for this it would be her.
"Aw Mark, of all the boys I think you can handle this. If you wanna move out on your own with Jordan like a little bird told me you do, then you gotta prove yourself. Start at the dollar store. Get everything you can there, then go to Aldi's. Anything you can't get there head over to Costco, if you don't have a card get a one day pass and next time I'll give you mine, okay?"
"What little bird?" I asked nervously.
"Get shopping," she ordered, hanging up on me with a giggle.
A complete lack of real world experience made a one hour trip into a four hour journey through Aldi, Dollar Tree and Costco, resulting in the largest bounty Emma had ever seen and a belly full of Costco hotdogs in celebration.
I was exhausted, it wasn't carrying the ridiculous amounts of bags or the walking but the stress of calculating and recalculating the price per unit or fluid ounce or debating the merits of Fruity O's over Fruit Loops.
With three hours left till patrol, I dropped down on my bed for a nap but Taylor came in shortly after, he hadn't left as I suspected but stayed behind with Charlie, who called him "Bro."
"Was it that bad?" he asked sitting at the edge of my bed.
"I have double patrol in three hours and I feel like I just ripped apart an army of vamps," I whined rolling onto my side.
"I can do the first shift for you," he offered.
"Naw, dad's been an ass, I don't want him to get on me about my responsibilities."
"Well at least you got everything done, right? Now you can relax," he said brightly, but I could tell he was hiding something, his eyes read sadness.
"Mason will find someone, he's cute and nice," I assured him and he smiled a little wider.
Something didn't feel right though… not with him, Taylor would be fine… I was missing something. I had gone to class, collected the rent, did groceries, bribed Tripp and… the bank!
"What time is it?" I asked sitting up quickly.
"Seven, why?" Fuck! The bank!