My pulse was still racing when Miles ended the conversation. Homeless? Was he trying to give me a heart attack? I still felt uneasy without a firm date for dinner with his parents, but if that meant I got to spend more time with him? I wasn’t going to complain. In fact, if we needed to see each other several times to make our “relationship” more real for his parents, we could put off dinner as long as he needed.

I still felt guilty for clinging to every chance to see him when I should be keeping my distance, but he had asked me for help. I could let myself indulge as long as he needed me. After that, I’d go back to keeping my distance and making sure I didn’t fuck up his life more.

I did my best to turn off thoughts of Miles and return to work. I did my best to turn off thoughts of Miles and return to work. I had been in the middle of preparing for a dinner with a possible client who was looking to expand some of their manufacturing overseas, and I felt like every fact about him and his company had flown right out of my head the moment I had seen Miles’s name on my phone screen. With a sigh, I scrolled back to the beginning of my research brief. Better safe than sorry.

* * *

We met at the same diner. I wanted to suggest somewhere fancier, with dim lighting, a rose on the table, wine—but that was definitely out of the question. Though to be honest, the diner wasn’t doing much to keep my romantic impulses at bay. So many of our happy memories were at a diner not so different from this one. Our first kiss. When I told Miles that I loved him. When he told me we were having a baby.

All bittersweet, now.

I arrived before Miles and the waitress approached with coffee. It had been surprisingly decent when we’d been here last time. Not as good as Café Om, perhaps, but better than the swill from a gas station or a home instant coffee machine.

“What can I getcha, sugar?”

I leaned back, not bothering to look at the menu standing at the end of the table. “I’ll take a cup of high-test, and what pies do you have tonight?”

“Well, we’ve got our standard apple, blueberry, and caramel pies, and the specials are coconut cream and strawberry rhubarb.”

I smiled. “I’ll take a strawberry rhubarb and a coconut cream.”

“Sure thing. Anything else to drink?”

“No, that’s all for now, thank you.”

She drifted over to the next table, a couple of grizzled truckers, and greeted them with the same friendly demeanor she’d given me. That was one thing that definitely gave this place a leg up over any five-star restaurant—here, it didn’t matter who you were or how much money you had. They treated you just the same. Unless you were an asshole; then you got botted out on your ass. Neither management nor the customers would let that go. I didn’t have to see it happen to know that’s how it would be here; it was eerily reminiscent of the one Miles and I went to in college.

Miles arrived at the same time as the pies, and it warmed my soul to see his eyes light up at the sight of the coconut cream pie slice. “I hope there’s more where that came from,” he teased the waitress. “I just may eat you out of your entire stock.”

“You keep eating, I’ll keep serving,” she replied, filling his cup without asking. I wondered if he was a regular here. I’d have to make a list, I realized, of places I needed to avoid after this whole charade ended, places where Miles liked to go. It was my responsibility to keep his path clear of me, and I didn’t want him to feel like he couldn’t go to his old favorites anymore.

Miles dove into his pie without greeting me, but I had expected that. Nothing would distract him until he’d packed away that first piece. If he ordered a second, which he probably would, that one he would savor and it wouldn’t block conversation, but until he set his fork down with the first slice, there would be no talking to him.

His fork finally clattered to the plate with a sound ring of satisfaction. Miles leaned back with a smile of contentment. “I needed that,” he said, and downed half his cup of coffee.

“Apparently.” I had barely finished a third of mine, content to watch Miles and sip my coffee.

“It’s not like Cathy’s,” Miles said. “I never know when they’ll have coconut cream. Sometimes, they’ll have it three days in a row, sometimes they won’t have it for a month.”

“I bet it wreaks havoc with your schedule.” I couldn’t keep the smile from my eyes, and Miles shrugged my teasing off.

“I actually haven’t been here in a bit. Probably… about a month?”

“Too busy?” I asked.

“Something like that.”

It was nothing like that, I could tell. But Miles clearly didn’t want to discuss whatever had kept him from the possibility of coconut cream pie. My throat itched to ask him about it, but I coughed it away. It wasn’t my place.

The waitress swung by again. “Ready for that second piece, Mo?”

“Not quite yet, Sharon. But I’ll take a refill.”

She topped off both our mugs.

“Mo?” I asked.

He blushed. “Because I always want some ‘mo.’ My dad brought me here every week when I was a kid. He stopped…” Miles cleared his throat. “I guess he thought I was too old or he was too good for this little diner anymore.”

From what Miles had told me about his parents, I could fill in what Miles hadn’t said. His dad stopped bringing him when they found out he was an omega instead of an alpha or a beta. Miles never said anything negative about his parents—frustrated, sure, like any kid—but sometimes my blood had just boiled thinking about how bound up they were in their expectations of Miles as an omega. They didn’t realize how much damage they did by trying to force their expectations on Miles instead of accepting him for who he was. Even knowing all that, I hadn’t understood why Miles hadn’t wanted to tell them about the baby right away, not until he had explained it the last time we were at the diner.

Now that I had a few years’ distance from the events, I supposed it wasn’t that different from why I hadn’t wanted to introduce him to my parents, either. They probably weren’t too dissimilar from his. Their attitude and expectations of me as an alpha and Zeke as an omega were completely different. Zeke hadn’t fought it like Miles seemed to, though. He had seemed content to be the traditional omega, submissive, meek, lighthearted. So much so that it worried me. Until he disappeared, and that worried me even more. Miles and Zeke were nothing alike; my parents would have been… difficult, at best.

“Hello? Earth to Parker?” Miles waved his hands in front of my face and I jumped.

“I’m sorry. You were saying?”

Miles looked at me curiously. “Where were you?”

Years ago and miles away, I thought. “Just… thinking…”

“So what are we going to tell my parents about how we reconnected?”

Ah, we were getting back to business. For a few minutes, I had let myself slip back into a time gone past, where we were friends, lovers, young, carefree. Those days were gone. “The truth?” I said. “We ran into each other in a coffee shop?”

“And then that I ran away from you and we ended up in the same bar, drinking away our sorrows?”

I flinched. That kind of had been what I’d been doing. “Well… maybe not that whole truth. But that we started talking, and realized that we’d grown compatible as we’ve grown up and left college behind us, and decided to explore making our connection something more.”

The words tasted bitter in my mouth. I wanted them to be true, but I knew myself. I wasn’t to be trusted with Miles’s safety or heart. A jagged anxiety started tingling at my toes. This whole situation seemed fairly low risk to me, but what if I was able to hurt Miles with even this small thing?