The turquoise specters of the veins in Nick's eyes still floated in his vision after they'd passed beneath the blaring light of Christine's porch light. Having settled down near the center of the Omega's palm as she held him level with her chest, the Beta had since wandered semi-delirious with doubt toward her fingers. The light cracked between the thick spires of her digits like a beacon, and he soon made himself comfortable at the altar of one of her fingers.
The evening had fared roughly as well as he'd expected. Which was incredibly disappointing, to say the least.
"Hey. Are you okay?" The whispered voice boomed from above.
Nick could feel Christine's powerful gaze on the back of his neck. She'd obviously noticed his head had lulled involuntarily down against the base crease of her ring finger in a bow. Fitting, really, he decided. He knew she would accept none of the apologies he felt it was necessary to make now.
"That was... well..." Christine continued. She'd slowed her pace.
"Yeah."
"It's all right," she reassured. The great wall of her fingers curved inward and upward, collecting Nick nearer to the center of her palm again. "Don't think about it too much."
The Beta obeyed the muscular trajectory of his girlfriend's hand, following the fresh hill formed in her flesh and making himself a more obvious visual target at the epicenter.
"It's hard not to."
"I know," she sighed. "Maybe it was too soon. Maybe I should've done more, tried to explain... more."
"I'm not sure how much that would've done," Nick said. He leaned against the steeper incline of Christine's cupped palm at the basin. "I know I can't really... understand what he's going through... what either of them are going through... but I don't think he's wrong."
"What do you mean?"
"Just... what we're doing together, it's... I..."
"Nick..."
"...I must be a lot to take in," the Beta groaned, realizing how absurd his wording sounding as soon as it was out. He was a human crumb to both his girlfriend and her son. "I'm only a few years older than him. Hell, if one of us was a different size, we might've even known each other at school. Might've been friends."
He regretted this particular comparison almost immediately.
Christine nodded, the bob of her towering head momentarily blotting out the moon. Her face was mostly obscured by shadow as she gazed down at him with renewed vigor.
"Do you think I'm too old?"
Nick batted his eyes, the acid in his stomach churning.
"No!" he defended. He gritted his teeth and squared his shoulders like an offended cricket. His felt anger roiling up inside, aimed solely at himself. "That's not... that's not what I meant. I'm sorry. Please, Christine..."
"Don't apologize," she murmured. By now she'd stopped completely in her tracks, the Omega path between the highway lanes still humming off in the distance. "I know you didn't mean it like that. But look at me. I've been alive more than a century..."
Nick squinted, tracing the limited geometry of her face that he could make out in the dark. Her violet eyes were glistening, and he knew it wasn't just their usual luster. Like all Omegas, she certainly didn't look her age. In fact, at most she appeared to be about five years older than him, so it was always a minor internal shock to return to this revelation.
"...and you're still at the start of your life. I... I taught you. And I know it must be hard sometimes not to still think of me as just your professor, as the giant old woman lecturing at you. So I understand, too, if you're-"
"Christine, stop." Nick didn't mean it to sound quite so much like an order, but this amazonian angel of a woman had been a guardian for him just as much as a lover. She deserved to be protected, including from her own obviously rigorous self-doubts. For all her city-block-height and earth-moving strength, she had never been more vulnerable to the Beta's eyes than now. Under the tricky influence of the dim lighting, he could almost convince himself he was watching her walk across her own hand, standing at three inches herself, laid raw before him.
The Omega's lips ceased their dance above. They pursed together, her tear-welled eyes zeroing on Nick as her hand brought him closer to her chin in a soft rush of night air. She waited.
"You were my teacher. But then you weren't. You were my friend. My... well, my best friend, let's be honest."
She nodded, her dark hair rustling above.
"And I just need you to know, that I don't care about how much time we had before we met each other. I don't care how old you are, how small I am, or if your children don't believe it's right. Because... because I do. I believe it's right, that you're amazing, and that I... I..."
"Yes?"
"I love you." The syllables came easier than he was expecting. Like a tune he'd had stuck in his head for months and only just now remembered the lyrics. "Do you hear me, Christine? I LOVE YOU."
A lilting giggle echoed through the silence of the Omega neighborhood. Christine tossed her head back, reveling in the exponential outpouring of joy originating from the three-inch individual standing defiantly in the landscape of her hand.
"I hear you." Her voice returned to its usual gentle confidence as the pink line of her lips reopened, descending toward her palm. "And I love you, too."
Nick was nearly swallowed up into the storm of suction. The mere intake of breath was enough to adhere him to Christine's lower lip. She quickly corrected his position, though, bearing him nearer to the center on the slick slope of kissably-soft flesh. The tip of that godlike red tongue resurfaced, dragging him comfortably forward on the stippled surface. Again and again her mouth tightened and relented, smooching the Beta an inch into the dark, warm maw and then releasing him back onto the sticky terrain of her lower lip. All the while, the young man could do nothing but surrender his body to the pull of her affection and lay as many of his own microscopic kisses upon her skin as was humanly possible.
When the Beta, now soaked with Christine's saliva and lip gloss and sporting a painfully obvious tent between his legs, was finally released from the thank-you kiss, he flopped onto his back. From here, he could so easily stargaze, so high above the ground and his previous life experiences, but all he wanted to do was stare down his queen. She'd turned nearer to a street light, now allowing her glowing features to shine again for her miniscule audience.
And God, she was a sight.
Without warning, Christine pivoted. At a brisk pace, she made her way backward on the path, in the opposite direction from Nick's house. Her sandals slapped aggressively on the underside of her building-sized peds down below, every footfall an echo in the Beta's ears. She'd made it several distant steps before her date got his bearings, wiped the moisture away from his eyes, and put some words together.
"What are you doing?" For an instant his heart thumped faster against his ribs. He wasn't used to uncertainty in Christine's hands. "Where are we going?"
"Just trust me," she requested softly, her irises yearning so deeply it made Nick ache in his bones. "You do trust me, don't you?"
"Of course," he breathed, hardly letting her get the last word out.
"Then just sit tight for me," she said with a reassuring smirk, blowing him a last air kiss as her fingers darted in overhead, sealing off his view of the night sky and limiting his exposure to the ridged ecosystem of her hand, and then suddenly nothing at all but what he could feel beneath his feet as she closed him inside her monumental fist.
The seismic motion returned almost immediately as Christine marched off, and the Beta could sense gravity shifting and robbing him of his footwork again. Not that he particularly minded.
It was an assuredly unique sensation for Nick to be utterly enclosed in an Omega's hand, one that once incidentally caused his heart to flutter just by nature of the brunette beauty's towering volume and the warm, open darkness he suddenly found himself in not unlike a bizarre dream on a hot summer's night. Now that he'd had multiple chances to experience this particular brand of absolute protection, he'd learned to calm down and even enjoy the brief interlude of sensory deprivation in exchange for being surrounded on all sides by the flesh of his girlfriend's hand.
Of course, his heart still fluttered, but for entirely different reasons.
The closer Christine's fingers closed in around him, in fact, the more comfortable Nick became, even as her titanic digits ate up the space he had to move. Not that he would've used that space himself, of course; he essentially gifted all bodily agency to her in these circumstances.
And what a gift it was. The segments of her feminine digits, padded and plush, expanded as her knuckles bent her hand into a gentle fist and compressed him into her encircling palm. So small he was by comparison to each trunk-like extension, his entire body could easily become lost on the width of any individual finger, even when he stretched his arms as high above his head as possible in the vertigo of her twisting appendage.
His entire body would bounce softly into the loping crevices of her fingers, but never sliding between them, as she maintained a strict barrier of tender flesh on all sides. The Beta was always easily collected back into the center of a finger and pinned playfully in sequence by each into the creased center, before he was released again.
To an outside observer, it would've appeared Christine was twiddling her fingers in a rippling pattern against the heel of her hand, a mere side effect of an intense brainstorm. To Nick, it meant his entire existence was squeezed into the bubble within the Omega's caring hand, the walls formed by her curved palm and bobbing fingers always evolving just as quickly as his meditative inhalations of the coconut-scented darkness. Though, from the sound of her voice before, it did indeed seem she had a brainstorm going as well.
The atmosphere warmed again. Hearing the smooth creak of the sliding door opening and shutting, Nick pressed his ear against the nearest crevice of Christine's digits, unsure exactly which part of her finger, or even which finger, he was nuzzled again. Either way, from this position, he could hug her skin, try to listen for exterior clues, and casually straddle the girth of her finger against his increasingly tight pants. In short, it was ideal.
"Hey, Mom." The voice was faint, probably coming from a nearby Alpha walkway on the wall, but Nick immediately recognized the sound as Sylvia's.
"Hi, honey."
"You're back quick."
"Nick decided to take the train."
"Sorry that went so suckily."
"Don't worry about it right now. Did Bennett come back yet?"
"No. I texted him but he didn't say anything. He probably went to his "spot," so I bet he's not coming back for a while."
"All right. Do you need anything?"
"No. I'm tired. I was just gonna go to bed and listen to my music."
"Sounds good," Christine said. "Good night, sweetie." Nick felt a shift in gravity again that jostled him softly from his prime eavesdropping location, but he quickly recovered in time to hear his girlfriend planting a motherly smooch on her daughter's head. He couldn't help but grin, continually enamored of her love for her offspring.
"Ewww, Mom! Your breath still tastes like the dinner," the girl blathered, laughing as she spoke. "Ever hear of toothpaste?"
"Sorry. I just can't help it," Christine said jovially. The authoritative rumble of her footsteps below started up again. "I'm going to go to bed too, okay? Try not to think too much about tonight for now. We'll talk about it more after we've all had some rest."
"Mom?"
"Yes?"
"Did... did Nick hate us? Me and Bennett?"
The Beta was only mostly dumbfounded. What a question. Him? Hate them?
As a single unit, the Omega's fingers all enclosed inward just a little further, hugging Nick in an incomprehensible direction between a yielding ceiling of sweet-smelling palm and Christine's delicate though skyscraper-like digits. A hope.
He kissed her flesh back almost immediately in answer as the warm cavern of the Omega's feminine fist gave way again.
"No, honey," Christine said. "I don't believe he did."
Good.
"Okay," Sylvia said, her uplifted voice descending to a whisper as her mother moved further away. "I'm glad."
The calming quakes of Christine's lumbering footfalls lasted for another minute. From his rough knowledge of the Omega house's layout, Nick was able to imagine the woman was just now passing through the living room, toward a separate short hallway. He heard the lush weight of her sandals on the family room carpet far below traded for the rubbery clack of them against the artificial wood of the alcove, and then finally the return to the softness of the carpet as she opened and closed another door.
Swiftly, the young man's estimated mental map of the home reached an unknown. The low blare of a bedside lamp crept across the mounds and creases of the Omega's hand as her fingers slowly uncurled. Nick felt himself reorienting to the pull of earth's gravity, momentarily remaining clamped into the underside of Christine's index finger joint before rolling back into the center. He clambered hand over hand toward her thumb, ascending closer to the pad of her finger with utter faith in her balance.
"I promised you a bedroom tour, didn't I?" Christine questioned cheekily as her boyfriend laid down on the ovular rings that made up the tip of her thumb. She extended a hand over the relatively modest-sized Omega quarters. "I keep my promises."
"I thought you said maybe a tour," he chuckled, tickling a finger against the grooved ground.
"All right, all right, I keep my implied promises."
"You certainly do."
"But that's not the only reason we're here, of course."
"Oh?"
"No."
"What's the other?"
"I'm going to convince you..." she said quietly, sinking down onto the edge of the bed. Her other hand rose into view over the horizon of her wrist. A finger curved into the neck of the fabric that hung over her shoulders and tucked it to the side, exposing more of her lustrous skin to the lamplight. "...that I believe it's right, too."