Plunder: a reverse harem omegaverse romance, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
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PLUNDER
an RH omegaverse romance
V.C. Lluxe
PLUNDER
© copyright 2023 by V.C. Lluxe
http://vjchambers.com
Punk Rawk Books
1
cameo
“WELL,” I SAY, tightening my hand as it wraps around the neck of my bass guitar, “the thing is, Gable and me? We’re a package deal.”
I’m backstage at the Dreamland Taproom, and there’s not really a lot of actual backstage here. It’s maybe also an employee break room or something. There are no windows. There’s a microwave in one corner and a utility sink, and there are a bunch of boxes of napkins stacked on the opposite wall.
I’m standing here with Gable, my omega, at my back, and the members of the band Plunder at my front. There are three of them, and they’re kind of a big deal, but they’re not actually a big deal.
Still, when I heard that their bassist, Samantha Briggs, was leaving their band, I reached out. I didn’t think they’d actually show up here at this show that I was doing to see me, but when they asked if they could come, I didn’t say no.
“Gable,” echoes the lead singer. Her name is Bandit Price. She’s an omega. I know this more than I notice it, even though I’m an alpha, and it’s a thing I notice—designations. She’s wearing scent suppressant. But her being an omega is common knowledge.
Not that omegas aren’t often front and center in bands. Not that lots of actors and actresses aren’t omegas. It comes with the omega territory, liking to be the center of attention, being good at commanding a crowd of people, knowing how to inspire devotion.
Anyway, she’s kind of mesmerizing. She has long, wavy red hair. I don’t know if her hair is naturally that color or if she dyes it. I kind of think she dyes it, because most actual redheads have hair that is sort of orange and hers is a deeper sort of dark red. But it’s beautiful, and it’s full of highlights of gold and browns, sort of multi-colored hair, and she has acres of it, and it catches under the stage lights when she grips a microphone or when she dances on stage.
She’s beautiful.
She has a quality to her, something unnameable, but something affecting. She’s always dressed as though she just threw on whatever rags were lying close by, but whatever the rags are, they also end up looking feminine on her. Everything she wears is kind of flowy and too-big for her, and since her clothes swallow her up, she looks small and delicate.
You want to protect her.
But she has a mouth on her.
She’ll swear on stage, flip off the crowd, that kind of thing. She has no interest in being told what to do. She has no interest in anybody’s criticism.
She’s, uh, she’s…
Well, anyway, um, Gable and I are together, so I don’t know why I’m thinking all these things.
Bandit stares at Gable. “What do you do, exactly?”
Gable stares back at Bandit, and he doesn’t say anything.
I answer. “Gable’s a songwriter. He’s got an amazing voice. He plays a little too.”
“Yeah, we just heard your set,” says Bandit, turning to me. “We heard him play.”
Okay, Gable is not a great guitar player, but if you watch him play, you don’t… care. Because he’s…
Gable ducks his face down, looking embarrassed.
Gable’s Pakistani.
I mean, he was born in America, but his family’s ancestry is that. His parents are Muslim, but he doesn’t talk much about them.
Once I was with him when his mother called him on the phone, and he went kind of monosyllabic and kept glancing at me sidelong throughout the conversation, and I felt weird, so I left the room to give him his privacy. Afterward, he said his family is not jumping for joy over the whole fucking-a-man-thing he tends to do. We both identify as bisexual, but Gable’s told me he’s never been in a longterm relationship with a woman, only men.
He says his family is supportive and loving on the whole, that he’s lucky to have them, but that he pulls away on his own, that he puts up barriers. And I see that he doesn’t want to talk about it, so I don’t push.
I mean, things aren’t perfect with my family either. My mom never calls me on the phone, though. My mom barely remembers I exist half the time.
Gable is graceful. He has shoulder-length black hair and huge dark eyes. He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen in my life. When I look at Gable, I can almost never look away.
But I gotta say, right now, Gable and Bandit, between them, it’s like being stuck between two very bright spotlights and feeling blinded anywhere I turn.
“We don’t need a singer,” says Bandit. “We don’t need a rhythm guitarist. We don’t need a songwriter.” She points. “Raider writes most of our songs. And I play rhythm guitar. I sing.” She draws herself up, imperious. “There’s no place in the band for Gable.” She emphasizes the word as though she finds Gable disgusting.
“Bandit,” speaks up Raider Smith, the aforementioned songwriter and also lead guitarist of the band, “uh, he’s good.”
She shoots a withering gaze over her shoulder at Raider.
Raider shifts on his feet and looks away.
Bandit whips her gaze back to Gable, lifting her chin. “There’s not room in the band for the both of us.”
Gable just stares at her, his lips slowly parting. “You do take up a lot of space, don’t you?” he murmurs to her, his voice sort of wondering, soft, seductive.
She goes still, swallowing hard.
Gable tucks a lock of his black hair behind his ear, stepping forward, closing the distance between them. They’re the same height. They hold each other’s gaze, and they step closer, and they are nose-to-nose, and there’s something about it, seeing them like that, I can’t describe it, but it feels big somehow to me.
“What is that supposed to mean?” You can tell she means it to be a challenge, but her voice trembles.
Gable reaches out and picks up a strand of her red, red hair. He runs it through his fingers. “Just your presence, I guess.”
“Did I say you could touch me?”
“You didn’t.” He doesn’t let go of her hair.
Another long moment as they stare at each other.
Gable lets her hair drop.
“We need to talk about it,” says Bandit.
“Yeah, that’s fair,” I say.
Gable smiles lopsidedly, with only half of his mouth. He looks as though he already knows we’re in the band.
2
bandit
WHEN I SEE Gable Saad the first time, the sight of him knocks the wind out of me. It’s like something reaches into my throat, into my lungs, and empties them.
I stand there, gasping, wheezing, practically unable to stand.
He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.
His expressive brown eyes swallow up his face. His jaw is cut-glass sharp. He comes up to the microphone, staring at it like it ruined his life or something.
Men shouldn’t be allowed to look like that.
This place is small. There’s a stone wall behind the stage, which juts out, painted black.
Gable is alone on stage, and there’s one microphone. He’s got a guitar strapped to his chest, an Epiphone acoustic-electric that looks like it’s seen better days. Just a cheap, standard guitar. He’s dressed in a too-tight t-shirt that shows off every detail of his chest and arms. He’s skinny.
God.
He’s probably skinnier than me.
I could break this boy like a twig.
I should find him unappealing.
But then he smiles.
There aren’t very many people in the bar. Maybe fifty people, and most of them are still talking to each other, sitting at the four-person round tables that litter the floor. There’s a bare space directly in front of the stage for dancing. No one’s standing there right now.
But when he smiles, people stop talking. Not everyone, of course, but enough that it’s noticeable.
It’s a spell.
He leans into the microphone and speaks into it, and I hear his voice for the first time. It’s male and melodic and a little vulnerable. There’s an edge to it, as if he might crack at any moment, and it makes me want to go up there and soothe that edge right out of him somehow. I don’t even know how, but I want to touch him. He says, “I’m going to start out with a couple covers.”
Then he starts to play, and he’s terrible. I mean, his timing is a little off and he’s muffling the high E string whenever he frets his cords which means it’s never ringing out properly and everything is a little off.
And I don’t care.
I can’t stop staring at him.
It’s supposed to be a cover. I don’t recognize it
He starts to sing.
My body goes taut, like I’m the high E string, like I’m ringing out.
It’s an Outkast cover, “Hey Ya,” and it sounds different with just one guy singing it, with one acoustic guitar, (well, it’s plugged in, but it sounds acoustic) and with his voice, which is scratchy and mournful.
He’s grinning though, and when he sings, I swear he’s looking right at me.
But from the way the audience is rapt, I know every woman in the whole place thinks he’s looking at her.
We’re all moving forward now, all of us. The other people are getting out of their chairs and leaving the tables behind and we’re prowling up on the stage. Some people even dance.
He throws back his head and exposes the length of his tawny-brown neck and his “Hey Ya” is raspy and affected, and I want to live in that voice of his. I want to lie down in a big tub full of his voice and let it splash over my thighs and my breasts and my belly.
This man.
He finishes the song, and the whole place goes insane.
It’s packed in here now. There’s another room and everyone who was in there, even the people playing pool because they’re still carrying their cue sticks, have migrated in, called by the noise, the power, the draw of Gable fucking Saad.
This man.
He ducks his head down, his long black lashes fanning out against his cheeks as he shuts his eyes. He looks shy, but he’s grinning. “Thank you,” he says into the microphone, as if he doesn’t think he deserves the applause, as if he can’t even understand how it could be happening. “I got another cover for you guys?” He grins wider and readjusts his hands on the guitar neck.
Everyone hoots a response.
He laughs, looking nervous.
He starts the song, plays three chords, hits an obviously wrong note and stops. He winces. “Lemme try that again,” he says, shrugging at us all in an aw-shucks way.
I want to reassure him it’s okay that he messed up, that we don’t mind.
Play something for us. Just play, I think.
He gets through the opening, and then his raspy voice comes out, and I realized it’s Britney Spears. He’s singing “…Baby One More Time.”
When everyone else realizes, the whole place erupts in cheers.
This makes him mess up his chord change, and he lets out a little laugh but immediately recovers. When he launches into the chorus, it’s mournful. How he must confess his loneliness is killing him and all of that.
I want him.
I want him so bad. I don’t know what I want to do with him, but he’s… hell.
At this point, half of the crowd is pressed up against the stage. No one’s dancing, because the way he’s playing the song is kind of slow, but everyone’s sort of swaying together, and staring up at him, all of us rapt.
I’m there too. I can’t stop myself from getting closer.
I’ve lost track of everyone else in the band, even Lloyd, who’s sort of my main guy right now, and I don’t even care about that. I also don’t care about the fact that we’re here to see a bass player who has yet to take the stage.
Now, I scent Gable.
He’s an omega.
He’s not even wearing scent suppressant.
I shake my head. Of course not. Because, if you’re a male omega, why bother? It’s not like you can get pregnant or anything. Just throw your scent around, turn on the audience, cheat, and there are no fucking consequences, not for you.
I hate Gable Saad.
I envy Gable Saad.
If I were a male omega…
No, I don’t want to be a man, not really. The truth is, I don’t want to be anyone other than me. Still, Gable Saad? He’s… maddening.
He finishes the song on stage, and then he says that he’s bringing out Cam, “to give a little depth and rhythm to the songs.” That’s who we’re here to see. Cameo Foster, bass player.
Samantha was an amazing bass player, and I really liked being in a band where I was not the token female. Two girls was a nice balance. I told the other guys in the band that I wanted to find another female bass player. They were fine with it, but we haven’t had any other female bass players interested.
Cam is supposedly pretty good. The demo tracks he sent sounded fine. He invited us here to see him live.
I’ve made my peace with it.
It could be worse, being the token girl in a band, really. And up until now, until Gable Saad rearranges my entire existence with his terrible guitar playing and the way he affects me, I’ve actually been having fun here at this bar.
I like to play games at bars sometimes, especially when they’re not super crowded. The games are simple. They don’t involve much. This time, when I get here, I go and stand at the bar alone, without Lloyd or Raider or anyone else, and I don’t look at the bartender. Instead, I hold onto the bar for dear life and look at the other people sidled up to the bar.
It’s interesting. When you don’t look at the bartender, he or she seems to assume you’re fine and doesn’t come to try to get you a drink.
And when you make eye contact with people at a bar, they’ll react either by being unsettled—in which case, they break eye contact and look away and don’t want to talk to you—or they’re receptive. I find people are receptive more often than not.
Maybe it’s because I’m an omega or because I’m an attractive woman, but I kind of don’t think so. Deep down, I think all people have a tiny, vulnerable, pink, squirming center and they all feel alone and sad. And someone who looks at them and projects confidence and acceptance—people just love that shit.
So, my game is to make eye contact at the bar and see how long it takes for someone to come over and strike up a conversation with me and how long it takes them to offer to buy me a drink.
Spoiler alert, it never takes very long.
This bar has been no exception, although Lloyd chased off my new friend when he found me at the bar. He does not like my game, I don’t think, but he knows better than to tell me what to do. No one tells me what to do.
Anyway, before Gable, before all this, everything was fine, and I had my entire evening under control.
I try to get that back.
I try to remember that we’re only here to watch Cam Foster.
Focus on the bass player, I tell myself.
He comes out on stage, and he’s taller than Gable. He’s your typical folksy hippie White guy, I guess? He’s got a beard, a little straggly, but not too long. His hair is in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. He’s not muscular—but then, if you’re wanting muscle-bound boys, you usually won’t find them amongst musicians, not unless they’re also into lifting weights or they have a day job in construction. It’s rare is all I’m saying. I’m fine with that.
But Cam’s not, you know, weak-looking either. He’s tall and fairly broad. He slides in behind Gable, and they launch into a song that Gable says is an original. It’s this haunting and affecting song about watching the person who Gable used to be in a relationship move on with someone new.
The thing is, Gable’s singing to a man who’s left him for a woman, and it might be 2023, and music may have busted a lot of boundaries, but that kind of thing is rare. And yet, the whole place is swaying to it, eyes closed, really grooving on the whole thing.
It helps that Gable’s playing is better with Cam backing him up, of course.
I wonder why they plan it that way. I’m sure Cam could play bass to the two covers.
I try to tell myself that the reason I’m here is to see if Cam is a good bass player or not. To try to picture him in our band.
But, I spend the rest of the set staring at Gable’s lips as they practically kiss the microphone.
raider
WHEN BANDIT AND I decided to start a band, I felt like it was meant to be. My name is Raider and her name is Bandit.
How is that not a sign?
That’s the reason we’re called Plunder, of course. It seemed appropriate.
