Chapter Nineteen
Frey
By morning, Frey figured his body was broken. He stifled a sob, staring at himself in the mirror. He’d slept all night with no issue after his body had done nothing more than stay hot. At two in the morning, he’d sent Ziggy off to sleep in the spare room as he’d struggled to keep his eyes open. Frey had promised that he’d wake him when things changed.
Frey had woken ten minutes ago, at noon, which was a common time for him to wake on a weekend if he’d had a busy or stressful week. He’d had both. He wanted to blame those things for why his body wasn’t behaving as a heat predicted.
A shuffling sound came from beyond the door and Frey shoved a fist into his mouth to stop the next sob from escaping.
He stood staring at his glistening eyes for so long; he smelled coffee before he was brave enough to go and face Ziggy. Although face him didn’t quite apply, because the other man wasn’t the issue. Frey’s body was the absolute problem. He dabbed at his eyes with the sleeve of the top he’d put on when leaving his bedroom.
Ziggy was lounging against the countertop, holding a steaming mug of coffee. His expression revealed none of his thoughts as they looked at each other. “Wanna coffee?”
Happy Ziggy hadn’t offered a dollop of sympathy to add to his misery when he felt fragile enough to break, Frey nodded.
“You like three sugars, right?” Ziggy, wearing old sweats, which hung perilously low on his hips, and nothing else, asked, glancing over his tattooed shoulder at Frey.
“Four, please. I need all the sweetness to wake me up.” He needed more than sugar, but he’d take what he could get for now.
Moments later, Frey mimicked Ziggy’s stance, standing next to him and leaning on the countertop, sipping his coffee. The caffeine hit buzzed through him, sending his anxious stomach into a full on macarena.
“You make wonderful coffee.” Small talk, it was all he had when everything else meant acknowledging that he needed to make another appointment with the doctor.
“I’m broken,” Frey whispered in a terrified voice.
Ziggy placed his mug down and took Frey’s from his icy grip. Ziggy wrapped his arms around him, and Frey sagged into the embrace. The sob came with a full body shudder of despair. “You aren’t broken, Frey.”
“How can you say that? I don’t smell like I’m in heat. The physiological reactions I should be going through… they ar en’t happening.” He buried his face in Ziggy’s neck and let the grief come.
He really was broken.
He hadn’t listened to Dr. Hockings, and now it was too late.
What was he going to do now?
Ziggy stroked his back and remained silent as Frey cried until his head felt wooly, his eyes ached and had become swollen. Ziggy didn’t complain at how wet and snotty his shoulder was as he led Frey into the bathroom, got a cloth and gently wiped his face. “What do you need from me?”
Frey hiccuped, unsure how he’d gotten so lucky to have a friend as great as Ziggy. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “I’m broken.”
“Okay, as your friend, what I’m gonna say comes from a place of love.” He placed the cloth down on the sink and cupped Frey’s bristly cheeks. “You gotta stop being silly.”
He locked gazes with Frey with a look that suggested he was being very serious. “Your internal system is unique. Not broken. The discovery of divergents has shown that nothing is black and white for shifters. Some shift, some don’t. Some have more of one hormone than another. Would you say they were broken when all they are is beautifully unique?”
The hands holding him limited his head shake, but Frey tried. “No.” His quivering belly settled as he processed what Ziggy was telling him. He clung to the hope that his being different wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe his difference gave him time to adapt, to figure out how to accept his body’s needs .
“Then I need you to stop saying that about yourself. You’re different. There is nothing wrong with being different. Whether that’s the drugs you took to survive a traumatic experience. Whether it’s to do with your biology. Or even to do with your fox choosing to hide out, none of the reasons matter if you can accept that different isn’t necessarily bad… or mean you're broken.”
His eyes crinkled as he grinned. “I mean, you kinda won the omega lottery right now with how you aren’t governed by pesky hormones, which can remove your choices of when you wanna have sex.”
When he put it like that, Frey’s lips twitched. “I suppose I did.”
Hands dropped from Frey’s face, and Ziggy took a step back, giving him an expectant look. “So as we don’t need to get jiggy all weekend, what do you fancy doing instead?”
A slow smile spread over Frey’s face. “Wanna go get cake, veg out, and find a series to binge watch?”
“Sounds perfect.”
On Monday, Frey did what he’d always done. He got up with his alarm, sorted himself out and had come into work on automatic pilot. As Booker stood in the doorway to his office, looking at him like he’d somehow lost something important, it struck Frey what the issue was.
He wasn’t supposed to come into work, was he!
Crapola! How am I going to talk my way out of this?
Booker’s nose wrinkled as if he was scenting the air, stepping fully into Frey’s office. He quickly shut the door behind him and stayed right there with his back against the door and his hand gripping the handle.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
Frey eyed the white knuckled hand on the handle before he fired back, “I work here!”
He went on the defensive, scrambling to come up with a valid excuse for forgetting himself and being at work when he was supposed to be going through his heat at home.
Ziggy had left him last night, after a glorious weekend of binge eating cake and watching Reacher in all his gloriousness. He’d had such a ‘normal weekend’ after his meltdown on Saturday that Frey hadn’t thought to turn off the alarm on his phone. So when it went off to say it was time to get up for work, he had.
He really needed to come up with a way to stop his rational self from getting in his way. Fifty questions about his heat wasn’t the way he wanted to start his day, especially when it was with Booker.
Booker remained plastered to the door, quite literally. “You said you weren’t coming in until tomorrow,” he accused, his eyes wheeling all over the place.
“Then why are you here?” Frey asked sweetly, getting up from his desk to move around it, watching Booker closely .
When had Booker become a door hugger?
“I… I heard… someone say they’d seen Zi—you,” he stuttered and wore an angry look that Frey was familiar with. It was the one Booker got when he wasn’t sure of his footing and anger became his defensive reaction.
Had he been about to say Ziggy?
Interesting.
Frey knew he could trust Ziggy, and would sell his soul to the devil if the snake shifter had gossiped about him. The man was honorable and there was no way he’d have told Booker about their plans at the weekend. That had to mean one of two things. One of the PAs had overheard them and gossiped about him. As the PAs were his friends, they would have come to him directly to ask what was going on. That was how they worked.
They hadn’t.
That left Booker having overheard him and Ziggy talking in the coffee lounge, the one-time they’d spoken at work about Frey’s heat issue.
What had Booker heard?
He went through the conversation and counted back the days to his doctor's appointment. Was it after that Booker had glued himself to me?
Things clicked together and Frey gave Booker a narrow-eyed stare as he walked towards the bear, who remained clutching the handle. Frey’s heart thundered in his ears at all the possibilities as he aimed his most sexy smirk at Booker, watching for his reaction .
If anything, the bear appeared to pale and then his hand rose as if to fend Frey off.
His ears actually rang with how fast his heart beat as Frey stopped, his hand going to the hip he cocked out.
“Whatsup?” he asked, doing his best to keep the nerves from his voice. Did Booker like him in a ‘I don’t want anyone else touching you’ kind of way? It sure seemed that way when Frey considered how Booker had been last Thursday, now he saw it through fresh eyes.
“You shouldn’t be here!” Booker exclaimed in a strangled, almost unrecognizable voice.
“Why?” Frey questioned, taking another step closer, only to watch Booker appear to hold his breath.
Then Booker put a hand over his nose and mouth, giving Frey a look of utter panic that gave Frey’s pulse another boost.
The bear was worried about his heat scent…
Our bear.
Now you choose to unblock me!
His fox sniffed indignantly.
“Stay back!”
The muffled command got met with a big ass grin. “What’s wrong, Booker.”
Frey sashayed closer and watched in utter delight as Booker flung open the door and darted out. He sprinted off down the corridor faster than Frey would have considered possible for such a big man.
“I thought you wanted to talk to me,” he called after him .
There was no response, not that he expected one when Booker had already disappeared into the stairwell leading to the fire escape.
“What’s going on?” asked Hollis, who poked his head out of his office door, frowning. “Shouting in the corridor, Frey? You know better.”
Frey couldn’t find it in him to be upset at the chastise he heard in Hollis’s tone as he nodded in agreement. “Sorry boss. Won’t happen again.”
Hollis glanced down the passageway and back to Frey. “Is there something I’m missing?”
Giggling, Frey shook his head. “Absolutely nothing,” he answered.
The frown remained as Hollis came fully out of his office. “Aren’t you supposed to be out of the office today… recovering?”
Blushing, he beckoned Hollis into his office. “About that…”