Chapter 10
ASH
This was bullshit.
“This is bullshit,” Ash said.
The beta doctor blinked at him, but her mild, professional smile stayed firmly in place. Her name was Dr. Turner, it turned out. She was nice. Polite. Ash shouldn’t swear at her.
“Such bullshit.”
Well, fuck. He couldn’t help it though. Ash was already grumpy just about being here.
He’d managed to forget that he was supposed to check in at the clinic weekly, and he hadn’t taken Ryder’s reminder well.
And it was a lunch appointment, too, so Ash was hungry.
Any second he was going to start chomping down on tongue depressors.
Dr. Turner uncrossed and recrossed her legs, the only sign that his bad attitude might be getting to her. “Well, Asher, can you tell me what part specifically has you so frustrated?”
Ash clamped his hands down on his seat so he didn’t start adding rude gestures to the mix. “You said this would be short but intense. It’s been a week since my last heat. No pheromones, no nothing. I don’t seem to be any closer to presenting than before.”
Dr. Turner shook her head. “I said the heats themselves would be short and intense. The length of presentation this late in life is variable. It could take a few weeks, or it could take up to a year.”
The unexpected spike of panic left Ash gasping for air. “A year?”
He shot a look to Ryder, who was sprawled stoically in the chair next to him. He’d known, hadn’t he? Ryder was the one who’d actually been paying attention last time.
But a whole fucking year?
Before this past week, if someone had told Ash he was going to present as an omega, he probably would have said the longer it took the fucking better.
But it turned out that the waiting—not knowing when the next heat was going to hit, not knowing when his pheromones were going to stick around and his life was going to change irrevocably—was worse.
Way worse. He didn’t have the patience for this shit.
“There are a few things that can be done to help speed the process,” Dr. Turner told him placidly.
“Regular and thorough scent marking with alpha pheromones, for one.” She gave a nod to Ryder, like she was commending him for making Ash smell like a goddamn cedar grove that morning.
“Knotting as frequently as possible when the heats hit, for another.”
She didn’t even blush as that sentence left her lips. But why would she? No doubt, as the campus heat and pheromone specialist, she was more than used to discussing knots and slick and all the rest of it with the same professional tone she used to discuss a blood draw.
She wasn’t thinking about the dirty details, like Ash couldn’t help but do. She wasn’t thinking about the grunting and the sweating and the smell of alpha cum all around him.
Ash cleared his throat, shifting in his seat.
Dr. Turner gave him another reassuring, professional smile. “I have some handouts you should have received the last time you were here. I’ll go get those for you, shall I?”
Ash turned to Ryder as soon as the door closed. “You heard her. Drench me.”
Ryder didn’t move from his seat. “I already have. I always do.”
Right. Of course. The cedar grove. Ash had literally just been thinking that.
And it wasn’t even new with this whole presentation debacle.
People had always gotten weird and pervy about the undesignated thing—like it was some forbidden fruit they had to try just to say they had—and over the years, Ryder had started scent marking the fuck out of Ash before he left the house each day.
It worked too. Their classmates seemed to think that Ash was an alpha or assume he was claimed by one. Either way, it was a deterrent.
And Ryder might have acted blasé about it, but Ash knew he loved it. Because underneath his mild-mannered stoicism, Ryder was just as possessive and obsessive as any other alpha was about their … person.
“Why so impatient?” Ryder asked, his dark gaze boring into Ash with an intensity that belied his relaxed pose.
“I thought you’d be happy for a delay.” There was no judgment to the question or the statement, no verbal side-eye at Ash for being a complete and total coward about addressing his designation so far.
It kind of made Ash want to cry, for some reason. Ryder always stood by him, didn’t he? Ride or fucking die. It was right there in his name.
Ash sniffed back any potential tears. Stupid fucking hormones, messing with his chill. Lately he was either wired, tired, or fucking weepy. He’d been trying to lean into the former two as much as possible to avoid the latter. Ash didn’t cry. It just wasn’t his thing.
What had the question been? Right. Impatience. Ash ran a hand over his face, left it there to press his fingers hard into his eyes. “I just want everything done with, I guess.”
“Except it won’t be done,” Ryder told him mildly. “It’ll be just the beginning.”
Ash dropped his hand, shooting Ryder a glare. “No therapy talk or I’ll jump right out of this window.”
“We’re on the ground floor. You’ll barely get a scratch.”
“The threat stands.”
Ryder leaned back in his chair, crossing his hands over his stomach. “Maybe you just want another heat as an excuse to call your crush.”
God, he might not even be wrong. Ash had promised Spencer frequent, intense, horny-ass heats.
Was Spencer going to get bored of them now that Ash might take another fucking eternity to go into heat again?
Was the promise of hanky-panky with Ryder enough to entice him or was he going to go back to letting any passably hot undergrad into his bed?
Ash bit back his rising anxiety. He tried for a leer. “He did sound pretty good in your shower the other day.”
Spencer had sounded more than good, with his desperate, hushed moans that Ryder had tried and failed to keep quiet.
Ash had even thought that maybe it could be the catalyst his body needed, that the lure of Ryder and Spencer getting hot and heavy together might have forced out a gush of slick as an incentive to join.
But there been nothing, only a faint arousal that had been overshadowed by Ash’s impatience to get moving again.
“We could just tell him, you know,” Ryder suggested.
“No.”
Ash wasn’t good with words. They always came out too harsh, his mouth moving faster than his brain.
And if Ash fucked it all up and Spencer just said, “No, thanks. Thanks for asking, but I’ll be going back to fucking half the student population now,” Ash and Ryder would be shit out of luck. That would be it. The end.
Ash rubbed his fingers to his temples. “Maybe if Spencer started scent marking me, that would help.”
“He might worry about Noah popping him one if he did.”
“Noah won’t give a shit,” Ash said, grimacing at the reminder of Spencer’s hard-on for his older brother.
“Well, he might give a little bit of a shit.”
What. The fuck. Ash shot Ryder a scowl. “You’re really up my ass today, aren’t you?”
Ryder shrugged a broad shoulder. “Not as much as I’d like to be.”
Stupid. So stupid. Ash fought hard to keep his scowl in place. “Don’t make me laugh,” he bit out. “I’m not in the mood.”
Ryder’s voice stayed mild, but his dark gaze only grew in intensity. “No therapy speak. No laughter. No common sense. What would you like from me, bright eyes?”
Ash wished he could still smell pheromones clearly enough to pick up on what Ryder’s were doing at that exact moment. Ash could faintly smell cedar, but was it growing richer? Thicker? Was the room filling up like it had when Ash had been in heat?
Ash clenched his fists under his thighs. What he wanted in this exact moment was too embarrassing for words, so he didn’t use them. He stood up from his chair in one stilted movement, then walked over to Ryder’s and plopped down in his lap.
And because Ryder was the best human around, he wordlessly wrapped his arms around Ash as tight as he could, dropping his chin to Ash’s hair.
Ash let out a breath. That felt pretty good, actually, so he tried another. In and out. Breathing in both Ryder’s pheromones and the subtle, musky scent that was just him. His skin and body wash and sweat.
Something horrible and tight finally loosened in Ash’s chest a little.
“Anytime you want, bright eyes,” Ryder murmured, even though Ash hadn’t said anything.
Ash didn’t even flinch when Dr. Turner came back with her pamphlets to find him curled up on Ryder’s lap like some kind of … docile omega.
She wanted Ash to soak up alpha pheromones, right? Then she had to pay the PDA price of it.
It turned out Ryder had gotten them deli sandwiches and shoved them in his bag, so Ash made it to his financial engineering lecture early.
Which sucked, actually, because arriving early meant sitting still and waiting.
More waiting. Always fucking waiting. No wonder he felt antsy and wired and pissed off at the whole world.
Ash’s phone was close to dead—he really needed to get better about charging that damn thing—so he left it on his lap and busied himself with scoping out his classmates.
Ash didn’t usually pay much attention, so it was a novel experience.
Because really, if they weren’t his friends or Noah, what did he give a shit for?
But now that he was looking, Ash realized his class was almost all alphas and betas.
He could clock only two omegas by sight, like the one sitting a few seats down from him, a cherubic-looking guy with light-blond hair and the biggest blue eyes Ash had ever seen.
Now that was what people pictured when they thought omega.
He should be on a campus poster somewhere, frozen in time as he frolicked on the quad, all short and slender and round-cheeked.
The seats between them were empty, and the guy caught Ash looking. He gave Ash a sweet smile and a little nod. See? Classic omega behavior.
If Ash had caught a random classmate staring at him, he would have given him a scowl and the finger.