Chapter 5 Sully
Sully
The knot goes down and I don't pull out.
I should. The protocol, the polite thing, the thing I've done every other time I've been in this room with an omega is wait for the knot to release and then ease out and clean up and leave.
That's how this works. That's the transaction.
You help them through the wave, you give them what they need, and you go.
I don't go.
Wren is asleep against my chest. Or not asleep exactly, more like he shut down, his body going limp and heavy after the crying, his breathing evened out into something slow and deep.
His mask has shifted slightly, riding up on one side, and I can see the line of his jaw and the corner of his mouth and a damp streak on his cheek where the tears ran under the edge.
I know that jaw. I've looked at it across Tate's dinner table maybe a hundred times.
I've watched it clench when someone says something Wren disagrees with, which is often, because Wren disagrees with everything as a hobby.
I'm so fucked.
I knew who he was the second he walked onto the floor.
Before I saw him, even. His scent hit me from across the room and my whole body locked up because I've smelled that scent before, faintly, in passing, at every barbecue and birthday party and random Tuesday night hangout at Tate's apartment for the past two years.
It was always quiet before. A low hum in the background that I trained myself to ignore, the way you learn to ignore a car alarm that goes off every morning.
Tonight it wasn't quiet. Tonight it was a scream.
And I should have left. I should have walked off the floor, found one of the beta staff, told them there was an omega I recognized and I needed to recuse myself or whatever the fuck the word is.
I knew it was him and I knew he didn't know it was me and I knew what that meant, the imbalance of it, how unfair it was.
I knew all of that. I stood there and I watched him move through the crowd with his fists in his pockets and his shoulders up around his ears, terrified and trying not to show it, and I thought about leaving.
Then I thought about some other alpha getting to him first and something in my chest went so dark and violent that it scared me.
So I stayed. That's the whole ugly truth of it.
I stayed because I wanted him more than I wanted to be a decent person about it.
I've wanted him since Tate's birthday two years ago when Wren showed up late and wet from the rain and smelling like heat-adjacent and I had to leave the room.
I've wanted him since the pool party where he climbed out of the water and I saw the scar on his hip and the line of his stomach and I went home and jerked off thinking about him and felt like shit about it after.
I've wanted him every time I sat on Tate's couch and Wren walked through the room without looking at me and I caught the trailing edge of his scent and my hands curled into the cushions.
And tonight he walked onto my floor smelling like pure desperate need and my brain said this is wrong and every other part of me said he's yours, go get him.
I look down at him now. His face is slack, his body curled against mine.
I can see the marks I left. A bruise forming on his hip where my thumb dug in.
Red crescents on his wrists from where I pinned them.
His thighs are a mess, slick and come and the raw pink of skin that's been rubbed against leather for too long.
He looks wrecked. He looks like exactly what he is, which is someone who just got taken apart by a person who knew too much about how to do it.
Because that's the other thing I can't pretend away.
I wasn't just an alpha helping an omega through his heat.
I was an alpha who knew this specific omega was proud, who knew he'd been fighting his designation his whole life, who knew praise would crack him open faster than force because I've watched Wren at Tate's fielding compliments like they're grenades.
I knew he was a first-timer because Tate has mentioned, more than once, that his little brother refuses to deal with his heats in any healthy way, and I used that knowledge, all of it, to be exactly what Wren needed.
And it worked. It worked perfectly. He cried in my arms and I held him and I told him he was perfect and I meant it.
I also knew I was playing a game he didn't know we were playing.
I don't know how to feel about that. Both things are true. I meant every word and I was also cheating.
He stirs against my chest. A small sound, not quite awake, and his hand tightens on my arm. His heat is still running, banked but present, a low warmth coming off his skin. The next wave will hit soon. An hour, maybe less.
I ease out of him carefully. He whimpers at the loss, even in his half-sleep, his hips chasing me, and the sound goes straight through me. I grab one of the soft cloths from the supplies the club keeps stacked near the alcoves and I start cleaning him up.
This is the part that wrecks me. Not the sex, not the knotting, not even the crying.
This. Wiping the slick off his thighs with a warm cloth, careful around the places where he's swollen and oversensitive.
He flinches when I touch between his legs and I slow down, go gentler, and he settles.
I clean the come off his stomach. I pull his shirt back down.
I find a blanket in the supply stack and spread it over him because the air is cold on wet skin and I don't want him to shiver.
He opens his eyes. Barely. "You don't have to do that."
"I know."
"I can clean myself up."
"Yeah." I wring the cloth out, reach for a fresh one. "You're not going to, though."
He makes a sound that's almost a laugh, or would be if he weren't so wrecked.
His eyes close again. I bring him water in one of the small bottles the club provides and he drinks half of it without opening his eyes, just tilting his head back when I press it to his lips.
The trust in that gesture, the casual way he lets me tip water into his mouth without checking what it is, makes my chest feel like someone's standing on it.
He doesn't trust me. He trusts the situation.
He trusts the anonymous alpha who just gave him the most intense experience of his life and is now cleaning him up and bringing him water.
He trusts the role I'm playing. And the role is real, everything I'm doing is real, but it's not the whole truth and the gap between the role and the truth is where I'm going to lose him if he ever finds out.
When. Not if. I'm not stupid enough to think this stays hidden.
I sit back against the wall and pull him against me.
He comes easily, tucking into my side like he was made to fit there.
I wrap my arm around him and press my nose into his hair and breathe in and it's Wren.
It's Wren and my scent mixed together and it's the best thing I've ever smelled in my life. Tate is going to kill me.
His hand is resting on my chest. His fingers are long, the nails bitten short, a callus on his middle finger from the way he holds a pen.
I know that about him because I've watched him take notes at Tate's kitchen table, hunched over a textbook, chewing on the end of his highlighter.
He studies like he's angry at the material for not being inside his brain already.
Everything Wren does has that edge to it, that impatience with the gap between what he knows and what he wants to know.
It's one of the things I like most about him.
I have never once told him that and I'm not going to start now, in the dark, while he's heat-drunk and half-asleep and doesn't know my name.
His breathing is slow but not even. He's hovering in that space between sleep and waking where the filter comes off.
"That was—" He stops. Swallows. "I didn't know it would be like that."
"Like what?"
He shifts against me. His face presses into my neck, right near the scent gland, and my whole body goes tight. "I thought it would just be the physical part. I read about it. The knotting and all of it. I thought I could just—experience the biology and then leave."
"But?"
"You were nice to me." He says it like an accusation. Like being nice was the part he didn't prepare for. "Nobody told me that part."
My arm tightens around him. I don't mean for it to. He doesn't notice, or doesn't mind.
"Do you do this a lot?" His voice is rough. Small. "Stay after."
"No."
He's quiet for a long time. I can feel him thinking, even through the heat-haze, that sharp brain turning something over. Then he says, "Why me?"
Because I've been wanting you for two years. Because your scent has been keeping me up at night since before I knew what it meant. Because I watched you walk onto this floor looking like you'd rather die than be here and I thought, that's the bravest fucking thing I've ever seen.
"Because you smell like mine," I say instead. Which is also true.
He doesn't answer. His breathing evens out.
I hold him and listen to the sounds of the club around us, muted now, the bass and the moans and the wet sounds of other people's heat nights happening in the dark.
I think about Tate's face if he could see this and I think about Wren's face tomorrow morning when the heat clears.
I think about my hand on his hip where the scar is, the scar I've seen before, and I don't move.
I don't leave. I stay exactly where I am with his weight against me and his scent in my lungs and the full knowledge of what I've done sitting in my chest like a stone.
***
The second wave hits him like a switch being thrown.