Chapter 9 Wyatt
I stay outside as long as I can, only coming back to the house after the sun has set behind the ridge.
Donna has been. There are two brown paper grocery bags on the kitchen table that weren’t there an hour ago, and a note folded underneath the salt shaker.
Julian isn’t in the kitchen. Usually, he’s sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop, his brow furrowed as he pays attention to whatever he is working on.
He said he would keep out of my way. Unless I need assistance.
Assistance. Does that mean what I think it does? I’ve never been good at reading people. Maybe he just means he’ll get groceries for me like Donna does.
Or maybe he means the other thing. That is why he is really here. I’m not stupid. I know why the Bureau is forcing this on us.
They want us to consummate the match. The thought pools low and hot in my belly.
My heat has been coming on harder and harder for hours now. I can feel it now behind the base of my spine, a heavy, hot, wrong kind of weight. My shirt is already sticking to me under the arms. I have been outside in the cold wind for twenty minutes and none of it has made any difference.
I grit my teeth.
I am not having sex with Julian Duffield. He looks at me like he thinks I need a bath. I know what city folk think of people like me.
Do not think of Julian. Except that it’s damned hard with his scent saturating the house.
I cross over to the table and pick up the note.
Groceries in the fridge. Bread and pasta in the pantry. I brought the heavy quilt down from the hall closet and put it on your bed. The boys are fine. Don’t do anything stupid. Call the cell.
I fold the note back up.
Julian is upstairs. I know exactly where he is, because my body knows. I can feel the pull toward him, like we are magnets unavoidably drawn together.
Get it together, Wyatt. It’s only a few days. You’ve always ridden out your heats alone. You can do it again.
I unpack the groceries into the fridge, fold the paper bags and put them under the sink. Then I run the cold tap and cup my hands under it and drink, the icy water sliding down my throat and into my burning belly.
It helps for all of five seconds before the heat rolls up again, higher this time. It goes through me like a slow hard wave. I put both hands on the edge of the counter and close my eyes until it passes.
I can’t stay down here all night. I walk the stairs slowly, and far too stickily considering the slick that is already beginning to pool in my jeans.
Upstairs, Julian’s bedroom door is shut, and there is a line of light under it. I go down the hall to my own room, close the door behind me, and put my back against it.
There is a sharp, undignified ache in my pants that I cannot make myself stop thinking about. I press the heel of my hand against it through my jeans and it gets worse and I stop.
It has never been this bad. I’m not even at the worst part of it yet and it’s already worse than any peak I have had on my own.
I sit down on the edge of the bed. There’s a heavy quilt on.
I will want it later, when the fever breaks and I go cold, but I don’t want it now.
I’m burning. I pull my shirt off over my head; it is soaked through at the back and under the arms, and I drop it on the floor and sit there in the undershirt and jeans and try to breathe.
And all I breathe in is him. I have been trying not to since he got out of the rental car in my yard. The heat is going to take the fight out of me altogether, soon, and then I will be in real trouble.
I’ve never had a heat with an alpha. Or done it outside of a heat.
Not with an omega. Not with an alpha. Not with a beta.
Not with anyone. I went through high school with a stutter that the boys in the year above me turned into a game, and I learned very early to say as little as possible to anyone.
By the time the stutter was mostly gone it was too late, I was the quiet one, the one who didn’t talk to girls at the dance and didn’t talk to boys either.
Then Mom was gone and there was nothing but the land, the bank and Caleb and Matthew. The opportunity has never come up.
I don’t know what he’ll expect. I mean I know the basics. I know what goes where. I’m not slow, no matter what Julian might think.
I know there are a whole unspoken set of things you are supposed to have learned by my age, and I have learned none of them. Julian Duffield is going to know within about thirty seconds that he is in a room with a twenty-three-year-old virgin.
It doesn’t matter. Because we’re not going to have sex. He’s a jerk. He should not be my first.
The light at my window goes from late afternoon to gray.
It gets worse at night. I had forgotten that it does, or I had never had one bad enough to remember.
The heat comes in waves that are longer and closer together and each one leaves me wetter and more undone.
My jeans are sodden at the back. I take them off.
I take myself in hand and try to get some relief but it’s not enough, no matter how many times I do it.
I take the undershirt off. I lie on top of the quilt in my underwear and try to sleep.
I want to go to him. At midnight, I get up before I even think it through. I get as far as the door, my hand on the handle. I let go of the handle and go back to the bed.
Later, I try again. I don’t know what time I make it to the hall.
The air in the hall is colder than the air in my room and it is a mercy for about three steps.
I get to his door. I can smell him through the wood.
My body goes heavy and hot and stupid and I put my hand on the frame to hold myself upright and I stand there.
I cannot make myself knock.
I want him to assist me. I am not going to ask.
I go back.
Dawn comes in gray at the window.
I have not slept at all. My mouth tastes of metal, and there is slick on the sheets beneath me.
I am hyperaware of his presence. He hasn’t snored. I’ve heard him moving about. The bed creaks as he shifts position. I don’t know if he is simply not snoring or if he is awake like me.
Just after first light, he gets up, opens the door and goes to the bathroom. Of course he does.
The bathroom door opens. Closes.
Water starts.
He is not just washing his face. He has turned the shower on and moments later I hear the sound of the water shift as he gets underneath it.
I sit up.
Oh god, he is naked. He is naked and in my shower. The water is going to be sliding over his bare skin. I want that. I need that.
He said he would assist me. He said it. That’s probably what he meant. It must be.
My body makes the decision for me. I’m on my feet and across the room and my hand is on the door handle. I am out into the hall before I think about it.
The hall is cold on my bare skin. I am in my underwear and nothing else. My hair is wet at the temples from sweat and my chest is damp. I don’t care.
The lock on the bathroom door has been broken since before Mom died. We never got around to fixing it. You just knocked, in this house, and you waited until whoever was in there said come in or don’t.
I don’t knock.
I push the door open. I’m crossing a line and I know it. The heat is the excuse but what’s he going to do?
The worst thing that will happen is that he’ll throw me out. And the best… I need this.
He has it hot. The bathroom is filled with steam. The glass of the shower stall is half-fogged. I can see the shape of him through it, the line of his back, his arm braced against the tile, his head bent under the spray. He’s heard the door. He goes still.
He turns his head.
Through the fog of the glass, his eyes find mine.
He stands in the shower with the water running over him and he looks at me through the steam and he waits.
I cannot say it.
I try. My mouth opens. Nothing comes out. I am shaking I am so nervous, and I can’t say a word.
He reaches out slowly. His hand finds the faucet. He turns the water down — not off, down, so it is a thinner sound behind him.
I close my eyes. I nod. Once. Hard.
“Come here,” he says.
I open my eyes.
He has opened the shower door. He is standing inside with the water at his back and his hand held out to me, palm open, and he is waiting.
I cross the bathroom floor.
The tiles are warm under my feet, then, I’m at the shower door and he is taking my wrist, and then my other wrist, and he is drawing me in under the spray with him. The water runs hot over the back of my neck and down my spine.
“You’re sure?” he says.
I manage the word. “Yes.”
He kisses me.
His mouth is warm. His hand is at the back of my neck.
The water is running over both of us. My hands are on his chest and I can feel his heart going hard under them, which is not what I expected, I did not expect him to be as gone as I am, and the knowing, that he is, unlocks something in me and I make a sound into his mouth that I did not know I was going to make.
His hand slides up from my hip, over my ribs, around to the small of my back. He slides his other hand up into my hair and he kisses me again.
After that I lose the order of things.
There is his mouth on my throat. There is his hand between us.
There is the tile cool on my back and his body hot against my front.
There is the sound of the water and the sound of my own breathing and somewhere, a long way off, a sound that I realize, later, was me.
I am held up. Whatever I cannot do, he is doing.
Whatever I don’t know, he is not asking me to know.
His hands are where they need to be. His mouth is where it needs to be.
At some point my legs go.
He takes my weight. He has been taking most of it already.
He lowers us down until I’m sitting on the tiled bench at the back of the shower and he is kneeling between my knees with his forearms on my thighs.
His forehead is against my sternum, and the water flows over his shoulders and runs down my legs.
“Easy, easy,” he says, breathing hard, into my chest. “All right.”
Neither of us moves for another minute. Then he lifts his head and he looks at me. His hair is stuck to his forehead. His gray eyes are almost black.
He reaches up and turns the water off.
He gets me out of the shower. He wraps the towel around my shoulders, not his, mine first, and he is drying my hair with the end of it and I am letting him. I would let him do anything in this minute.
“Your room,” he says.
I nod.
We go out into the hall. He has not bothered with a towel for himself, he is holding mine around me with one arm and holding my hand with the other, and the hall is cold and I am still shaking and we go down to my room.
At the door I stop.
He stops with me. He does not push. He waits.
“Julian.”
“Yes.”
“I haven’t — “ I swallow. Come on, Wyatt. You can do this. Get the words out. My throat is thick. “I’ve never done this. Before. Any of it. I thought you should know.”
He looks at me for a long second, then he says, “I figured.”
I look at the floor.
“We can go slow,” he continues. That wasn’t what I meant but I’ll take it.
I look at him, then I push the door open.