Chapter 6 Perry
Perry
Iwake up, and the first thing I think is: my jeans are still on the floor.
Not this floor. The club floor. The one with the platforms, the gallery, the blue lights.
The one where a hundred people watched me get railed last night.
My jeans are still out there somewhere, probably shoved under a platform, soaked in slick.
Some poor beta is going to find them and toss them in the lost and found with all the other clothes that didn’t make it through heat night.
They were good jeans, too. That’s what I’m focusing on, because if I let myself think about anything else, I’ll lose it.
The room is small and dark and it reeks of us.
Both of us, mixed together so thick it’s hard to breathe.
Slick, come, sweat, and under all that, his scent—smoke and iron—and mine, whatever the hell mine is.
I can’t ever smell myself the way other people do, but it’s everywhere.
The sheets are trashed. The room’s trashed. I’m trashed.
I’m on my side with my back to him, and I can feel him behind me.
Not touching. Close enough that I can feel the heat off his skin and hear him breathing, slow and steady, the way he does everything.
He’s awake. I know he’s awake because his breathing changed about thirty seconds after mine did, like his body was tracking mine even in sleep.
My mask’s still on. His is too. We fucked for hours, he held me while I cried, and I still have no idea what he looks like.
I just lie there, staring at the wall, letting it all hit me.
It all comes back out of order. The knot locking, the pressure so much I blacked out for a second.
His voice in my ear, telling me everyone was watching.
The leather mask alpha by the column, arms crossed.
Me begging, just saying please over and over like I forgot every other word.
His hand on my cock during round two, jerking me off while I rode him in front of the gallery.
Coming untouched the first time, still full of him, and the shame hitting at the same time as the orgasm, so I couldn’t even tell where one stopped and the other started.
The way he said, 'there you are,' when he pushed inside me. Like he’d been searching for me.
The way I just pulled away from the leather mask alpha without even looking back. My body just left. The alpha I picked, the one I drove across town for and obsessed over for months, suddenly meant nothing. Just background noise. His scent got buried under something better.
I close my eyes and I can still see the gallery.
All those shapes up there, watching. I can still feel how he sat me in his lap, facing out, and I didn’t even try to fight it.
I leaned into it. Some part of me I didn’t know about got off on being seen like that—wrecked, desperate, totally falling apart in front of strangers.
That part scares me more than anything else from last night.
I can blame biology for most of it. The scent, the heat, my body just taking over.
That’s all true. But nobody made me like the gallery.
Nobody made my cock get harder when I saw those shapes watching.
Nobody made me grind down on him when he said, 'let them see you,' except for whatever’s inside me that heard that and wanted more. That wasn’t heat.
That was just me. Something I’ve been carrying around and didn’t know about until a stranger dragged it out of me in front of a hundred people and I came so hard I forgot my own name.
I don’t know what the hell to do with that. I’ve never been the type who wanted an audience. I’ve had sex in private rooms here and it was good, it was enough. But now I know what it feels like to be seen at my worst, totally wrecked, and to have my body light up from it. I can’t un-know that.
I liked it. All of it. That’s what I have to live with now.
Not just the sex, which was good—better than good, honestly the kind of sex that ruins you for anything else.
I liked losing control. I liked that my body made the call.
I liked being held down and fucked on a platform where anyone could see.
I liked his voice telling me to let them watch.
I liked crying on his knot while he held me with those steady hands.
I’m supposed to be the guy who has his shit together.
I’ve got a career, a chair at one of the most popular tattoo shops in the city, and clients who book months out.
I walked into that club last night with a plan, a drink, and the right alpha.
I left that version of myself somewhere on the main floor, right next to my ruined jeans.
Behind me, he moves. A small shift, the bed dipping slightly, and then his hand is on my hip. Light. A question, not a claim.
I don’t pull away. I don’t lean into it either. I just let it sit there, his hand on my hip, warm through the sheet, and I breathe.
“You moved us,” I say. My voice sounds like I gargled glass.
“Yeah.” His voice is rough, too. Lower than I remember from last night, without the edge of rut sharpening it. Just a guy’s voice, tired. “Between the third and fourth. You were out.”
Third and fourth. Right. There were more waves.
I remember them in pieces. His arms around me, the knot releasing and then building again, his mouth on my neck, the point where I stopped being a person and became something simpler.
I remember him carrying me at some point.
My face against his chest, his heartbeat under my ear, the cold air of the hallway after the heat of the floor.
“The other one,” I say. “The alpha. Did he—”
“He left. During the second.”
I nod. Something shifts in my chest, but I can’t tell if it’s loss or relief.
He left. The alpha I came for watched me get knotted by someone else and then just left, and I didn’t even notice because I was too busy falling apart.
I should feel guilty. I should feel a lot of things.
What I actually feel is tired, and under that, just this weird, flat acceptance.
Like finding out your flight got cancelled but you’re already somewhere else, so who cares.
I wonder if he waited for me to look at him before he left. I wonder if he stood there by the column, hoping I’d turn around and see him and feel something. I hope he didn’t. I hope he just left.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
I almost laugh. “Define okay.”
“Can you move without anything hurting?”
It’s such a weirdly practical question that I just blink. Not 'are you okay emotionally' or 'do you regret this.' Just, are you hurt? Can you move? Like he’s checking my vitals.
I do a quick check. Sore, yeah. My hips and thighs ache, and there’s this deep tenderness inside that’s going to stick around for a few days.
My jaw hurts from clenching. My throat’s raw from noises I don’t even want to think about.
There are bruises on my hips where his hands were.
I can see the edges, purple and green, and my brain is nice enough to remind me exactly when each one happened.
I’ve given people tattoos that hurt less than these bruises.
I’ll be looking at them every time I shower for a week.
But nothing’s actually broken. Nothing’s wrong. I’m just used up in a way I didn’t know was possible. Like someone took me apart and put me back together, but didn’t get all the pieces back in the right spots.
“Yeah,” I say. “I can move.”
“Good.”
We just lie there. The bass from the floor is gone. The club’s either closed or almost there, because now it’s just building noises. A pipe somewhere. The hum of the vents. The distant clang of someone stacking chairs or moving shit around. The real, unsexy side of a sex club at six in the morning.
His thumb moves on my hip, tracing a small circle.
Same move the leather mask alpha used to do on my lower back, which I really don’t want to think about, but my brain goes there anyway.
Two different touches. Two different alphas.
One I picked, one who picked me. The one I picked is gone.
The one who picked me is here, drawing circles on my hip, waiting for me to decide what happens next.
“I don’t know what to do with this,” I say. Not looking at him. Looking at the wall.
“I know.”
“Stop saying that.”
“What?”
“'I know.' You keep saying 'I know' like you’ve got it all figured out and I’m just slow.”
He’s quiet for a second. Then: “I don’t have any answers. I just know what you’re feeling because I’m feeling it too.”
I roll onto my back and look at him for the first time since I woke up.
Matte black mask. Bare chest—his shirt’s out on the floor too.
He’s broad, solid, takes up space even lying down.
I can see a small smattering of chest hair, a scar on his collarbone, the line of his shoulders.
None of it tells me who he is. Just what he looks like from the neck down.
He’s on his side, facing me, one arm under his head.
In the gray light leaking through the door, he looks different from the alpha who pinned me to a platform last night.
Quieter. The intensity’s still there, but it’s dialed down.
His body’s still, his breathing even. There’s a scratch on his forearm—I’m pretty sure I did that—and looking at it makes my stomach twist up.
His eyes through the mask are tired and steady, looking at me like he’s scared to lose me, which is nuts because he never had me. We don’t even know each other’s names.
But his hand’s on my hip and my body’s leaning toward him like gravity.
I can smell him under all the sex and sweat—the real scent, smoke and iron and something warmer I missed last night.
Something that only shows up when the rut fades and the actual person is there.
It’s a good scent. Not the wall that knocked me flat on the floor. Something I could get used to.
“In three months, my heat is going to come back,” I say. “And my body is going to want you.”
He doesn’t say anything. His thumb stops moving on my hip.
“That’s not a compliment. That’s a problem. Because I don’t know you. I don’t know your name, what you look like, or what you do, and my body doesn’t care about any of that. It’s already decided.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Mine too.”
I look up at the ceiling. Concrete, like the rest of this place.
Stained, cracked, industrial. About as far from romantic as you can get.
Not exactly the backdrop for the conversation we’re about to have—or not have—or just avoid by getting dressed and pretending biology isn’t going to drag us both back here in twelve weeks.
“I had a good thing,” I say. “With the other alpha. It was easy. It was manageable. I knew what I was getting.”
“I know.”
I cut my eyes at him. He holds up a hand.
“Sorry. Habit.”
Something in my chest cracks, small and weird.
Not pain. More like a laugh that doesn’t quite make it out.
I see the corner of his eye crinkle behind the mask—he’s almost smiling.
I think I might be almost smiling too, which is terrifying, because twelve hours ago I was a guy with a plan and now I’m lying in a wrecked bed with a stranger whose face I’ve never seen, and my body’s already reaching for him again.
Not heat, just the pull of a scent I can’t shake and don’t want to.
I look at him. He looks at me. Masks on, names unknown, the smell of us filling the room.
“So,” I say. “Now what?”