18. The Slick
The Slick
COOPER
I woke in the middle of the night, naked, trembling, and aching. I was so hard it actually hurt.
“What’s wrong?” Jon’s voice cut through the dark. He didn’t sound groggy at all. He was instantly on high alert, like a guard dog.
“Nothing,” I panted, my face catching fire. “Nothing to see here. Go back to sleep.”
“Your nothing is poking my thigh, Coop,” he said, sounding way too amused.
“Oh, God,” I muttered, shielding my face with my hands. Then I felt a new, terrifyingly damp sensation.
“Fuck,” I breathed, going rigid. “Jon, we need a doctor. Or a plumber. Or a priest.”
“Are you in pain?”
“No, but I’m leaking!” I hissed.
Jon moved closer, the bed groaning under his weight as he crowded into my space. “It’s just the slick,” he said, sounding maddeningly steady. “Nothing dangerous. Slick prepares your body for . . . well, you know. Fucking.”
My eyes snapped open in the dim room. “I produce lube?” I whispered, horrified. I could practically hear Jon swallowing a laugh. I groaned. “This is a nightmare. I’m poking you with my hard-on and literally leaking lube. I’m never recovering from this.”
“Do you want to shower?”
“No!” I snapped. “Stop being so practical. I need you to panic with me! This is a crisis!”
“What exactly are we panicking about?”
“Jon!”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said, reaching for his phone. “You’re an Omega in heat. Slick happens.”
“But I don’t want to be in heat! What I want is to rearrange these blankets—look, they’re all wrong! And where’s my monkey!”
“Here.” Jon handed me the monkey. I snatched it, then arranged the blankets around us urgently, as if we were in imminent danger of dying because of misplaced fleece.
I heard the tapping of Jon’s thumbs on his screen. “Found it.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re on Wikipedia.”
“Sure, I won’t tell you that,” he said, his eyes scanning the text.
Groaning, I buried my face in the pillow.
“This is actually a very informative page. Okay, heat symptoms.” He started scrolling. “Appetite, check. Fatigue, check. Heightened sensory response, check.”
“Me getting pissed off every time you say check? Check.”
Jon ignored me. “Awareness of specific people’s pheromones, check.”
My nose twitched involuntarily. “Have you been luring me with your Alpha pheromones?”
“Not on purpose,” he murmured. “But yeah.”
“Huh.”
He kept reading. “Mood fluctuations. Irritability, emotional sensitivity, uncharacteristic attachment—”
“Shut up.”
“—behavior,” he finished anyway, a smirk playing on his lips. “Yes to all the above.”
I whacked him with the monkey.
“What? I’m starting to think you presented as an Omega the moment you were born.”
“Inaccurate.”
“Instinct to create a secure environment. Heightened awareness of the body.”
I made the weirdest little sound as he looked up from his phone.“You aware of your body right now, Coop?”
My skin was practically buzzing with how much I needed him to touch me. “Yes,” I whimpered. “You could say that.”
“Yeah,” he murmured. “I’m pretty fucking aware of it too.”
My cock twitched, but Jon was still scrolling.
“And finally, we have a strong need for physical reassurance from a compatible partner, preferably an Alpha.”
Jon set the phone down, its screen illuminating the cocky expression on his face. “That’s me, by the way.”
The air was so thick with the scent of us and my slick that I couldn’t think properly. Jon’s hand slid to my hip, his palm searingly hot. The need for him pooled low in my belly, making me throb and leak.
“I take my job as an Alpha very seriously,” he hummed. “So if my Omega needs physical reassurance, I’m more than happy to give it.”
I wanted to say something flirty back, but I failed. What I managed instead was a rushed, stuttering, “Green.”
Jon paused. “Green to what, exactly?”
“Shut up.”
“Green to this?” He wrapped his fingers around my length, and I gasped.
“Yes,” I moaned, my eyes rolling back. Jon pulled me flush against his chest. Using the slick now running down my thighs, he wrapped his fist around both of us.
I kissed him, pouring everything I had into it, my tongue stroking his in the same rhythm his hand was stroking us.
When we pulled back for air, he brought a finger to his mouth and sucked, groaning.
“Your slick tastes so fucking good,” he muttered before returning to the task at hand. I was grinding my cock into his palm, whining impatiently. “I can’t wait to taste your cum, to find out if it’s as good as I’ve imagined.”
“You’ve imagined how I taste?”
“I’ve imagined it all.”
“Tell me,” I pleaded, panting. The sweet pressure behind my balls kept building with each word Jon said.
“I’ve thought about how I’d fuck you into a mattress. How beautiful you’d look riding my cock. I’ve thought about you on your knees, moaning when I feed you my cock.”
“I want that,” I whimpered, almost delirious with need. He started stroking us faster, until I couldn’t hold back anymore.
“Gonna come,” I moaned, my voice breaking.
“Good,” he rasped, his grip tightening. “I’ve got you.”
The pressure peaked, my balls drew tight, and then we were both spilling over his fist and my stomach.
Jon scooped up some of our release, letting me lick the taste of us from his palm.
I lapped his whole hand clean, dizzy with satisfaction.
A few minutes later, once we were no longer a breathless tangle of limbs, and Jon had wiped us clean, I made my confession into the crook of his shoulder.
“That was my first time.”
Jon stilled, his hand pausing on my hip. “First time what?”
“Anything,” I whispered. “Well, the first time after the . . . upstairs.”
“Coop.”
I lifted my chin. “No reason to sound like that. I’ve had opportunities.”
He let out a low growl. “Oh, I know. I’ve had the urge to punch every one of your opportunities.”
A delicious shiver ran down my spine. “I knew you were jealous.”
“It’s not so dark that I can’t see your triumphant smile, brat. Of course I was jealous. I was so fucking jealous that if I’d seen you kiss someone, I would’ve—fuck. It wouldn’t have been pretty.”
I pressed a kiss on his shoulder, practically purring.
“What stopped you?” he asked. He saw the confusion on my face and clarified. “From taking those opportunities.”
“Guess I wasn’t that interested.”
“The truth, Coop,” he said, his tone so firm I couldn’t ignore it.
“Fine.” I took a breath. “I was waiting for you.”
There it was, out in the open. My embarrassing truth. How I had waited, like a hopeful puppy, for Jon to find his way to me. And how I would still wait, until the end of this year and the next, until the end of all my years, for him. But I didn’t elaborate. It would go to his head.
“It’s not that big a deal,” I added. “It can’t come as a surprise.”
“Cooper.”
“Don’t Cooper me. You’re the one who was always glaring at people if they so much as breathed in my direction.”
Jon went completely rigid beneath me. “I did more than glare,” he muttered in a low growl.
My heart skipped a beat. “What?”
“That guy from the coffee shop near where you live—the one who kept writing his number on your cups,” Jon started. The primal edge in his voice made me shiver. “You ever wonder why he stopped?”
My mouth went dry. Yeah. I had wondered. I’d enjoyed flirting with him until suddenly he started treating me so neutrally that it was like he’d had a personality transplant.
“What did you do?” I whispered.
“Caught him out by the dumpsters after his shift. I told him if he didn’t stop looking at what was mine, I’d break his fucking jaw.”
Holy shit. His confession made my slick pulse. “You threatened to break his jaw,” I repeated.
“I was losing my mind,” Jon rasped, his chest heaving against my shoulder as he tucked me even tighter against him, like he was trying to fuse us together.
“You weren’t speaking to me. You’d made it clear you hated me, and there I was, tracking every single person who tried to get within an inch of you.
I knew it was wrong. I knew I was the one who’d hurt you in the first place, but I couldn’t stop it. ”
He ran a hand through his hair.
“You could never hurt me,” I whispered.
“You stopped speaking to me.” He sounded so sad. “I lost you for a whole year, Coop. I thought I’d lost you for good. Don’t say I could never hurt you.”
“It wasn’t your fault.” I bit my lip and gave his rib a good poke because I didn’t know what else to do with the intensity of my feelings. “And I lost you too.”
“You didn’t. Not for a second.”
I couldn’t deal with the painful honesty behind his words. Couldn’t take the sorrow on his face. Something told me Jon couldn’t either. We were both too raw and vulnerable right now.
So I yawned.
“I’m tired, and your constant chattering is keeping me awake.”
Jon paused. “You call this—the talk we’re having—chattering?”
“Yes,” I said. “You’re a regular chatterbox all of a sudden. Or like a . . . like a bomb of emotions. You’re a bomb of emotions inside a chatterbox, and I need to sleep.”
He exhaled, some of the tension leaving his shoulders.
“We’re going to talk about it,” he said. “All of it. And we’ll deal with it somehow. But it doesn’t have to be now.”
I pressed my body into the solid warmth of his chest.
“Good night, Alpha,” I mumbled.
“I like the sound of that.”
“You need to say it back,” I pointed out, already drifting off.
His hand slid up my back again. A tired sigh escaped me, and my body was already relaxing into sleep.
“Good night, Omega.”
“I knew you’d take care of me,” I murmured.
“I was always going to.”