Chapter 8 #2
The name did something. Ren saw it run through the alpha’s body like an electric current: a slight spasm in his shoulders, a change in his breathing, a fleeting dilation of his pupils.
Brody closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, something in them had given in.
Not completely. Just a fraction. Just enough.
“Two. Three, if I take my meds.”
Ren felt his stomach drop a floor.
“Since when?”
“Since you arrived.”
The silence that followed was heavy, and smelled of raisins and walnuts, of freshly baked oatmeal cookies, of a warm kitchen in December with rain on the windows.
Ren clenched his teeth against the flood of images the scent was pushing into his brain and forced himself to stay in the present, in the hallway, on Brody’s bare feet on the cold wood and the purple shadows under his eyes.
“Before you showed up, everything was in order,” Brody continued, and his voice changed.
It grew softer, slower, as if the words required an effort he couldn’t afford.
“I knew what I was doing. I knew why I was doing it. I had a plan for every move I made and a Plan B for when the first one failed. I slept five hours, woke up functional, trained, managed. Everything clean. Everything under control.”
He ran a hand over his face. His fingers trembled as they crossed his forehead.
“Now I sit at my desk and all I see is you behind that door. All my body wants is to cross the hallway and lie down next to you. My lungs want to breathe you in until my brain stops burning.” He let out a short, humorless laugh.
For twenty-seven years I didn’t know what I was missing, and now I can’t stop needing it.
Ren didn’t move. His hands hung at his sides, and he wanted to raise them, he wanted to place them on that face ravaged by insomnia; he wanted to close the circuit that was killing them both. But he didn’t. Because the day he gave in to that, he would lose the only thing he had left.
“I’m not asking you for anything,” Brody said, as if he’d read the gesture Ren hadn’t made. “You just asked, and I’m answering.”
Ren swallowed. His throat hurt.
“Are you okay?”
Brody’s gray eyes met his with an honesty Ren hadn’t expected.
“No.”
The kitchen smelled of roasted garlic and rosemary.
Rocco had left a pot of stew on the kitchen island before disappearing with that discretion of his that Ren was appreciating, and Brody had set out two plates without asking.
They ate in silence. It wasn’t a comfortable silence, but it wasn’t hostile either.
It was the silence of two people who had said too much and didn’t know how to return to the safe ground of indifference.
Ren speared a piece of potato and brought it to his mouth.
He chewed slowly. The stew was good, with a spice he couldn’t identify that warmed his chest as he swallowed.
Brody was eating on the other side of the island, standing, with his plate resting on the marble countertop as if sitting down were a luxury he couldn’t afford.
The dark circles were still there. Purple. Deep.
Ren looked away.
The kitchen door burst open, and the air shifted.
Ren felt it before he saw it: a physical presence so dense it displaced the oxygen in the room.
The man who entered was bigger than Brody.
Much bigger. Shoulders like beams, a thick neck, hands the size of plates.
He moved with a lightness that belied his bulk, his feet light on the tiles, his body in constant balance like that of a fighter who never stops gauging distances.
Alpha. The scent confirmed it: mineral, dry, clean. Without the complexity of Brody’s scent, without those layers of sweetness that stirred Ren’s gut. This was a direct scent, with no tricks.
“Jax,” Brody said without looking up from his plate.
“Kovac.” The man took an apple from the fruit bowl and took a bite that echoed throughout the kitchen. His dark eyes scanned the scene: Brody at one end, Ren at the other, the tense void between them. He smiled. “And you must be the omega.”
Ren straightened his back.
“Ren.”
“Jax.” He stepped closer and held out his free hand. Ren accepted it. The handshake was firm but measured, neither crushing nor holding him back. “I work with Brody. Security.”
“Jax,” Brody repeated in a tone that was clearly a warning.
“What? I’m introducing myself. I’m being polite.” Another bite of the apple. He chewed with his mouth open, his eyes darting from one to the other as if he were watching a game. “So you’re having dinner together.”
“We’re eating in the same room,” Ren corrected.
“Right. Three meters apart and both looking like you’re at a funeral. Very natural.” Jax leaned on the counter next to Brody and lowered his voice, though not enough. “Have you told him yet that you don’t sleep, or are you still playing this little game?”
Brody set his fork down on the plate with a sharp clatter.
“Shut up.”
“Because I sleep,” Jax continued, unfazed, “but the wall of my room is right next to yours, and I hear you tossing and turning in bed like a caged animal. Every night. Three, four in the morning. And then you go down to the gym and punch the bag until dawn, which, by the way, you’ve already busted two times this week. ”
“Jax.”
“I’m just saying that if the problem has a solution, and the solution is sitting right there eating potatoes, maybe you should…”
“Finish that sentence and I’ll kick you out of my house.”
Jax raised his hands in surrender, the bitten apple in one of them. But the smile didn’t leave his face.
Ren fixed his eyes on his plate. The heat was rising from his neck. He could feel it climbing up his jaw, his cheeks, his ears. He speared another piece of potato and shoved it into his mouth even though he’d lost his appetite thirty seconds ago.
“Sorry, Ren.” Jax shot him a look that seemed genuinely friendly beneath the provocation. “It’s just that seeing you like this makes me feel bad for you. You’re usually a pretty functional guy.”
“I don’t feel bad for myself,” Ren said without looking up.
“No, of course not, it’s worse for you. You can tell by your skin. You’re… how should I put it? Glowing. Omegas get like this when the bond pulls. Your skin lights up as if you had a fever from…”
“Jax.”
This time it was a growl. Low, guttural, coming from somewhere in Brody’s chest that Ren didn’t want to identify. The sound ran up and down his spine, and he had to dig his nails into his palm to keep from reacting.
Jax raised his eyebrows.
“See? That. That right there. That little growl. That’s not a ‘shut up, Jax’ growl. That’s a ‘this omega is mine and if you look at him again, I’ll rip your head off’ growl. Do you hear it, Ren? Because I do.”
Ren’s ears were burning. They burned as if they’d been stuck in an oven. He dropped his fork and stood up.
“Thanks for dinner.”
“Ren…” Brody began.
“I’m tired.” He didn’t look at him. He couldn’t look at him. If he looked at him, Jax would see it, and if Jax saw it, he’d make another comment, and if he made another comment, Ren couldn’t guarantee what he’d do. “Good night.”
He turned toward the door. He didn’t run because running would have been proving Jax right, but his legs moved faster than he would have liked.
“Man,” Jax’s voice came from the kitchen, loud and clear, bouncing off the hallway walls, “the sexual tension between you two is so thick you could cut it with a butter knife.”
Ren quickened his pace.
He took the stairs two at a time. The first floor hallway was dimly lit. His bedroom door appeared at the end. He turned the knob, stepped inside, closed the door behind him, and pressed his forehead against the wood. He breathed. Once. Twice. His hands were shaking.
Sexual tension.
No, that wasn’t it. It was biology. Chemistry. A genetic programming error that had paired him with an alpha he hadn’t chosen, didn’t want, and…
It smelled of raisins and walnuts.
Ren pulled his forehead away from the door and turned his head slowly.
The room was just as he’d left it that morning: the bed made, the curtains open, the light from a garden streetlamp spilling through the window in a pale rectangle on the floor.
Everything the same. Except for the gray sweatshirt folded at the foot of the bed.
It hadn’t been there when he went down for dinner.
He walked over. The fabric was soft, thick, a cotton that looked like it had been washed a hundred times. No visible label. No brand. It was huge. And the scent it gave off was so concentrated, so pure, that Ren felt his knees give way.
Brody had left it there. While they were having dinner.
Or before. He’d left it there for Ren to find and use for what it was: an olfactory anchor, a sedative, a controlled dose of alpha scent designed to stabilize a bonded omega who didn’t want to be touched.
It was a gesture of surrender. Brody accepting that Ren didn’t want him near but trying to look after him anyway, from a distance, through a garment that smelled of him.
Ren grabbed the sweatshirt with both hands. He lifted it. He stared at it for a long second and then flung it across the room. It hit the wall next to the window and fell to the floor in a shapeless heap.
He stood by the bed. His chest was rising and falling too fast. His fingers were trembling.
I don’t need it.
His breathing quickened. He could smell it from where he stood. He could smell it as if Brody were lying on the floor next to the window, arms outstretched, chest exposed, and those gray eyes with red rims looking up at him.
I don’t need it. I need nothing from him.
His hands shook harder. He sat on the edge of the bed.
The mattress gave way under his weight. His head ached.
His chest ached. His bones ached with that low-grade fever that wouldn’t go away and that he knew wouldn’t go away as long as he kept the circuit open.
How many days had it been since he’d slept over four hours?
How many times had he woken up drenched in sweat with Brody’s name on the tip of his tongue?
Two hours. Brody sleeps for two hours.
He lay back and stared at the ceiling. The shadows cast shapes on the plaster that meant nothing.
He thought of Reznov. Of his seven hundred thousand dollars.
What he would do when he found him. He thought of his father and the debt and the chain of decisions that had brought him to this bed in this mansion in this city.
He thought about what would happen if Brody couldn’t fix his situation.
He thought of what would happen if he did and Ren had to leave and the circuit remained open forever, a bare wire sizzling in the void.
And then what?
He sat up. The sweatshirt was still on the floor, by the window, exactly where he’d thrown it. The streetlight shone right on it. Gray. Soft. Huge.
Ren stood up. He crossed the room barefoot. He crouched down. He picked up the sweatshirt from the floor and stared at it for a moment. Then he pulled it over his head.
It looked ridiculous on him. The sleeves were a full hand’s width past his hands.
The hem reached mid-thigh. The neck was so wide it left one shoulder exposed.
But the smell. The smell enveloped him like hot water, like a bath in winter, like those mornings when his mother would hug him when he was little and everything was safe and all was well and nothing hurt.
He got into bed. He curled up into a ball.
He pulled his knees up to his chest and buried his nose in the sweatshirt’s neck where the fabric was thickest and the smell densest. Raisins and walnuts.
Oatmeal cookies. The wood-burning stove in a house that never existed but that his body remembered as if he’d lived there his whole life.
The calm was immediate. Not gradual, not slow: immediate.
Like a switch. Like a faucet being turned off.
The trembling in his hands stopped. His fever dropped by a degree.
His jaw relaxed, and he realized he’d been clenching his teeth for hours.
His shoulders slumped against the mattress.
His breathing became deep, long, and each exhalation carried away a little more tension until there was nothing left, only the warmth of the fabric and the weight of his own body sinking into the mattress.
Just tonight.
He closed his eyes. The scent filled his lungs like sweet smoke and carried everything else away: Jax, the kitchen, the shame, Reznov, the seven hundred thousand dollars, the future. Everything. Nothing remained except the warm darkness inside Brody Kovac’s gray sweatshirt.
Ren fell asleep like that, wrapped up in him.