Chapter 12 #2
The heat of Brody’s body against his was such a brutal relief that Ren sobbed.
He didn’t cry. He sobbed. A dry, short animal sound.
The pain didn’t give in, but it transformed, shifting from a fire that destroyed to a fire that illuminated, and the difference lay in Brody’s arms encircling his back and in the alpha’s heartbeat against his chest.
“My room,” Brody said.
It wasn’t a question. Ren nodded against his neck. He didn’t trust his voice. He trusted nothing other than the solid, warm body holding him.
Brody walked. Ren heard doors opening and closing, the sound of footsteps on wood, a distant voice that could have been Jax or Rocco saying something he couldn’t quite make out, and Brody’s reply, deep.
“No one is to come up.”
Stairs. The rhythmic movement of Brody’s body climbing the steps. The alpha’s jaw brushing against his temple. The scent grew concentrated, thickening and turning liquid and hot like dark honey.
Ren buried his face in the hollow between Brody’s neck and shoulder and took a deep breath. The pain throbbed, but the scent contained it, cradled it, kept him in a limbo between suffering and something that dangerously resembled peace.
A door. The last one. Brody pushed it open with his shoulder, and the scent that poured out of that room was like diving into an ocean made of the alpha’s scent. Every surface, every fabric, and every molecule of air soaked in it. Ren arched his back and dug his fingers into Brody’s shoulders.
“I’ve got you,” Brody said. His voice vibrated in his chest, and Ren felt it resonate against his ribs. “I’m here.”
Ren opened his eyes. The room was large, austere. A massive bed with dark sheets. Closed curtains that filtered the light into golden streaks. Nothing superfluous. Nothing decorative. Only the essentials, like Brody himself.
He laid him on the bed. The contrast of the cold sheets against Ren’s burning skin sent a shiver through his entire body. He curled up on his side. Knees pulled up to his chest. Fists clenched.
Brody knelt beside the bed. At eye level.
“Look at me, Ren.”
The blue eyes met the gray ones. Gray again, not black. Brody was breathing heavily but had regained some control. Enough to do what he did: raise his right hand and leave it suspended in the air between them, palm up. Open. Offered. Untouched.
“You decide,” he said. “Every step. Every moment. You decide.”
Ren looked at the hand. Large. Calloused. With a thin cut on the index finger. A hand that could break his bones but that floated in the air, waiting for permission.
The pain intensified. A fierce contraction that shot through his belly and stole his breath. Ren reached out and intertwined his fingers with Brody’s. The contact was an anchor. A fixed point in a sea that was swallowing his whole.
“Don’t let go of me.”
Brody closed his fingers around his.
“Never.”
Ren writhed on the dark sheets, soaked in sweat.
The heat was melting his bones from the inside, a fever that had nothing to do with illness and everything to do with what he’d been refusing to name for the past two days.
His skin burned. His throat burned. His eyes burned, crystal clear even now, even so, shining with something between rage and desperation as he intertwined his fingers with the alpha’s.
He clenched his jaw and kept resisting, because that was how he’d always done it.
“Brody,” he moaned.
His voice came out broken. Unrecognizable.
Brody remained kneeling beside the bed, watching his every move. He held Ren’s fingers firmly, and his expression revealed the need to help his omega, as he had called him recently. But he held back because that was what Ren had asked of him.
“Help me,” the young man pleaded now, and the next spasm bent his body in half. Ren clenched his teeth until his jaw cracked. “Brody, please.”
“What do you want me to do?”
His gray eyes focused on him. Red at the edges, dilated in the center. Brody’s face looked carved from stone, but the tendons in his neck stood out like ropes about to snap.
“You know,” he groaned.
“I need you to say it.”
Ren closed his eyes. Pride was a towering wall inside him, built brick by brick over twenty-one years of resisting what his body demanded, of denying his nature, of proving that an omega could be more than a biological function.
And now that wall was cracking under the weight of something greater and older than any conscious decision.
“Fuck me,” Ren murmured, and the word came out rough, torn from somewhere where pride could no longer protect him.
The word fell between them like a stone in still water. Brody didn’t move. He didn’t blink.
“No suppressant is going to work,” Ren continued, his voice trembling but his words clear. “I haven’t taken them in too many days. My body has already crossed the threshold. I can feel it. I know it.”
“You’re wrong.”
Brody let go of his hand. Ren felt the absence of contact like a reverse burn, as if his skin were being torn away instead of touched. He groaned. He couldn’t help it. The sound humiliated him to the core.
Brody crossed the room to a built-in cabinet on the back wall. He opened it. Ren heard the metallic sound of a safe, an electronic beep, the click of a lock. Brody returned with a black box the size of his palm and placed it on the nightstand.
“I have an emergency suppressant. I keep it for situations like this.”
Ren looked at the box. Inside was a syringe pre-filled with an amber liquid.
“It’s injectable. It works in minutes, not hours.” Brody held the syringe between his thumb and index finger. “But I need your permission.”
“Yes.”
“Ren.”
“I said yes.” Another contraction. Ren bit his lower lip until he tasted the metallic flavor of blood. “But fuck me anyway.”
Brody stood motionless.
“The suppressant will reduce the pain. You won’t need…”
“You’re not listening to me.” Ren opened his eyes and looked at Brody from the bed.
Crystal clear blue eyes against bloodshot grays.
The omega against the alpha. Pride against instinct.
Everything Ren had fought to keep separate was converging into a single point.
“I’m asking you to take me. Not because my body demands it.
Not just for that. Because I’m asking you. ”
Brody’s jaw clenched. His whole body tensed like a bow ready to fire.
“The pain is unbearable, Brody. The suppressant will do what it has to do, but right now I’m dying. Do you understand? I’m dying in here.”
Brody sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress sank under his weight. He carefully rolled up Ren’s t-shirt, exposing the inside of his right arm. The skin was flushed, hot, and covered in a thin film of sweat.
“This is going to sting.”
The needle went in cleanly. Ren barely felt it amid the tangle of pain that occupied every cell. The amber liquid coursed through his veins with a coldness that contrasted with the fire of the heat. Brody withdrew the syringe and pressed his thumb against the insertion point.
“A few minutes,” he said.
Ren nodded. The coldness of the suppressant spread through his arm, his shoulder, his chest. It didn’t extinguish the fire. It contained it. Like a dam that holds back the flood but doesn’t dry up the river. The pain receded enough for Ren to breathe without every inhalation tearing at his insides.
But the need was still there. Intact. Clearer now that the pain wasn’t masking it.
Ren raised his hand and placed it on Brody’s cheek. The alpha closed his eyes at the touch. A tremor ran through his shoulders. Almost imperceptible. Almost.
“Come here,” Ren whispered.
Brody opened his eyes. The gray had darkened to a shade Ren didn’t recognize—dense, liquid, hungry. But beneath that hunger lay something else. A question. One last chance to back out.
Ren didn’t take it.
He sat up on the sheets and kissed Brody.
Not like the first time, which had been an accident, an inevitable collision between two bodies searching for each other blindly.
This kiss was deliberate. Ren’s mouth against Brody’s with intention, with determination, with the clarity the suppressor had restored to him.
He bit his lower lip. Brody growled, a sound that originated somewhere deep in his chest and that Ren felt vibrate against his own ribs.
Brody pushed him back onto the mattress. Not violently. With weight. With the absolute gravity of his body covering him, surrounding him, trapping him in a cage made of arms and legs and heat. Ren should have felt trapped. He should have felt panic. But the only thing he felt was relief.
He pulled Brody’s t-shirt up, pulling the fabric upward. Brody pulled it off in a single motion, and Ren discovered a torso he had already imagined, but that reality far surpassed. Broad. Hard.
Marked with fine scars that traced a map across the pale skin. Ren ran his fingers over one that crossed his left side, and Brody held his breath.
“What…?”
“Later.”
Brody pulled off his shirt. His pants. Everything.
With firm but unhurried hands, stripping Ren of each layer without haste, as if they had all the time in the world.
As if the heat weren’t a clock counting down.
Every garment that disappeared exposed more burning skin, and Brody traced it with open palms, leaving a trail of calm on every inch he touched.
But not just calm. Recognition, too.
Brody’s hands didn’t move like those of the other alphas who had touched Ren before: fast, utilitarian, treating his body as something to be used and discarded.
These hands paused. They learned. The open palm on his hip, memorizing the curve.
The thumbs tracing the space between rib and rib as if that detail mattered. As if Ren mattered.
Ren clenched his jaw to keep from saying anything.
When he was naked beneath Brody, Brody stopped. He looked at him. At all of him. With an almost painful attention, as if he were memorizing every detail, every curve, every imperfection.