Chapter Five
The first thing Colin registered was the weight of the sheet over his legs. The hospital cotton, thin and over-laundered, and tucked in far too tight at the foot of the bed. Then there was the sound of a heart monitor somewhere to his left, beeping at a sedate, untroubled pace.
He tried to move his hand and his hand moved, eventually, after a delay long enough that he wondered if he’d imagined his brain giving the instruction. It travelled about four inches across the sheet and stopped. That was all he had in him.
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling was a square of acoustic panelling and a single recessed strip of light that someone had mercifully turned down low.
The curtains round the bed were that particular shade of NHS green, and beyond them, there was the muffled sound of a clanking trolley being pushed somewhere down a corridor.
He turned his head a fraction to the left, and there was his baby.
Stephen was slumped in the chair beside the bed, his long legs stretched out, one hand resting on the edge of the mattress beside Colin’s hip.
He’d thrown a hospital blanket over himself at some point and it had slid down to his waist. His hair was greasy at the roots, the way it got when he’d skipped a shower for more than a day.
A paper cup from the vending machine sat on the bedside table next to a half-eaten Twirl.
Colin watched him for a long moment, because he didn’t have the strength to do anything else.
Stephen’s eyes were closed, but the rest of him was holding too much tension for sleep. After a few seconds his lashes flickered apart, and then he was looking at Colin, and his whole face crumpled.
“Daddy.”
The cry came out small, wet, and entirely undignified. Stephen was leaning forward over the bed before Colin could come out with a reassurance, one hand cupping Colin’s cheek and the other gripping his shoulder through the hospital gown.
“Oh, Daddy. You’re awake! You’re back.”
“Hello, love,” Colin said, and his voice came out a rasp.
“Don’t talk yet, hang on, hang on…” Stephen was scrabbling for the paper cup on the bedside table, sliding an arm under Colin’s shoulders and lifting him just enough to get the rim of it to his lips.
The water was the best thing Colin had ever drunk in his life, cold and instantly soothing to his throat.
“Take small sips.” Stephen lowered him back onto the pillow once he was done with the water.
“I’ve been here.” Stephen’s thumb was stroking back and forth across Colin’s cheekbone now, and his eyes had gone bright and wet at the edges.
“I’ve been here the whole time. I made them let me stay, I told them I wasn’t going anywhere.
They tried to send me home on the second day but I just sat in the corridor until they gave up. ”
“You should’ve gone home, love.”
“Don’t.” Stephen’s voice cracked. “Don’t, please. Just listen before you go on insisting you’re okay.”
Colin gave him a minute. He let his son hold his face and breathe in too quickly through his nose, and with the small amount of strength he had he turned his head into Stephen’s palm.
“Ryland,” Stephen said eventually, sniffing.
“Ryland was gutted about this. He’s been in absolute bits, Daddy.
They wouldn’t let him in because he’s not blood, even though I tried to explain he’s basically family at this point.
The woman on the desk said it was policy, and Ryland was so polite about it, you know how he gets about sticking to policy. But I could tell he was upset.”
“I know how he gets, my love.”
“He sat in the car for three hours on the first night. Just in case you and I needed him. I told him to go home and he wouldn’t.
He just sat there in the car park listening to a podcast about the lifecycle of cuttlefish.
When I went down to bring him a coffee at midnight he was eating a sandwich he’d bought from the caff.
It was a fucking disgusting sandwich, Daddy.
The lettuce was all limp. And, oh God, Daddy, I have to warn you.
” Stephen had got himself together enough to let out a watery laugh.
“You know how he gets when he’s in protect-my-omegas mode.
He’s going to absofuckinglutely stuff you with food the second you come out.
He’s been popping over to Waitrose every lunch hour.
I don’t think he’s eaten a proper lunch in five days, he’s just been buying things for your flat. ”
“What sort of things?”
“Everything. He’s filled the fridge and the freezer. He’s bought soups, three different kinds, and those stupid little ready meals that cost six quid each, all the ones with the cream sauces because he said you needed to put weight back on.”
Colin made a sound that was meant to be a laugh, but got cut off because his chest hurt when he moved it too much.
“He’s bought you a humidifier,” Stephen went on, gathering steam now, his thumb still moving across Colin’s cheekbone.
“He read somewhere that hospitals dry your sinuses out and he wanted the air right for when you got home. He had a whole spreadsheet, Daddy. He showed it to me. He’s figured out the correct macro targets for you. ”
“Of course he has,” Colin said.
“He’s mad about you, you know.”
“I know, love.”
Stephen pressed his forehead to Colin’s temple and held it there. Colin lifted his hand from the sheet, and got it onto the back of Stephen’s neck.
He thought about Ryland in the car park, and the moment when he was fourteen, and a social worker had asked, very gently, whether he might be thinking about adoption. He’d told her to fuck right off in a Midlands cadence so polite that she hadn’t been entirely sure that he was being rude.
Twenty-six years on, and Stephen had brought his alpha David Ryland into their fold, and Colin couldn’t think of a better addition to their family.
“Tell him thank you, love,” Colin said. His eyes were closing whether he wanted them to or not. “Tell him I said thank you, and that I want him to come round for his tea on Sunday.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“And tell him I love him. Almost as much as I do you. Maybe more, actually, if he’s got me my hobnobs.”
Stephen made a noise into the pillow beside Colin’s head. “Of course he got you your hobnobs.”
By the next morning, Colin felt like the inside of a tin that had been scraped out with a teaspoon and left on the draining board.
The heat had fully broken that day. He knew because he’d woken up cold.
The suite at St Mary’s kept its rooms at a careful twenty-two degrees, and he hadn’t felt anything other than tropical for nearly a week now.
Now the cotton of the hospital gown was sticking to his back where his sweat had dried, and his hair was flat to his skull.
He sat propped against the pillows and watched the fluorescent strip above the door. Somewhere down the corridor a trolley wheel squeaked. The knock came soft against the doorframe.
“Mr Huxley.” Dr Gu let herself in without waiting, as she’d done every morning since he’d been admitted, a tablet tucked under one arm. She was a small Chinese woman in her late forties. She pulled the chair to the side of the bed and sat without any wasted motion. “How are we doing this morning?”
“All right.”
“Mm.” She tapped something on her tablet, then set it on her knee. “Your bloods came back. We need to have a proper chat, if you’re up to it.”
“Go on, then.”
“You’ve gone into andropause, Mr Huxley.
” She said it without preamble, the way you’d tell someone the bus was running late.
Bit of a let-down, being told you’d come into your change of life like this.
Shouldn’t there be some acknowledgement of a milestone passed?
A celebratory cupcake, maybe. “You’re a touch younger than I’d expect to see it, but the markers are unambiguous.
The hormonal scaffolding that’s been holding your cycle steady has started to come apart, and that’s why this heat ambushed you the way it did. ”
Colin nodded, once.
“The other thing the bloods are telling me is that you’ve been running heats unserviced for a very long time.
That on its own isn’t dangerous. Plenty of omegas manage them solo and come to no harm.
But the cumulative load on the body adds up, and combined with the hormonal shift, it makes the next few years rougher than they’d otherwise be.
The cycles will get more erratic before they taper off.
You may go six weeks between heats, you may go three.
The intensity is going to be unpredictable.
The onset speed —” she gestured at the bed, the room, the entire situation.
“As you’ve discovered, that can collapse from a fortnight’s warning down to a few hours. ”
“Right.”
“I have to ask you something, and I’d like you to think about it before you answer.
” She caught his eyes in her unwavering gaze.
“Is there an alpha in your life that you’d feel comfortable working you through your heats?
A partner, a long-standing friend, anyone you trust to be careful with you.
It would change what we can offer you, in terms of management. ”
“No.”
“You can take a while to think about it.”
That was when Colin understood how bad it was.
Dr Gu had his notes. She knew about what happened to him in the stairwell, and that he couldn’t manage a vibrator without his omega therapist talking him through the breathing exercises first. And she was sitting in front of him asking about an alpha anyway.
“I don’t need to think about it.”