50. Cherry Tomatoes #2
Orion was flushed, his jaw clenched tight, staring at the disassembled lot like it owed him iscs. His storm-wind scent had sharpened, sweet and electric, like the air before lightning.
“Oh no…”
“Yeah.” Orion sighed. “Heats start different when you’re bonded. Less warning. More...” He gestured at all of himself.
“I thought there would be more warning,” Cass pressed his hand to his stomach, already feeling the faint discomfort growing.
“There isn’t. One minute you’re doing something normal, the next minute your body’s decided it’s time and it didn’t consult you about your schedule.” Orion wiped sweat from his forehead. “I’ve been doing this with Dante for a while and it still catches me off guard.”
“But we’re both…at the same time?” Cass’s skin felt hot, flushing from his hair line down to his chest at a genuinely alarming pace. It hadn’t been like this before.
“That’s the part I’m less sure about.” Orion’s voice was tight. “I wasn’t due for two weeks. I think your cycle pulled mine forward. Or…I don’t actually know if that’s what happened. I’ve never been around another Omega during heat.”
“Never?”
“In SVI territory, I avoided everyone if I could, so I never spent enough time with other Omegas to find out.” Orion grabbed the bottom of his shirt and tugged on it, trying to billow air up inside it.
Apparently it didn’t work, because a second later he swore under his breath and pulled his shirt over his head.
Cass looked at his lean muscle and the flush spreading across his chest, then at himself, already sweating through the undershirt, the overalls feeling like too much fabric, his skin crawling with the need to be cooler, closer, touched.
“Can I ask you something?” Cass said, working his arm out of his undershirt without undoing all of his safety pins.
“You’re going to anyway.”
“When you’re in heat with Dante, does the bond feel louder? Like it’s turned up?”
“It’s deafening.” Orion leaned back against the supply closet. “Everything through the bond is amplified. His rut, my heat, the whole thing feeding back on itself. It’s intense.”
“Is that scary?”
“Sometimes. At the beginning it was terrifying. Now it’s just...” He searched for the words. “A lot. It’s a lot. But it’s ours.”
Cass pulled his undershirt off. The air on his bare skin helped—not enough, but the relief made him sigh. His scars were visible , the circles healed to smooth pink, mapped across his chest and ribs, but he didn’t try to cover them anymore. “Can I ask you something else?”
“Cass.”
“Just one more.”
“You’re going to ask twelve more. I know you. Go ahead.”
“When you go into heat, does the, um, does the need start in your belly or your chest? Because mine starts in my chest. In the bond place. And then it moves down. But I don’t know if that’s how it’s supposed to work or if that’s a Primal Triad thing.”
“The chest,” Orion said. “In the bond. Then it spreads. I think that’s the Triad. Normal heats start lower.”
“So our bodies are different from—”
“Our bodies are different from corporately bonded Omegas, yes. Everything about the Triad is different.” Orion shifted, trying to find a comfortable position and failing.
“The heat calls your Alpha specifically. Other Alphas can smell it but it doesn’t hit them the same way.
It’s like—everyone else gets a whiff, but your Alpha gets hit in the face with it.
” He paused. “Dante turns into a caveman.”
Cass laughed. He knew Dante was lewd and crass, and nine times out of ten, when Cass saw him and Orion together, they looked like they were two seconds away from fist fighting, but Dante had an easy composure about himself. Imagining him like a ‘caveman’ was very funny.
“Don’t laugh. It’s mortifying, he gets so spanky and then I can’t sit right for days.” Orion was trying not to smile. “Every single time.”
“Riot was very intense with my heat,” Cass offered, blushing as he said it. He sat down beside Orion, looking at the lock pieces still on the ground like maybe they could make him feel less embarrassed. “But he worries about being too rough when I want him to just…be.”
“Be what?”
“Be himself. Berserker and all.” Cass’s face was hot, and not just from the heat. “When he stops asking and just, I don’t know, follows what his body wants? Because his body wants me and my body wants him and we don’t have to translate anything into words.”
“The classic approach,” Orion chuckled. “Very effective.”
“Don’t make it sound like a strategy.”
“Everything between two people during a heat is a strategy. Some strategies just involve less thinking.” Orion wiped his face. “Christ, you smell good.”
“You can’t say that.”
“I can say whatever I want. I’m in heat, you smell like cinnamon rolls, and I’ve lost all dignity. This was established.” He shifted closer. “Okay, I think we need to talk about the elephant in the greenhouse.”
“I read that elephants are bigger than this greenhouse?”
“It’s a metaphorical elephant, Cass. An elephant where two Omegas in heat are sitting shirtless on a greenhouse floor, their Alphas are somewhere on this property, and both are about to come running like their hair is on fire.”
Cass could feel it. Some signal had reached Riot and through the wire, Cass could feel the shift from whatever Riot had been doing to Cass. Where. Now.
“They’re coming,” Cass said.
“Maybe if we hide in here long enough, they’ll get tired and just fuck each other?”
“Orion!” Cass covered his face, horrified by the idea.
Orion laughed as he elbowed him. “Calm down, I’m just kidding. How would that even work?”
Cass breathed a sigh of relief and leaned into him. His face found the place against Orion’s neck that it had found on the worst night of his life, and Orion’s arms came around him, stiff for two seconds and then not.
“When Honey and I were kids,” Cass said, his voice muffled against Orion’s skin, “when things were hard or we were sick, we used to just hold each other. It always made me feel better, so I hope you don’t mind….”
“Nah, it’s fine…still a bit weird for me.” Orion’s hand settled on his back. “I never bothered with all the Omega-to-Omega comfort stuff, but it’s not terrible.”
They stayed like that, skin against skin, just enjoying the strange closeness of another person knowing exactly how he felt without feeling like he was in danger or going to get in trouble.
It was just Orion. They weren’t terribly close, but Cass liked to think they were friends, and cuddling in general was one of his favorite activities.
“You know,” Orion said after a while, “if someone had told me a year ago that I’d be cuddling a former Elysian missionary in a greenhouse during a synchronized heat, I would have suggested they see a medical professional.”
“Do you like how things have changed? Your life since you bonded with Dante?” Cass asked, stretching his legs out as the heat pulsed under his skin.
He pressed his face against Orion’s neck, closing his eyes.
It didn’t make him less warm, but it made him care a little less about the building discomfort and that was good enough.
Orion was quiet for a beat, his hand on Cass’s back, his chin resting on Cass’s head. “Yeah,” he said. “I like it.”
The greenhouse door slammed open and the two scents hit Cass like a wall.
Strawberries, cream, and cordite—Riot, close, audibly breathing hard—and next to it, rich and dark black tea and cherries.
Cass peeked up for a moment, immediately clocking the gold in Riot’s eyes, his hands at his sides, standing very still in a way that said he was about to pounce.
Dante stood beside him, looking smaller next to a Berserker, breathing just as hard, but he looked delighted.
Whatever the man had looked like when he’d worked for Gensyn was long gone.
“Oh,” Dante said. His voice dropped about an octave. “Oh. This is—”
“Don’t,” Orion snapped.
“I was just going to say—”
“I know what you were going to say. Don’t say it.”
“I haven’t said anything yet.”
“You’re thinking it loud enough that I can hear it from here.” Orion still hadn’t moved. “Whatever filthy thing just crossed your mind, keep it there.”
Dante’s eyes were moving between Orion and Cass with the kind of unhurried attention that made Cass’s neck feel warm. “I’m simply observing that this is a very attractive arrangement—”
“Dante,” Riot growled, “if you finish that sentence, I’m going to break something you need.”
“I was complimenting your Omega.”
“Stop complimenting my Omega.”
“Both of them, actually. The composition is quite—”
“Dante.“ Riot’s hands balled into fists.
Dante held up his hands in surrender, but the delight in his eyes didn’t change.
He leaned toward Riot and said something low—too low for Cass to catch, but he saw Riot’s reaction: a jerk of his head, a sharp exhale through his nose, and then a very precise “Go fuck yourself, Ashford” that made Dante smile in a way that was all teeth and no apology.
Orion groaned. “What did he suggest?”
“You don’t want to know,” Riot said.
“I suggested something perfectly reasonable involving mutual observation and—”
“He suggested a foursome,” Riot said flatly.
“I suggested an arrangement,“ Dante corrected, as he walked over to them with Riot.
“He’s a pervert,” Riot told Cass. “He was a pervert when he worked for Gensyn and he’s a pervert now. Ignore him.”
Dante kneeled down beside Orion, cocking his head like he was admiring a piece of art. “I’m not a pervert. I’m a man with sophisticated interests in—”
Orion reached up and grabbed Dante’s face, his palm flat against his mouth, fingers pressing into his cheek. “Stop. Talking.”
Dante’s eyes went half-lidded above Orion’s hand. He looked, if anything, more aroused by being silenced than he had by the suggestion.
“DANTE that’s fucking gross, don’t lick my hand,” Orion snapped, yanking his hand back and wiping it on his pants.