Chapter 41
H is mother had taken one look at him as he’d walked through the door in his smelly clothes and smiled knowingly.
“Hello,” Kallen said. He wasn’t smiling any more, though on the drive over he’d found himself laughing aloud a couple of times. Levy was gone for now, sure, but that paled in comparison to the fact that Levy was his boyfriend.
If anyone had asked him before, he’d have said the label didn’t matter much to him. But obviously that had been bullshit. It mattered, a lot. It mattered because it meant Levy had chosen him, and maybe that part of it was stupid, but he’d always been profoundly aware that his sexual partners never had before—any omega would have done. Even with Nouri, all that had really mattered had been his heat.
“Good morning to you, I see,” she told him. “Have you eaten?”
“Yeah, we—” He bit his lip, stomach taking a tumble. “Yes.”
She nodded, patting his arm as she headed to the kitchen. “That’s alright, darling, tell me later.”
OF COURSE ANALISA WASN’T going to be that easy to fool, if she noticed. But Kallen couldn’t make himself do anything about the smiles that kept taking over his face all day.
Three hours later his phone pinged with a text that was just emojis, a plane and three sets of confetti.
[Why is it still morning? CRYING EMOJI] Levy asked next. Five hours difference with only a short trip in between was about enough to throw the brain for a spin.
[Have a nap] Kallen told him, then added a kissing emoji because he could.
Levy had listened, and Kallen was a little sorry he hadn’t asked him to video call so he could watch him. Just to make sure he was real. That they were real. But it would have been super creepy, and anyway, if he saw Levy again, he’d probably burst from smiling.
His mum kept the conversation going during lunch, and his dad was oblivious, asking why he’d skipped the gym the last two days. Since he couldn’t exactly tell him about the alternative source of cardio he’d been practising, Kallen simply admitted fault.
It wasn’t a bad way to spend the afternoon anyway, and then Levy was awake again and sending him some of the pictures he’d taken during their outing. In one of them, when he’d got distracted looking at the water in the terrace where they’d had lunch, Kallen had got caught with the same dopey smile he’d been both seeking and escaping from all day in the mirror.
[Never show this to another person] he tagged it, and Levy assured him [For my eyes only 3 CLOSED LOCK EMOJI 3]
“CAN I TELL YOU ABOUT something good?”
Doctor Meira blinked at him. “Of course, Kallen.”
He could feel himself start to smile even before the words came, “I have a boyfriend. I mean, I just got a boyfriend. He was a teammate, before. Or I guess—” He huffed, laughing a little and saw she was waiting. “We were both playing for the same team in Jiro, and we became friends and then he got injured and I kind of... Well, moved in. He lived in the same building in a flat on his own and I was staying with a different teammate’s family so it was no big deal. I liked it. Living with him, taking care of him.” He shrugged a little. “He cooked for me,” he added and realised he sounded a little defensive. He hadn’t talked to Analisa yet and damn, but he was worried about it.
Levy wasn’t like most alphas, and he didn’t treat Kallen like he was there to serve him. The opposite, really, but Kallen did want to help him, and maybe that was very omega of him. Or maybe it meant he was a good friend. Boyfriend .
“He sounds nice,” the therapist said neutrally.
“He is!” Kallen said at once, too loud. “He quit the team, he said he couldn’t do it anymore.”
She nodded and he thought he detected real approval there. Not that he needed anyone to confirm Levy was worthy.
“I’m a little jealous, and I feel a little guilty. That I haven’t quit yet,” he added, surprising himself with it. He’d told Levy already, in a way, but what was the point?
But Doctor Meira asked him some questions about it, and she insisted his feelings on the matter were important too, even if what he wanted wasn’t the most convenient practically speaking. And that was all well and good, really, except for how he still hadn’t done the budget and now it looked like he was going to have to book a meeting with his lawyer too.
THE CLASSROOM—THAT’S what everyone else called it, and Kallen had privately decided that it was fine as long as no one tried to refer to him as the teacher—was already full of chatter when Kallen and Analisa got there the next day.
Kami spotted them first, his little face going bright and happy at once. He wasn’t as young as he appeared. At seventeen, the reason he’d started attending meetings was that he was a good enough fencer to have a chance at making a team. Even though he was a professional athlete himself, Kallen hadn’t realised that sports where one competed individually had requirements for omegas, but it turned out that in some categories, a team of fencers added up their points and took turns confronting other teams, which was enough for them to want the extra oomph a team omega could bring.
Was the oomph even real? Because otherwise it seemed like a lot of trouble to go through just to get your team what amounted to a free hooker. He didn’t know how much fencers made, but based on his own salary, hockey teams could definitely afford paid entertainment.
Two thoughts occurred to him at once. That he’d forgotten the budget and that he probably shouldn’t be thinking of prostitutes as an alternative to being made into one .
“Kallen?” Taylor was smiling a little, as if he found his distraction amusing.
“Yeah? Sorry, just...” He waved the rest away. “Should we pair up? Leo, I can help you first if you want.”
Except for Taylor, who’d put his private tutoring to good use with his partner and other friends, the other five were at about the same level. Once he’d explained the oasis metaphor, they’d either taken it for their own or come up with something that resonated with them. With that, they could all get themselves calm enough to make their partners look at them three times out of four.
Analisa had claimed she could do that already, but once they’d tested it, it’d turned out to come and go. She was convinced it was better already, though, which helped keep Kallen calm himself. If he could trust one thing, it was for his friend not to bite her tongue.
And that was why he hadn’t told her about Levy yet.
“Did it work?” Leo piped up and Kallen came back to earth. “You are smiling.”
Kallen grimaced. “No, sorry, mate. Got distracted.”
Leo, who was fifteen and had begged Taylor for the chance to come when his alpha dad had told him what Kallen had done, shrugged philosophically. “Well, maybe I helped a bit.”
Kallen laughed, delighted with his optimism. In this, it could only help. He turned his face to the side. “Go on then, see if you can help a lot.”
He’d managed to keep his attention on the far wall, which seemed like a fairer rival for the kid than Levy—a tornado could have gone by and Kallen might have still been thinking of the way it’d felt to wake up wrapped up in him. The tug of Leo’s will felt a bit like hearing an odd sound would, arousing more curiosity than peace. When Kallen turned his head to look at him, the feeling clarified into what he could only describe as gossip. Like Leo had a secret he was dying to tell and knew Kallen would love.
It wasn’t anything like the tranquillity he himself aimed at, but he could see how it was close enough to seduction to make sense. “What are you thinking about?” he asked, and Leo jumped off his chair crowing.
Oh, fuck, they were supposed to be silent, weren’t they? So technically Leo had just got to the next level, not just getting someone to look at him, but to do something.
“It counts, right?” he asked, stopping to stare at Kallen.
“Yeah,” Kallen told him. “You just caught me by surprise. It felt different.”
Leo grinned at him, smug as all hell. “Well, you said to think about peace because everyone wants that, right? But sometimes you don’t want peace , you just want something fun . So...”
Kallen nodded his encouragement. The others were starting to turn their way too, clearly distracted from their own work by Leo’s theatrics.
“So, yeah, I thought about this awesome new trick I learned today at practice, and I think you could use it for hockey? So I was trying to say: do you want to know? And then you asked me!”
It took him a moment to process all that, the hit most of all. It hadn’t been meant that way, naturally. Leo didn’t know anything about Kallen’s career, only that his sport was hockey, it was one of the questions that everyone got asked when they introduced themselves. And then he saw himself raise his head and smile, not quite as brilliantly, but fucking proud. “That’s absolutely amazing.”
“It is,” Taylor said from the side. “I think you have earned some cake.”
While they grabbed refreshments, Analisa came and put an arm around his waist, leaning on him while she sipped her coffee. Kallen was just drinking water, a little tired and a little sad. He’d ask her about the budget in the car, he decided firmly, and he couldn’t quite put it aside, the heaviness of the axe about to fall, but once they went back to work for the last half hour, his distraction worked out for the best when Analisa got him to smile again by loudly transmitting her own feelings about a joke she’d been told the previous day.
Given the mood he’d been in, he’d conceded defeat at once, still smiling.
HIS JOY LASTED UNTIL they were back in his car, and he put the key in the ignition and then left it there, turning to her. “So... do you know anything about budgeting?”
She blinked her long dark eyelashes at him. “What?”
“Sorry, I just... I realised when I quit my job, I’ll need to know what I can spend and all that. And I have never done anything like that.”
“I figured you’d stay with your parents.”
He shrugged a little. “Well, yeah, but then I’d help them. And I wouldn’t stay forever, anyway.”
“Huh,” she said slowly. “Is that what’s got you all over the place?”
He turned to look at her, a little alarmed. He’d hoped she hadn’t noticed. He didn’t want to lie to her about Levy. It’d have been like saying there was something wrong with their relationship. “One of the things.”
Analisa looked thoughtful. “Well, all I know is you do your incoming money and then your outgoing expenses and see if the first cover the second. Like, it works for me with my flat share and the bills. But I’m not paying insurance or anything like that.”
“Insurance?” he echoed. “I think I better ask my mum.”
His friend agreed with him, then started asking him about what they’d do in the class once they all managed to get the other person to do what they wanted. And could they get volunteers that weren’t aware they were being lured to simulate real life situations?
Kallen was already planning to ask them to try and outlure each other once they got it to a 100%, but he liked the idea. “Alpha volunteers? Or you figure it doesn’t matter? Like betas react to alpha will so we could assume they’d respond to us too?”
“Betas are probably keeping all their willpower to themselves,” Analisa theorised.
Kallen shot her a surprise look, but given he hadn’t even known about lure for most of his life, it was as reasonable as any theory could be. “Huh. I guess that would explain how most presidents have been betas.”
“Wait, what?”
Kallen took the turn to merge into the motorway. “It’s an intense job, isn’t it? Politics? You have gotta keep up with lots of thing, it requires constancy more than anything, and alphas and omegas are too cyclical for that to be easy.”
“Cyclical? Oh, you mean like alpha rut? But that’s rare, isn’t it? It wouldn’t affect most alphas.”
“It still means they have cycles,” Kallen said. It was a good point, why didn’t alphas go into rut all the time? “And that their hormones can mess them up. Plus, if betas don’t have external will, they have got to have something , right? Otherwise, there wouldn’t be betas.”
She pointed out the window at a falcon flying low, and Kallen leaned over to steal a glance, keeping his hands steady on the wheel. When it’d passed, she added, quiet and thoughtful, “I guess we should ask some betas then.”
HIS MOTHER WAS DELIGHTED to help him with his budget, and all his fears turned out to be for nought. She had him read her numbers from his bank statement and put them into three columns, then he added all the variable expenses and came up with an average.
“I’m not sure if that’s right,” he argued. “Like, I haven’t been going out much lately.”
She smiled, soft and encouraging, a flashback to getting stuck on a homework assignment, and suggested he round it up. He did, generously so. Because now he had a reason to go out regularly, or at least he thought Levy might want to explore the city some more and Kallen definitely didn’t want to be worrying about money if they did.
“So how much are the bills?”
His mum seemed surprised but wrote down the numbers on a new column.
It was her silence that made him brave enough to ask the next question. “And would that be the same for a flat? Like it should be cheaper to heat, right?”
“Probably,” she agreed easily. “If you look at listings, they sometimes mention it and if not, you can ask when you view them.”
His heart skipped a beat. “I’m not—” She didn’t look upset, but it felt like a betrayal. “I’m not sure if I want to,” he admitted.
“That’s perfectly alright. I hope you know you are not talking us into paying any of our bills,” she said next, that glint of stubbornness he’d spotted in the café.
“But I mean, you must be spending more with one more person here...”
She laughed a little. “Good argument,” she praised. “But still no.”
He sighed, not really up for an actual argument. Besides, if he was going to move out... And fuck, he was, wasn’t he? He missed living with Levy, and he’d moved in with him before they were dating simply because being around Levy was the easiest thing in the world. Of course the Johnsons hadn’t helped matters, but other than the kids being a little loud, they hadn’t been a problem, really. Later on, things had got awkward for a multitude of reasons, but he wasn’t going to lie to himself, he’d wanted to look after Levy and then he’d just wanted to be close. He still thought he should have paid rent then at least, but of course he couldn’t have brought it up without explicitly admitting he’d moved in.
It'd felt safer to pretend the Johnsons’ teasing was an exaggeration, that he wasn’t really that committed... And therefore, that close to heartbreak if Levy did something he didn’t like.
But Levy never had, and when they’d disagreed about stuff, it’d never gone beyond that, a disagreement between equals who could look for a solution together.
“I’ll come with you to look at flats if you want,” his mum said, and he realised he’d zoned out for a bit.
“No, that’s...” He met her eyes. “Could you do something else for me?”
HIS MOTHER HAD STAYED in the room with her sketchbook, while he called Mr Evans and told him he wanted to quit as soon as possible.
He’d expected an objection, but the lawyer hummed thoughtfully. “Well, I am waiting on the official word, but there should be an order to arrest McKinley very soon anyway. And then the team will know, and if they wanted to support you—”
Kallen snorted.
Mr Evans sighed. “Well, they could,” he finished. “And if they won’t, it won’t change anything. May I suggest you wait two weeks and get an extra month’s salary?”
Kallen paused. He didn’t need the extra salary at all, not when what he’d made this year and barely spent would cover his expenses for years to come. And then he realised something he hadn’t budgeted for. “Um, how much... How much am I going to be paying you?”
“Ah.” He had really surprised the guy there. “I charge per the hour, it’s in the contract we signed,” he added, which Kallen was pretty sure was a gentle chide. “But I can get my secretary to send you an estimate, if you want. It will depend on how quickly the court resolves the matter, but it is also customary to ask the person who’s wronged you to pay for the cost of representation.”
“Oh.” That seemed fair. Or not fair since McKinley had fucking raped him and he couldn’t pay Kallen back for that. But even if he had money, he’d gladly take a chunk out of McKinley’s bank while he rotted in prison. “That’s... That’s good, that he has to pay.”
Mr Evans, as usual, seemed to be very much in his wavelength. “Yes, it doesn’t fix anything, but money pays for the protection that allows them to think the law does not apply to them.”
“Are we asking for a lot?”
“We are not asking,” Mr Evans explained. “But it is standard for judges and juries to assign compensation, particularly when there is a big discrepancy in economic status between victim and perpetrator, like in this case.”
Kallen looked at his mother, thinking of what he could do for her with... a lot of money. McKinley had been a pro for maybe twenty-years and captains were on a higher salary bracket. She met his eyes, as if sensing his regard, and he remembered what she’d told him about their bills.
“Could I donate it?”
“Donate it?” Mr Evans echoed.
“Yeah,” Kallen said, and he was smiling now, the idea like a shot of electricity through his body. “I mean, I know we haven’t won, that I haven’t done it, what I need to do to get him put away. But if I win, can I give the money away? To... Well, I’m thinking Fair Sport. To fix this, all of it?”
In the silence that followed, his racing heart started feeling less like excitement and more like terror, but when his lawyer spoke, it was low and full of something Kallen thought might be respect. “You could. You could do whatever you wanted with it, and, not that my opinion matters, but it seems like if McKinley funded the organisation that takes down the whole system... That might be fair.”
Hanging up left him feeling a little lost. He’d been putting this off for months and he’d been so afraid of being left with nothing when he walked away from the rink. But he hadn’t put on skates in months and he was okay. He could walk again, and he had Levy, and teaching lure, and now he thought he might have a path forward.
It wasn’t a short path, he knew nothing about laws, but he didn’t think everyone at Fair Sport and every other civil rights organisation had just failed at their task for lack of funds. But money was power and lure was power, and Kallen was going to make sure it went to the people that didn’t currently have any.
A warm hand on his shoulder startled him back to the present. “Big conversation there,” his mum said. She’d heard, of course.
Because he wasn’t alone.
Maybe he’d never been, he’d just told himself he was because it’d been the only way to put himself through the things he had.
“Why don’t you go for a walk? Clear your head.”
He went around the block twice before he realised it was no good. He couldn’t clear his head because it didn’t seem real. It’d happened and he even had a witness, but even so...
Ringing Levy wasn’t easy, and when he didn’t pick up, it only made things worse. He couldn’t quite think what time it was in Jiro; most days, his boyfriend was still volunteering and now he had the added hassle of packing up his life. It wasn’t fair of Kallen to expect him to be on call twenty-four/seven.
He thought about walking to Analisa’s house instead, but what would have been the point? She would have believed it’d happened, but she wouldn’t have got what it meant .
What he’d just given up.
What he’d just escaped.
She’d have understood his future plans and part of him couldn’t wait to tell her. But he’d just instructed his lawyer to send in his resignation letter; in a matter of hours, he would no longer be a White Cat.
A hockey player.
He’d just be Kallen Guin.
He had no idea who that was outside the ice.
It was fine, really, he’d just walk the path up to the mountain, try and get high enough to see the city from above. His dad had taken them hiking and climbing when they were kids, but once he’d become serious about hockey, Kallen had swapped to safer forms of exercise.
Now he didn’t have to worry about violating his contract with an injury. He’d be careful, in fact, that’s what he needed, the absolute demand of the terrain that he pay attention or fall. It was only when he was halfway there that he realised he hadn’t brought any water with him.
It wasn’t very smart, but it wasn’t a steep path, so he wasn’t that high up yet. He checked the signal on his phone, three bars. He kept going, swallowing to wet his mouth as best he could. He’d get water as soon as he got back down from one of the corner shops near the start of the path.
Time blurred a little after that, because there was nothing to count except steps and that soon became an instinct awareness of right and left and right and left.
And then he reached a viewpoint, a tiny one without even a plaque. Someone had arranged some big rocks where you could sit, though, and Kallen carefully lowered himself over them, body pleasantly warm from the effort, eyes catching on the gorgeous vistas at once.
Terali spread beneath him, the river at its centre glittering under the sunlight, the bridges black stripes across its brilliance, and the constant low-level movements of humanity everywhere else more a suggestion than anything his eyes could truly parse.
It’s over , he thought, and then said it aloud, “It’s over. I’m done. I’m not gonna— play hockey anymore.”
He clenched his teeth against a much deeper ache, then exhaled slowly. “But I’m going to play again someday.”
There was no logical reason to think so, nothing he could have explained, but the words settled something in him anyway. They felt true.