26. Ethan #2
It’s incredible. And it makes me sad, because I’ve seen enough of the real Sophie to know that every bright smile, eager question, careful softening of her posture and voice is a withdrawal from her real self, and I wonder what it’s costing her.
I’m about to head back to my office when Sophie looks up from across the room. She catches my eye, and before I can stop it, I’m smiling.
She smiles back. Immediately, without thinking, the way you smile at someone you’re actually happy to see.
And it hits me like a wave—that warmth again, and suddenly I’m thinking about the protein bar and the sticky notes and the way she said some things stick like she was talking about more than pharmacology.
I’m thinking about the fact that in all the weeks of knowing Sophie, this morning is the first time I’ve seen her smile at me without seeming to think about it first. The first time she’s talked about herself, shown her humor, let me see something... that actually seemed real.
And I want more. God help me, I want so much more.
After lunch, I appear at Sophie’s borrowed workstation.
“Sophie.” I’m carrying my tablet, scrolling through the afternoon’s schedule. “Can you come with me to the product design lab? I’d like you to see the other side of what we do here.”
“Sure, Mr. Brooks.” She closes her laptop and stands. “Lead the way.”
We walk through the atrium together. People nod and smile as we pass.
“The product design team is small—five people,” I say, holding a glass door open for her. “They take the formulations we develop in research and turn them into the physical products. They’re a good group. Quiet, focused. Most of them have been with us for years.”
She follows me through a short corridor into a section of the building she hasn’t been in before.
The corridor opens into a wide, well-lit space, and the first thing I notice is that it’s empty. The overhead lights are on, but no one is here.
“Huh.” I frown. “They must all be on break. I’ll just show you around a bit anyway, since we’re here.”
I walk her through the workstations, explaining the process.
We’re passing the main display case, and I’m mid-sentence when I notice that Sophie has stopped walking.
Her eyes drift to the left—a quick, involuntary slide of her gaze toward the display case while the rest of her body stays pointed at me, as if she can look without being caught as long as she doesn’t turn her head.
She’s looking at the dual-shaft model. The one with the double knotting mechanism.
Her gaze lingers for maybe two seconds. Then she feels my attention shift and her eyes snap back to me so fast it’s almost violent. Her expression doesn’t change. But there’s a faint wash of color along her cheekbones that wasn’t there before, and her arms tighten against her chest.
She got caught. She knows she got caught. And she’s pretending it didn’t happen, and I should really leave it alone.
But something comes over me. A dark, quiet compulsion that I don’t understand but can’t seem to stop. I reach into the display case and lift out the dual-shaft model.
“This is one of our flagship products,” I say, holding it between us. It’s sleek, ergonomic, matte-finished in soft gray. Two shafts, slightly offset, each one tapering to a knotting mechanism at the base.
Sophie’s eyes drop to it. Quick and involuntary. She pulls her gaze back to my face within a heartbeat, but in that heartbeat I see it. She’s curious. She’s trying so hard not to be, but I can see right through it.
“Right.” Her voice is slightly higher than normal.
“This device mimics the experience of an omega being knotted by two alphas simultaneously.”
The air between us thickens. I can feel it in my skin, in the way the room seems to contract around us.
Sophie’s resolve finally breaks. Her gaze lowers to the device and stays there, her breath catching just enough for me to hear it, and she bites her lower lip—slow, unconscious, the kind of gesture that tells me she’s forgotten I’m watching.
“Simultaneously,” she says, as if she doesn’t know what it means. I can see the flutter of her pulse at her throat, the faint sheen of sweat at her temples. She’s thinking about something, and she bites her lip again, and I stare at her mouth.
I find the button on the side. “Yes, simultaneously. When you press this—” I press it. “—the knot starts inflating.”
Sophie watches it, and I watch her watch it, feeling my heartbeat hammering in my chest.
The mechanism activates and the base of the first shaft begins to swell—slowly, expanding outward in a gradual curve designed to replicate the pressure of an alpha’s knot. I can see the slight widening of her eyes as the knot fully inflates, and I can feel it all the way to my cock.
Fuck.
I watch the slight dilation of her pupils. The quickening of her breath. The way her lips part, barely a millimeter, such an unconscious thing but one that tells me everything.
It’s turning her on, and she’s fascinated and curious, and I should stop talking and I’m not going to.
“Of course,” I say, and my voice has dropped lower, unable to stop now, “some omegas prefer larger devices. Separate units, so they can control each one independently.”
“Independently,” she says softly. Her voice is barely above a whisper, and she hasn’t looked away from the device.
“Different speeds. Different pressures. Different sequences.” I turn the device slowly. “The user controls everything. That’s the point. Full autonomy over the experience.”
She’s so close now. Close enough that I can see the faint freckles on her nose, ones I never noticed before, and the way her lashes cast tiny shadows on her cheekbones.
Her lips are still parted from whatever she was about to say and if I tilted her chin up, my lips would be on hers.
And the terrifying thing is, I think she’d let me.
But then we hear footsteps in the corridor, and we jump apart so fast my hip catches the edge of the display case. The sharp pain is almost a relief—something concrete, something that isn’t the heat still radiating through my body.
I watch her come to her senses immediately. Her jaw tightens and her shoulders square. Her eyes, which were soft and dark and close enough to drown in three seconds ago, go flat and steady, and the woman who was breathing my air and leaning toward my mouth disappears as if she never existed.
“I get the idea, Ethan.” Her voice is even.
The device is still in my hand, the knot fully inflated, and the absurdity of it hits me—standing here, holding a swollen knotting device, my heart pounding, while Sophie straightens her blouse like we’ve just been caught doing something we’ll both pretend never happened.
I press the button. The knot deflates with a quiet hiss. I place it back in the display case.
And the shame hits me like a slow tide.
Because I saw her glance at that display case with something she didn’t mean to feel, and instead of pretending I hadn’t noticed—the way any decent person would—I picked up the thing she was trying not to look at and held it between us and made her watch it inflate while I narrated the experience in clinical detail.
She gave me a stolen glance. A two-second lapse in a lifetime of perfect control. And I turned it into a demonstration.
“The pharmaceutical section is this way,” I say, and my voice is normal again. “I’ll walk you through the regulatory pipeline.”
We walk to the pharmaceutical wing. I spend the next forty minutes explaining the regulatory pipeline with aggressively professional detail, and Sophie asks intelligent questions, and neither of us acknowledges what happened in the product lab.
But I know.
And she knows I know.
Later, alone in my office with the door closed, I press my palms against my eyes.
I know better than this. I have boundaries for a reason, and using my position to get close to someone who works for me is exactly the kind of thing I swore I’d never do.
And I picked up a knotting device and used it as an excuse to stand close enough to count the freckles on her nose. I watched her breathing change and I liked it. If those footsteps had come five seconds later, I would have kissed her.
She’s a contractor, here on an assignment. And I was inches from her mouth in a product lab, holding a sex toy, telling myself it was professional.
I lower my hands and stare at the ceiling.
SOPHIE
By six the research wing has mostly emptied out, and I’m shutting down my workstation when someone stops beside my desk.
“You must be Sophie.”
I look up. And my first thought is that she looks like a 1950s pin-up who took a wrong turn and ended up in corporate biotech.
A couple of inches taller than me and all curves, with dark red hair falling in waves past her shoulders and the kind of figure her lab coat is doing absolutely nothing to hide. Hazel eyes, a wide, open face, and a smile so warm and immediate it hits like stepping into sunlight from a cold room.
She’s an omega. I can see it in her curves, in the softness, in the way her body fills the space it takes up. And she carries all of it without a scrap of apology—the kind of confident, comfortable femininity that I’ve spent my whole life burying.
“Oh my God, finally.” She breathes, already reaching for my hand.
“I’m Evie. Mr. Brooks told me you’d be at this desk and I have been waiting all day, except I got stuck in back-to-back supply meetings, which is seven hours of my life that I will never get back and I am still furious about it.
” She hasn’t let go of my hand. “You have no idea how excited I am. It gets so lonely being the only non-scientist in this wing. Everyone else just mutters about compounds and half-lives and I’m over here like, great, the printer’s jammed again, does anyone care? Nope, nobody cares.”
I blink. She’s not even breathing between sentences.
A category unto itself, Ethan said. He undersold it.
“It’s nice to meet you, Evie.”