Chapter 41
JAMIE
Morgan finally pulls back, and I gasp in a breath, world swirling around me. I’m so dizzy.
Her hands find my arms and steady me, and her voice comes from faraway.
“Jamie. Jamie, are you alright?”
My breathing evens, my vision clears, and the ground steadies beneath me. “Yeah.”
Something warm and wet runs down my back, and I shiver.
Morgan crouches by me. She lifts her hand, and her claws are tipped in red.
She stiffens. “I want too far. I shouldn’t have…”
I grab her hand and close my mouth around her finger, licking my blood from her claw.
“Fuck, Jamie…” Her voice is coarse.
I move to the next finger, and she shivers. I reach for her other hand, pressing it between my legs, moaning as she palms my overhard cock, already throbbing and leaking from the feeling of her down my throat.
Her breath catches. “Jesus, what am I going to do with you…”
“Fuck me,” I breathe as I switch to the next finger.
“You’re lucky I just did,” she says, leaning close. “Or I would make a very bad decision right now.” She trails a claw up my cock, digging in to the point of pain.
I whimper, heat blossoming in my brain.
“Is it going to make you more or less desperate if I let you cum right now? Be honest.”
My chest heaves with rapid breaths. I want to say whatever will keep Morgan’s hand against my cock, whatever will get me release.
But I can’t lie to Morgan.
“More desperate…”
“That’s what I thought.” She gives my cock a hard pinch, and I gasp. “Now relax, and let’s get you cleaned up.”
Morgan pulls me to my feet and picks up my t-shirt, using it to clean the trickle of blood from my back before holding it against my head. Her bones snap, and she slowly returns to her usual form.
“I’m fine,” I insist. “Head wounds just bleed a lot.”
“I’ll believe it when I see these clean,” she says.
Morgan leads me back through the expansive house, up a flight of stairs, and through a luxurious velvet-lined bedroom into a gleaming bathroom of gold and black marble. She sits me on the edge of the bathtub and gently parts my hair, dabbing with a clean washcloth.
Alcohol follows, and it stings, but I don’t wince.
“You’re tougher than I am,” Morgan mutters.
“I’m fine, really. I have a high pain tolerance.”
She runs her fingers through my hair, and I shiver.
“Maybe too high,” she says.
“I like it,” I murmur.
“I know. That’s the problem.”
Something tightens in my chest. “Why is it a problem?”
“Because I’m going to hurt you again. I’m not… I’m not sure this is a good idea.”
It’s so foreign, seeing Morgan unsure. And equally strange, being so confident myself. But I reach back and take her hand. “I want this,” I say with certainty. “You won’t do anything permanent. I’m sure of that.”
Morgan’s fingers trace under the collar. “I’m not sure I’m that strong…”
“I’m willing to take the risk.”
“It’s going to be different as the suppressants wear off,” Morgan says quietly, cleaning another puncture wound. “Worse.”
“I can take it.”
“Now you sound like me,” she says with a dark chuckle. “But I almost suffocated you back there.”
My back arches into her.
“Oh, you are bad,” she says.
“I can’t help it,” I breathe. “I love… everything you do to me.”
Morgan is quiet as she applies a styptic. It stings worse than the alcohol, but it quickly resolves the bleeding.
She cradles my head in her hand and leans me back over the basin of the tub, supporting my full weight as she runs warm water through my hair with a gold wand, washing the rest of the blood away. She’s careful to keep the collar as dry as possible as she rinses the blood from underneath.
“No harm, no foul,” I say.
“The expression is ‘no blood, no foul,’ and you did bleed.”
“Eh.”
I could lie like this forever, Morgan’s nails gently circling my scalp, but she stops the water and squeezes my hair in a fluffy towel.
As she pulls me back upright, I find her eyes.
“Let me do this for you,” I say. I try to not sound like I’m begging. I try to sound professional, confident. I’m mostly successful.
“Alphas can’t just go grabbing any omega that—”
“I’m not just any omega,” I cut in.
Morgan sighs. “That’s what Gia said too.”
“Who’s Gia?”
“My psychiatrist. Friend. My psychiatrist friend. She agrees with your assessment, by the way. Of the data.”
“I wish you’d told me it was yours.” I drop my eyes to her collarbones, brushing her skin with my fingertips. She’s so beautiful. And dangerous.
“The irony is fantastic. My life’s work, and to make it happen, I apparently gave up it being able to work on me.”
“It still works. Enough.”
Morgan gives a small shake of her head. “There’s no room for flattery in science—”
I grab her hand, pull it to my cheek, and find her eyes again. The touch stops her words.
“Things don’t have to be perfect to be enough, Mor.” It’s the most forcefully I’ve ever said anything in my life.
Morgan stills, and I see the mask waver. See the uncertainty there.
“It was enough for me to get to know you,” I continue. “Enough time. Enough just… being ourselves.”
“Jamie…” There’s an edge of sternness in her voice. “It’s been two weeks. That’s no time at all.”
It feels like years. Shit. But I’m not dissuaded. “It’s like summer camp time.”
“And what does that mean?”
I can’t help but snort. “Of course you didn’t go to summer camp. It’s just… camp may only be a week or two, but you bond like crazy. Leave with lifelong friends. On day three, it’s like you’ve known each other for years.”
“Sounds like there’s something in the water,” Morgan mutters.
“Well… people get to know each other what, an hour or two at a time? Normally. But an eight-hour day together? That’s at least four dates. So it’s just all… concentrated.”
Her voice is low, controlled. “Jamie, it doesn’t matter what you say, I’m not taking off that collar.”
“No! No, that’s not what I mean, just… give me more credit than two weeks. We’re… friends, at least, right?”
“Are you friend-zoning me?” Morgan teases.
My cheeks go bright red, and I sputter. “That’s not—I just didn’t mean—”
She brushes a thumb along my cheek, a soft smile on her lips.
I cross my arms, pouting. “Let me finish!”
She drops a hand to my inner thigh. “I thought that was only going to make you more desperate.”
I tremble, but I fight to keep control of my voice.
This is important. “Let me do this for you,” I repeat.
“I know the risks. And I… I have spent my entire life trying to be…” I chew on the inside of my cheek, follow the white veins in the marble floors, looking for words.
“A… a good omega. And it has always felt like being cornered, like—on the one hand, I want to be kind, and accommodating. On the other hand, I owe it to omega-kind to not be a total doormat? I guess? Like I want to be myself, but not play into the stereotype, but then there are things that I don’t do because they’d be stereotypical, and so then I’m not actually being true to myself?
And…” My voice tightens, and I take a deep breath, hoping I can avoid tears.
“And… nobody knows what to do with a male omega. A female omega? That’s, like, patriarchy squared.
But a male omega? People feel like it… cancels out or something…
and it should, right?” I’m rambling now, shit. This isn’t what I meant to get into.
“But you’re not a man,” Morgan says simply.
I blink. “What?”
“You don’t have cis-man privilege if you’re not a cis man.”
“I don’t know if it’s quite that simple…”
“That woman wasn’t the first one to grope you,” Morgan says quietly. “I could see it on your face.”
I swallow hard. “Well… yeah…”
“Are you afraid to walk home alone? Take rideshares alone?”
“Yes,” I breathe.
“Do you think I am?”
I hesitate. Scan her face. It feels like a trick question. I bite my lip. “I think… you know what could happen. But you’re not afraid of it.”
She nods. “Do you know how many women’s support groups I’ve been invited to during my professional career that are utterly useless for me? And it’s not that these things don’t happen. It’s just that I can and will break bones if they do.”
I crack a wry smile. “I can imagine.”
Morgan’s expression is thoughtful. “People like you and me… we don’t fit the mold. Any mold.”
“It’s made me… second-guess myself when the people who are supposed to get it… don’t. And I know I shouldn’t care what other people think, but…”
“Of course you would,” she says, with a surprising tenderness.
“But you don’t.”
“Not in the slightest.”
I fidget with the edge of the towel that falls over my shoulder. “So… shouldn’t I… also not?”
She gently touches the backs of her fingers to my cheek. “Why should you be like me? We’re very different people.”
“Because isn’t the alternative being… I don’t know, a doormat? Codependent?”
“It can get to that point. But you’re also sensitive. Thoughtful. Generous. Understanding. All things I’m not.”
There’s no self-deprecation in her tone—it’s a neutral observation, stated as a fact.
And it sinks to my core in a way I don’t know how to react to, except to just… accept it. Or start to, anyway.
A soft smile finds my lips. “You tend to attract out-of-the-mold people, don’t you?”
“Everyone else is boring,” Morgan says with a shrug.
“There was a point to all this, um… oh. Right. So, I’ve been…
shoving myself into a mold, I guess. And this is something I feel like…
I know… I want to do. For myself. I want to throw myself into this, to unleash, to let this…
creature out that has been suffocating. I want to be…
primal. I want to be chased and pinned, I want you to make me bleed.
I want to claw you back and…” My heart flutters, my mouth is dry.
I force a hard swallow. “I’m sorry, that does sound insane, I—”
Morgan catches my chin in her hand. “No, it doesn’t.”
I see it in her eyes. She understands.
“So… please. Let me do this. For me.”
Morgan takes a deep breath and nods. “Okay.”