Chapter 26 #2
And fuck. Having her body pressed against my back—even partially, even through the tub’s marble edge, even with the wet hair dripping onto my bare skin and the steam turning both of us into damp, overheated, emotionally excavated versions of ourselves—feels so fucking good.
So specifically, irreplaceably good that the memory of the years without it clarifies into a pain I can now accurately measure because I have the contrast.
I missed her. Not the concept. Not the category. HER. The specific, irreducible, couldn’t-be-substituted-by-any-other-Omega-on-the-planet her.
I continued.
Because the window was open and the truth was in motion and stopping now would leave the most important part undelivered, which would be worse than the discomfort of delivering it.
“There was a night,” I said, and my voice dropped further—lower, quieter, entering a register I hadn’t heard myself use since the morning I’d woken up in Stockholm alone and realized what I’d lost. “Where I was just…frustrated. The accumulation of months of inadequate release compounded by the blockers’ interference with the knotting mechanism and the basic, humiliating, I-am-a-functional-Alpha-who-cannot-functionally-climax reality that the medication had produced.
And I fucked her. Again and again. Trying to reach a release that the blockers kept pushing further away.
I’d lowered the dose—thought the reduction would help, thought giving my biology a longer leash would allow the system to produce what the full dose was suppressing. ”
A breath.
“It was just so fucking frustrating. Needing that release so desperately—not wanting it, needing it, the way your lungs need oxygen, the kind of biological demand that doesn’t negotiate or compromise or accept close enough as a substitute for completion—and having your own chemistry prevent you from getting there. I hadn’t had a proper climax since…”
I trailed off.
Her lips pressed against my shoulder. Soft. The pout traveling through the point of contact and into the muscle beneath with the warm, involuntary tenderness of a mouth that was reacting to the hurt in my voice before the mind had formulated a verbal response.
“Since me?” she murmured.
I didn’t want to admit it.
The nod was slight. The smallest possible physical confirmation I could produce—a millimeter of downward movement, the gravitational minimum of an acknowledgment, offered to the steam-filled air above the bathwater rather than to her face because looking at her while confessing that my body hadn’t properly functioned since the last time she’d been in it was a vulnerability I couldn’t manage and a disclosure I refused to verbalize.
I won’t say it with words. The nod is enough. She’ll understand. She always understood the things I communicated through silence and motion and the specific, involuntary, can’t-be-controlled language of a body that trusted her even when my mind was busy constructing reasons not to.
She understood.
I felt it in the way her chin pressed slightly deeper into my shoulder.
The way her arm tightened by a fraction around my neck.
The quiet, received, I-heard-what-you-didn’t-say shift in her breathing that told me the nod had been decoded and filed in the same archive where she kept every other piece of information I’d given her through gesture rather than grammar.
“It got to the point,” I continued, because the momentum was carrying me now and stopping would require a force I no longer possessed, “where she was tired. She wanted me to stop. And I…”
The words thickened. Caught in my throat like ice jamming a drain.
The memory of that night—the desperation, the frustration, the moment where the biological demand had nearly overridden the conscious decision and my body had almost done the thing my mind was horrified by—pressed against the walls of the sentence and made the delivery feel less like speaking and more like expelling a foreign object.
“I didn’t want to stop. Because I needed the release so badly that the wanting had started to eclipse the listening. And that moment—the gap between what she was asking and what my body was demanding—made me realize…”
I saw the face again.
Not the Omega who’d been beneath me. Not the woman whose name I’d erased.
Behind my eyelids, in the dark, in the space where the truth lived unedited: Octavia’s storm-gray eyes.
Wide. Blurred with tears. The hallucination that had lasted one second and branded itself permanently into the neural pathway between my desire and my fear.
I dared to whisper it.
“I never wanted to do that to you.” The words were barely audible.
Carried more by vibration than volume, transmitted through the contact points where her body touched mine—her chin on my shoulder, her arm around my neck, her chest against my back—as much as through the air between my mouth and her ear.
“So why would I be okay with doing it to any other Omega? It was…a line I couldn’t cross.
Couldn’t risk crossing. Not with someone whose pain I wouldn’t survive causing. ”
I swallowed.
“So I cut ties with her. Went back on the full dose. That was more than two years ago.”
The bathroom held its breath.
The faucet dripped. The steam curled. The bathwater settled against the porcelain with the quiet, ambient sound of a surface that had absorbed the confessions deposited into its vicinity and was holding them without judgment.
She was quiet.
Not the performative quiet of a woman formulating a response.
Not the loaded, about-to-detonate quiet that preceded one of her trademark verbal eviscerations.
The real quiet. The rare, held, full-body stillness of Octavia Moreau absorbing information at a depth that required her entire processing capacity and that she honored by not filling the space with premature words.
This is the first time I’ve said any of this out loud.
To anyone. Not Maddox. Not Renzo. Not the sports medicine specialist who prescribed the blockers, because the conversation with him had been clinical—symptoms, dosages, management protocols—and had never touched the emotional substructure that the medical terminology was built on top of.
I’ve carried this alone. In the same rooms where I carried my pride and my composure and the specific, carefully maintained performance of a man who had everything under control.
And the weight of it—the sheer, compressive, years-of-silence weight of a secret that lives in your chest and grows denser with every day you don’t release it—is leaving me now.
Transferring from my body to the steam. From the steam to the air she’s breathing.
From the air to the woman whose chin is on my shoulder and whose arm is around my neck and who hasn’t moved or spoken or flinched.
She spoke.
“Those blockers have bad side effects, Kael.”
The sentence was quiet. Direct. Stripped of the banter and the bickering and the Octaviana-grade theatrical energy that she deployed in public.
This was the medical professional’s daughter speaking—the woman who had grown up with a father whose coaching career had included a comprehensive education in sports medicine, who had absorbed pharmacological knowledge the way she’d absorbed skating technique, and who was now applying that knowledge to the chemical compound currently failing in her Alpha’s bloodstream.
I didn’t respond.
Because I knew. The side effects were listed on page three of the pharmaceutical insert I’d been too desperate to read and had since memorized through lived experience: reduced sensitivity, impaired knotting, diminished ejaculatory function, potential hormonal rebound upon discontinuation, and—in extended-use cases exceeding two years—the risk of paradoxical overstimulation events, vasomotor instability, and the specific, dignified medical phrase for the thing that had just happened to my nose: spontaneous epistaxis secondary to vascular fragility induced by prolonged androgen modulation.
I changed the subject.
Or tried to. The captain’s instinct for controlling the direction of a conversation—the same skill that managed post-game press conferences and pack disputes and coaching-staff negotiations—attempted a redirect with the clumsy, obvious, I-don’t-want-to-discuss-this-further energy of a man whose evasion techniques had been severely compromised by emotional exhaustion.
“Aren’t you on heat suppressants?”
The deflection was transparent. She saw through it immediately—I could feel the slight, amused exhale against my shoulder that indicated she’d clocked the maneuver and was choosing, for the moment, to permit it.
“Stopped.” Her voice carried the casual, medical-history-disclosure tone of a woman who discussed her pharmacological status with the same comfort she discussed her skating program—openly, technically, with the confidence of someone who understood her own biology and managed it actively rather than passively.
“Because of the accident. The suppressant compounds would contraindicate with my current medication stack—the anti-inflammatories for the knee, the vestibular therapy compounds for the post-concussive residual. If I reintroduce suppressants, the interaction produces either a systemic allergic response or a seizure event. My doctor was against it. Firmly, loudly, and with the specific, medical-professional intensity of a man who did not want to see his patient back in the hospital because she’d gambled on pharmaceutical chemistry. ”
She shifted behind me. Her chin adjusting on my shoulder.
“So I’m enduring heats again. Though they don’t come as frequently—two, maybe three times a year. Won’t have another until close to summer at this rate.”
I huffed.