4. Everett
This isn’t going to happen. It can’t be him. I cannot spend the rest of my life with a Barons alpha. I got away from all this.
I’m not going to do it.
I am not mating with a hockey player. I am certainly not mating the hockey player my father loved best.
I’ve said it to myself a thousand times in the past week. It’s not happening.
It doesn’t help that I’ve dreamed of him every night this week. Dreamed of him and woke up hard and slick and panting.
I’ve not seen him since. I’ve not gone back to the office or the arena.
I used my authority as owner to invite Sacco to a business breakfast where I made it clear that I’m not interested in taking a hands-on approach.
He didn’t approve. But then he wouldn’t.
Sacco isn’t interested in managing the franchise.
He just wants to do the day-to-day boring hockey stuff of ordering the team to train one way instead of the other, and obsess over tactics.
I’m going to have to find someone else. Callahan is no longer an option for obvious reasons. I’ve put out feelers to an agency that I can trust to be discreet, but so far they haven’t suggested any names that work.
Still, my mind keeps circling back to Callahan. My god, he was big. Alphas run to the large side obviously, but he was something else. The thought makes me want to squirm in my seat.
I’m going to see him this morning when he arrives for the first compliance meeting with the Bureau representative.
Then we need to spend two weeks together somewhere.
That’s going to be tricky. We’re both going to need to come and go, Callahan in particular.
He can’t just disappear from the team for two weeks without a lot of questions.
Publicly, I need to do a meet and greet with the team, him included. That’s expected. But nothing else. Everything else we do should be away from the prying eyes of the public and the press.
The Bureau wanted us at their downtown office this morning. I’ve managed to negotiate our way out of that at least.
The Bureau claims it respects the privacy of its matches. That’s bullshit. It most certainly does not.
Somehow, prime matches keep walking out of that lobby into cameras that just happen to be waiting. Happy couples, government-verified. It’s free advertising for the whole program. We’re not doing that. I’m not a walking billboard for some government department.
The new owner of the Barons, walking out of the Omega Match Bureau shoulder to shoulder with the captain of the Barons. That clip would run for a year.
So I’ve done the thing I am actually good at. I worked the phone and by Thursday we had terms.
Match law is old. Nothing in the statute stipulates where a compliance meeting has to happen; venue sits at caseworker discretion, and discretion can be negotiated.
The meeting moves to my suite. Participants arrive separately, unlogged, no venue notation in the file.
In exchange, I accepted an expedited compliance schedule I will no doubt come to hate. Nobody photographs the two of us walking into the same building and if news gets out about the match, then the Bureau has some stiff financial penalties to pay.
I did look at refusing outright. Obviously I looked, but the easiest way to get out of this is by not resisting. The Bureau is like sinking sand. The more you struggle, the more they trap you. The penalties escalate. Fines. Compliance orders. I’d almost certainly have my passport revoked.
The Bureau is lovely and friendly and match makes true love until the second you say no and then it becomes an unrelenting government machine. The harder I push, the harder they’ll push back. It’s just not worth it.
I take a deep breath. This is going to be difficult, but it’s only a few weeks. Once it’s done, it’s done.
I proposed meeting in my hotel room because it’s a place I control, it’s discreet, but now that Callahan is due any moment, it feels like the worst idea that I’ve ever had.
A hotel suite is a bedroom with a sofa in it, and everybody who walks in knows where the bed is.
I do not want to be in the same room as Callahan and a bed. I’m going to be thinking about the wrong thing.
Yes, there’s some Bureau guy coming too.
His name is David Sun. I’ve researched him too.
He’s responsible for prime matches at the Bureau.
He’s been at the forefront of every famous prime match of the last ten years.
I do not trust him an inch, but if I play this right by not fighting the battles I’m going to lose, I’ll wrap him up in a contract tight enough that no one will ever need to find out about it when I am finally free to leave.
Sun is arriving at ten. Callahan at ten past. I’m not going to be alone with that brute in this room.
The knock comes at two minutes to ten. The man is prompt. That fits what I know about him.
I open the door and Callahan’s scent comes through the gap before the door is half open, and every thought I have flies out of my brain instantly.
He’s in a charcoal overcoat with the collar up and a baseball cap pulled low, and none of it works. There is no version of six foot six that reads as inconspicuous.
“Mr. Rourke.”
“You’re early.”
“I didn’t want to be late.”
I don’t want to let him in, but having him stand outside in the corridor would be even worse.
“Come in.” I step back to let him in. It feels like a controlled retreat that keeps six feet of carpet between our bodies. It is.
He moves past me, carefully keeping his distance. I shut the door.
He stops by the window with his hands pushed deep in his coat pockets. I recognize the strategy.
My own hands are locked behind my back. Between us there is a sofa, a coffee table, and, behind me, showing in every reflective surface in the room, the bed.
Neither of us says a word. Thirty seconds of shared air and the room already smells like the two of us. It’s that fast.
My mouth floods. Lower down, my body starts reacting, that warm loosening I have felt exactly once before in my life, with this same man standing in the doorway of my father’s office. I breathe shallow, through my mouth. It didn’t help then either.
He looks at the bed once. Then at me. His face is the worst part. He looks stricken. Pupils blown, jaw tight, chest moving. If he looked smug I could work with smug.
He shifts his weight forward, half an inch. I watch him catch himself and stop. I am counting the steps between us.
One clear thought gets through from a long way off: two weeks of this is going to be a catastrophe.
I’ve not seen him since that first disastrous meeting. I had a notification from the Bureau that he had requested my phone number but I refused to authorize its release.
The Bureau can play its part here. If it wants to insist on us following its pathway, we can.
I’m not going outside of its rules and doing whatever it is that Callahan wants.
The Bureau might not like it, but its sheer bureaucracy is going to work in my favor.
I’m going to use the damned place like a shield.
“Mr. Rourke — may I call you Everett?” Callahan begins. His voice is low, almost a growl. It sends a shiver running through me.
“No.”
He almost visibly startles and I’m unexpectedly pleased. He didn’t expect that.
“I need to be clear that I have no intention of completing this match,” I say. “I will comply with requirements because that is the easiest route out of this. But it will go no further.”
He looks as if I’ve punched him in the face, which is funny because I’ve seen him take actual punches with a lot less emotion than he’s looking at me with right now.
I study his big broad face. He’s genuinely surprised. He thought I was going to fold like a good little omega the moment that I picked up his scent. Typical alpha.
He might smell like heaven itself, but that doesn’t mean he is any different to the rest of them.
The second knock arrives, snapping me out of it. Callahan turns to face the window.
I open the door, my mouth tight.
The man in the corridor is a slightly built beta with a leather folio under one arm and the durable good cheer of someone who has done a thousand of these.
“Mr. Rourke. David Sun, Omega Match Bureau.” He steps inside, and I watch our combined scent reach him. He looks pleased. Sicko. “And Mr. Callahan is here already. Wonderful. Shall we sit?”
We sit. Sun takes the desk chair, turned around to face the room. I take the near end of the sofa. Callahan folds himself into the armchair by the window, which is too small for him.
“Normally,” Sun says, opening the folio, “I’d begin with a formal introduction, but I believe you two have already met in person.”
Callahan’s eyes snap to me. They’re a startling blue. I look away.
Sun continues, “Even so, would you like me to take a photograph of this moment? People like to have a memento. You might like to frame it later.”
“No photographs,” I say.
“So noted.” He uncaps a pen. “I’d also recommend a handshake.”
Callahan is already leaning forward, one enormous hand half extended. He is smiling. Actually smiling, like the office and the scream and the get out never happened. Like he has been looking forward to this.
I am on my feet moving back. I know why Sun wants this. He wants us to touch. That’s the worst thing we could do. “I’d rather not.”
Callahan’s hand withdraws. His face closes. “Sure,” he says, flat.
Watching it happen is like watching a light go out. Good, I tell myself. He arrived open, friendly, ready to make the best of this, and that is exactly what I cannot afford.
“It isn’t personal.” It is entirely personal. If that hand closes around mine in this sealed room, I cannot warrant what happens in the thirty seconds that follow.
“Perfectly usual,” Sun says, serene, writing something down. “Plenty of pairs prefer to pace themselves.”
“Before we begin,” I say, “I want to understand how this happened at all. I have not been an official resident in this country for years. I didn’t register.”