10. Everett
My argument dies in my mouth.
One second I’m telling Brody Callahan exactly why the league is right about his six games, and the next my whole body goes hot from the inside out. A cramp rolls low through my belly. And I can smell it, rising off my own skin, sweet and unmistakable, filling the space between us.
Across the gym, Brody has gone very still on the bike. His nostrils flare. His eyes are black.
I work it out maybe a second after he does.
Heat. I’m going into heat.
I don’t say a word. There’s nothing to say that my scent isn’t already announcing on my behalf. I turn and take the stairs at a run — the basement flight, the hall — and slam the guest room door behind me hard enough to shake the frame.
The suppressants didn’t work.
I doubled the dose the day I moved into this house and I have swallowed them every morning since, religiously, and they didn’t work.
Or they worked just well enough to let me lie to myself, which is worse.
I stand with my back against the door, heart slamming, and run the week back with clear eyes: the armchair in the hotel.
The kitchen counter. Standing too long in the hallway outside his bedroom door on Tuesday.
Waking up with the taste of woodsmoke in the back of my throat.
It was stress, I told myself. Grief, maybe. It’s been a rough month.
I should have known.
The first slick comes while I’m still standing there. Warmth, then wet, sliding down the inside of my thigh, and my cock is already hard enough to hurt, and none of what happens next is going to be dignified.
Because the thing my brain serves up, unasked, is Brody on that bike.
Sweat down the column of his throat. The taped hand wrapped around the bar.
Shoulders and thighs working, all that mass moving easy, the T-shirt stuck to him.
Big rough alpha body one floor below me, and I know exactly what his hands feel like now.
That’s the problem. My imagination no longer has to invent anything.
I want him. There it is, flat where I can’t unsee it: the size of him, the brutality and the hints of kindness that keep showing up underneath.
I call the emergency line before I can lose my nerve. My doctor is in London, which makes it morning there. The service picks up on the second ring and patches me through to Dr. Ansari herself, which tells you what I pay for.
“I need something to stop a heat,” I say. No preamble.
A pause while she pulls up my file. “Everett. Has it started?”
“It’s starting.”
“Then I’m sorry, but no. Blockers work ahead of a cycle, not inside one. Once a heat has broken, anything strong enough to interrupt it would put you in the hospital. I wouldn’t prescribe it if you were standing in my office.”
I know that. I’m not stupid. I’ve been an omega long enough to know how heats work. I also know that there must be ways around it. All you need is money and you can fix the world.
“There must be something. A private clinic. I’ll pay whatever—”
“I’m aware you’ll pay. There is nothing to buy. Anyone who sells you something will be selling you an admission ward.” Then, gentler: “Is there a trigger? Are you somewhere safe?”
“I’m safe.” It comes out rough. Safe is one word for this house.
“Then fluids, food when you can face it, and no decisions in the first twelve hours. It will pass in three to five days.”
I thank her. I don’t mean a syllable of it.
It isn’t the heat I’m afraid of. I’ve done heats. It’s that I already know how this one ends.
If it runs its course in this house — his scent in every room, his big hands one flight down — I am going to give in. I felt it happen in the basement: the give already in me, like ice starting to soften. That’s why I wanted the drug. Not to stop the heat. To stop me.
I am already desperate for him and it’s barely even started yet.
The first time I come to the thought of him, I tell myself it’s simply heat management.
I stand in the shower with the water as hot as it goes and take myself in hand, brisk and clinical about it, and that fiction survives roughly four seconds, because the moment I close my eyes he’s there — the bike, the sweat, the forearms — and it takes embarrassingly little.
I come with my forehead against the tile and his name locked behind my teeth, and the relief lasts about as long as the steam.
It’s not enough. It was never going to be enough. Heats on suppressants were a fever and a foul mood.
This one, unsuppressed and triggered, is something else entirely.
The want doesn’t sit in one place. It’s in my skin, the roots of my teeth, the backs of my knees — everywhere his hands have been and everywhere they haven’t.
I try distance. I open the window and stand in the freezing air until I shake. I do press-ups until my arms give out, which takes less time than I’d like to admit and achieves nothing.
The second time I’m in bed, and I’ve stopped pretending.
I let myself have it properly: his palm flat on my spine on that kitchen counter, the growl he made into my mouth, the sheer size of him crowding me back against the marble.
I get a fist around my cock and imagine it’s his hand — double the size of mine and callused right across the palm — and I come all over my own stomach with my heels dug into the mattress and his name almost out loud, in the empty room.
It doesn’t help. The heat wants him.
By the small hours, I’m slick to the backs of my thighs and past caring. I get two fingers in myself, which I have done maybe a handful of times in my life without much conviction.
It’s both revelatory and nowhere near enough at the same time. My body is extremely specific about the dimensions of what it’s missing.
I press my face into the pillow and ride my own hand and let myself imagine it: bent over his spotless kitchen island, held down under one forearm, taken with that same unbearable patience while I say terrible things to him.
The noise I make when the version of him in my head finally pushes in is one I have never made in my life.
I have to stop and breathe after that one. He’s somewhere below me, awake — I’d put money on it; alphas don’t sleep through this — and I no longer trust myself to keep quiet.
The third time — or the fourth — I don’t even build the fantasy. I just say his name into the pillow and grind against the mattress, slick everywhere, cock aching. When it finally comes, it leaves me shaking worse than before.
The room reeks of me now, ripe and shameless. And the woodsmoke coming up through the house has changed too. Darker. Closer to how he smelled in the kitchen with his mouth on my jaw. My heat is talking to him straight through the floorboards.
At some point I find myself at the door with my forehead against the wood, listening. Just listening.
He moved through the house an hour ago — water ran, something opened and closed in the kitchen — and every cell in me tracked it. This is what I am now.
The night goes on like that. Wave, spike, relief that doesn’t hold, twenty minutes of shivering clarity in which I consider and trash increasingly unhinged plans, then the next wave.
At some point I cry a little, which I will take to my grave. At some point I must sleep, because when I next look at the window, it’s gray.
My phone starts up at eight. The league — again. I watch it ring out from the far side of the bed. Whatever composure that call requires, I do not currently have it.
Priya I do call.
She picks up on the first ring, wherever in the world she is. “Good morning.”
“I need to be away from the office for a few days,” I say. “Personal reasons.”
The pause is a fraction too long. Personal reasons, from an omega, means exactly one thing, and Priya has kept my diary for years. She’ll also know it’s early.
“Of course,” she says, smooth as ever. “I’ll move what needs moving. The league?”
“Is leaving voicemails. Let them.”
“Understood.” A beat. Then, too lightly: “And Mr. Callahan?”
“What about him?”
“He’s suspended. So he has an excuse not to be anywhere, hasn’t he? For days.” Another beat, immaculate. “Nobody will be looking for either of you.”
“Thank you, Priya. That will be all.”
“Take care of yourself, Everett,” she says, and is gone.
I put the phone on silent and lie there, resolutely not thinking about it. He has an excuse not to be anywhere.
I get up to lock the door, but there is no damn lock. I eye the dresser on the other side of the room. I don’t think I have the strength to keep him out.
It isn’t to keep him out. He hasn’t come near the stairs all night — I’d have heard it. It’s to keep me in. It’s one decision between me and the version of this where I walk downstairs in nothing but slick and ruin us both.
I get back into bed. I last two minutes. Too hot for sheets, too hot for air, the room swimming with both our scents, my skin crawling everywhere the fabric touches. I get up again.
The shower, then. I crank the dial as far into cold as it will go and step in before I can flinch and I stay.
I stay while my teeth start chattering and my fingers wrinkle, running it colder every time my body adjusts, trying to freeze him out of my head — the bike, the taped hands, the kitchen island that exists only in my skull — and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t even slightly work.
Under the cold water, folded up on the tile with my arms around my knees, I can still smell him.