11. Brody
I stay on the bike until I stop shaking. It takes a while.
The basement smells of him. Orange peel and dark honey, gone sweet and heavy at the end there. I know what that sweetness means, and my body knows too.
I get off the bike, rack the weights I already racked, and stand in the middle of my own gym breathing like I just played double shifts through overtime.
He’s going into heat. In my house. One floor up.
I take the coldest shower of my life and it does nothing. By the time I’m out, the scent has found its way downstairs, faint, coming down the stairwell in slow pulses. Within the hour it isn’t faint.
I want to go up there so badly my teeth hurt.
That’s not a figure of speech. My jaw aches from clenching against it, this pull that has hooks in places I didn’t know I had — go up, be close, guard the door, fix it.
I thought I had control over my alpha instincts.
Nobody’s instincts ever met Everett Rourke.
But I stay down here because he said no. Maybe not to my hands — the kitchen happened, and we’ve been pretending it didn’t for days — but to me. To the match.
Yeah, I want him. I’m self-aware enough to admit it, but I’m not the type to force an omega who doesn’t want me.
Fuck. He smells so good. I shut my eyes, breathing deep. There’s nothing wrong with that. I can smell him and enjoy that. That’s not crossing a line.
The problem is that the more I breathe him in, the hornier I get.
If he wants me back, he has to say yes. If he wants me, he can tell me with his own mouth, someplace his blood isn’t doing the talking.
So, that means I have to be a gentleman, even if I don’t want to be.
I also need something to keep me occupied or I am going to go actually insane. I also can’t spend the next week in the basement.
Okay. If I can’t help him through it in the way that I want, I’ll have to be useful some other way.
I fill the good cooler with water bottles and the electrolyte mix from training camp.
I make sandwiches and stack them in the fridge.
Then I carry the cooler down the hall and set it outside his door without knocking, and I’m proud to report I only stood there like an idiot for about ten seconds first.
Through the door, the shower is running.
I go back downstairs, put the TV on and the volume up. It doesn’t help, because the problem isn’t my ears — although my ears are a problem too, because the shower stops, and the sounds that come after that are worse.
He’s quiet. He’s trying to be quiet. But it’s my house and I know every noise it makes, and the house has never heard those ones.
I sit on the living room floor with my back against the couch and my fists on my knees and take it.
Here’s what nobody tells you about being matched to somebody who wants no part of you: your body doesn’t get the memo.
My cock has been hard since the basement.
Every pulse of scent through the vents cranks it tighter, and when he makes that sound up there — the one he’d die over if he knew I heard it — I have to grip the counter edge and grit my teeth until the urge to take the stairs three at a time lets go of me.
Then his next wave rolls down through the air and we start over.
The wanting isn’t even the worst of it. There’s another instinct under it with no sex in it at all: be in that room, hold water to his mouth.
He’s hurting, alone, in a strange house in a country he didn’t choose, on the worst night to be alone, and the only person within reach is the one he least wants to see.
Around four I think about calling Sun. Emergency separation, medical grounds — get him somewhere with professionals and no me in the walls. I get as far as the contact screen.
There is no chance they’d agree. They are the people who put us in this box. I put the phone down.
At some point I sleep, face down on the couch, and dream about nothing I’d repeat.
Gray light. The house has gone quiet. My first thought is the cooler, so I go up, quiet on the stairs, and there it is outside his door, exactly where I left it. Untouched. He’d rather dehydrate than open a door I might be behind.
JP shows up at nine.
I forgot. That’s the honest truth of it.
The plan was Linus, the leadership group doing staggered visits so we don’t blow past the two-visitor rule, and JP swinging by to collect me.
We’d hoped that my little bust-up wasn’t big enough news for them to stay all night or bother coming back in the morning.
I remember all of this the moment that he knocks, far too late to do anything about how the house smells.
He’s got a coffee in each hand and his collar up against the cold, and he’s already talking as the door swings. “Okay, so parking at the hospital is a disaster, we sh—”
He stops. Mid-word, mid-step, one foot on the threshold.
I watch it happen. The nostrils. The blink. The slow look from me to the stairs and back to me, his face working through different theories before it lands on the right one.
JP has stood next to me in a locker room for years and he was ten feet away when the new owner shook my hand in front of the whole team.
“Brody.” He says it very carefully. “Why does your house smell like Everett Rourke?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Why does your house smell like Everett Rourke in—” his voice drops to a hiss anyway, “—in heat?”
There’s no play here. I had all night to come up with a story but I was kind of…distracted.
So I pull him inside, shut the door, and give him the truth. “We’re matched. Prime match. It came back ninety-eight percent. The Bureau’s had us in mandatory cohabitation since last week.”
JP sets the coffees down slow. “Fuck,” he says.
“I know.”
“That’s why you wouldn’t let me in last week. That’s why—” He points at me with his whole hand. “I knew I smelled something on your gear.”
“JP. Listen to me.” I haven’t begged for anything since I was a rookie, and it comes out of me now without a fight. “You can’t tell anyone. Not the boys, not Sacco, not your mother.”
JP looks at me for a long moment. Whatever he’s hunting for in my face, he finds it, and it settles him. “Okay,” he says. Simple as that. “Okay. I promise. Nobody hears it from me.”
The relief nearly takes my knees out. “Thank you.”
“I’ll cover for you. Hand’s flaring up, doctor says rest it, you’re keeping your head down until the hearing.
Nobody’ll question any of that.” He picks his coffee back up and pushes the other one into my hand.
“Linus — I’ll tell him his captain says heal fast and stop admiring his own passes with his head down. ”
“People are going to notice, JP. Him and me, gone at the same time. Somebody in that room is going to put it together.”
“Nobody is putting anything together.” He says it flat, goalie-certain.
“The boys think Rourke’s gone back to London, or he’s hiding from us, and either way they’re glad.
And you’re suspended, which as far as the room is concerned means you’re at home punching a heavy bag and feeling sorry for yourself. Nobody is looking for either of you.”
He gets to the door and stops with his hand on it, and I brace for the joke. “Ninety-eight, eh?” A shake of the head, half a smile, then he leaves me to it.
I watch his car out of sight. The relief lasts about as long as the driveway. Because covered or not, there are days more of this — heats run three to five days, and we’re not one full day in — and I barely survived the night.
I don’t know how any alpha can handle a week of being a gentleman about this. I genuinely don’t know.
Then my phone chimes.
The Bureau app. Cheerful yellow banner, little bell icon. DAILY COMPLIANCE CHECK-IN. BOTH REGISTRANTS MUST APPEAR IN FRAME. RESPOND WITHIN FIVE MINUTES.
Today. Timing like that isn’t luck. The fuckers know exactly what they’re doing.
I think about ignoring it. I stand in my kitchen and run the play: miss the check-in, take the breach.
But a missed check-in doesn’t mean a fine.
It means a compliance visit. It means a Bureau car in the driveway and a stranger with a tablet in my hallway asking to sight both registrants in person, today, while Everett is—
No.
We have to do it.
I knock on his door. Nothing. I knock again, say his name. Nothing — and through the door, water. The shower, still going. Or going again. He’s in it constantly.
I try the handle, half expecting him to have barricaded the door, but it opens clear and easy.
I immediately scent cold air and orange, thick enough to taste. The bed is a wreck, the window is wide open, and the bathroom door is shut with the shower hammering away behind it.
The phone says a minute and a half.
I cross the room and knock on the bathroom door, loud. “Everett. It’s Brody.”
The water shuts off.
“Come in.” Instant. Desperate. Then, just as fast: “No. Don’t—” A breath I can hear from here. “Yes. Come in.”
“Bureau check-in. We’ve got under a minute or they send a car. I need you in frame.”
“Okay.”
I go in. He’s out of the shower, towel around his hips, dripping on the tile, one hand braced on the sink like it’s the only thing holding him up. His hair is plastered flat. His eyes are all pupil.
“Come here,” I say, and hold the phone up, and he steps into frame beside me without a word of argument.
We look into the little lens. I tap. The app thinks about it, then throws up a green tick and a burst of confetti, because somewhere in a Bureau office a designer decided this moment should feel fun.
“Done. That’s it.”
And then I actually look at him.
He’s shaking. Not heat-shivers. His lips have gone faintly blue at the edges. When my hand brushes his shoulder reaching past him for the towel rail, his skin is cold. Cold as the rink. The window open all night, the water run cold for hours, no food, no sleep.
“How long were you in that shower?”
He looks at the wall and doesn’t answer me.
Every protective instinct I own floods in at once.