3. Mary
Mary
I shut the hotel room door, put my back against it, and looked at the ceiling. I had given them my name. My real one.
Not Marli, the tidy little reinvention I’d carried across the Atlantic in a suitcase with too many sweaters and not enough sense. Mary was what I handed to two strange alphas.
Damien didn’t know it. My professors didn’t know about it. The registrar knew, because bureaucracy has no respect for a woman’s mysterious era.
“That was really stupid, Mary. Really—“ My stomach cramped hard enough to fold me over my own hand.
I breathed through it. The pain loosened a little and left heat behind it, thick and low and specific. My thighs shook under my tights. The back of my neck was damp. My scent had gone so strong I could taste it at the back of my throat.
Blackberry and rain.
That was the unfair part. They had stood in that corridor, trying to be decent, and their scent had come through the door behind me. Rain off the dark-haired one, cold and held tight. Warm whiskey and storm off the bearded one.
I didn’t even know their names.
I did know they were in room 416. Three doors down. Two alphas. Two knots.
“Absolutely not.” I dropped my bag on the bed. Everything in here should have helped.
I kicked off my shoes as the air on my skin made me shiver hard enough to click my teeth together.
Then I did the sensible thing and called the clinic.
It rang out before a recorded voice told me that for urgent heat support I should press one, and I pressed one with enough force to break the screen. A second recorded voice thanked me for calling.
“Don’t thank me. Fix me.”
I listened to the message telling me that the next available triage nurse would be with me shortly. It was not quick enough.
I put the phone on speaker and carried it into the bathroom, where the tiles were blessedly cold underfoot. I ran the bath, first the cold water, then the hot, having no idea what I was doing beyond wanting my body to become less aware of itself.
I sat on the closed lid of the toilet and peeled off my tights, which had become a challenge. My fingers caught in the fabric. I swore. The hold music continued to be cheerful, and I understood why people became villains.
The next cramp was worse. I bent over my knees and breathed through it while the room lights got too bright and my breasts ached inside my bra. I hated what my body had become.
The music clicked off.
“Hello, this is Boston Omega Health. Are you currently in danger?”
I nearly wept at the sound of an actual human answering.
“No. Not unless you count poor planning.”
“Are you alone?”
I looked at the bath, the steam, the discarded tights, and the two tiny wrapped soaps by the sink. Thought of my life in Boston away from my sister.
Then the lady repeated, “Are you alone, ma’am?”
“Yes.”
“Are you already in heat?”
“Pre-heat, I think. Possibly heat with a flair for suspense.”
“Do you have suppressants?”
“Not with me. And I forgot to take a couple.”
“Okay. Have you taken any medication to stop the heat in the last twenty-four hours?”
“No.”
“Do you have a safe alpha or a registered beta support person with you?”
My mind offered me Damien. Then, with deeply unhelpful enthusiasm, it offered me the two men three doors down.
“No,” I said. I couldn’t take them up on their offer, could I?
“I can book you for an intake tomorrow morning at nine-fifteen. If your heat breaks overnight and you feel unsafe, call emergency services or come to our urgent entrance directly. Do you have self-soothing aids?”
I looked at my reflection. “I have a bathtub and a level of hope that this is a false alarm.”
She hesitated. “Do you have toys, ma’am?”
My face went hot for reasons unconnected to the heat. “Yes. Two, or perhaps three. I bought a new one but I can’t remember if I put it in my emergency bag.”
“Very good planning. Two should be enough, three is perfect.”
“That’s the first time anyone has congratulated me on that.”
“You’d be surprised how many omegas get caught out in a hotel in town with nothing but that hope.”
“Well—“
I decided to stay quiet as keys clicked. “Use what helps. And keep hydrated. Keep the room cool. Avoid alpha contact unless that alpha is trusted and chosen, and don’t open the door to anyone you don’t know.”
“And if my heat comes on quickly?”
“If you feel you’re becoming disoriented, call emergency services. And ma’am? If your scent spikes badly, put damp towels at the bottom of your doorway.”
“Is this supposed to be reassuring?”
“It’s advice.” Keys again. “So you’re booked in for nine-fifteen. Most omegas stay in pre-heat for days, so you should be fine.” The call ended.
I sank into the water and the heat eased. My muscles relaxed as steam wrapped around my shoulders, and I twisted my hair up with both hands and put my head back against the rim.
Then the water turned too hot, and my skin turned traitor, and I climbed out dripping and furious.
I grabbed the towel and wrapped it around myself, tucking the edge between my breasts, and marched back into the bedroom, where my bag was sitting on the duvet with the self-soothing aids inside it.
I smiled. There were three of them.
I’d bought them online with the grim practicality of an omega who dated a beta and believed in being prepared. Silicone, expensive, knot-based, and currently better than any man I had ever dated.
I set the black zip pouch on the bed. “This is fine.”
Then my phone lit up with Damien’s name.
I let it ring out. It started again. I closed my eyes and let that one go too. On the third, I picked up. “What?”
“Where are you?”
No greeting and no apology.
“In a hotel.”
The silence lasted a moment before his imagination caught up with his mouth. “With whom?”
I looked at the pouch on the duvet.
Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was four months of being reasonable at a man who kept reading it as weakness. I unzipped the pouch and took out the first one.
“At the moment,” I said, “I’ve three dicks to choose from, and every one of them has a knot.”
“What the hell, Marli?”
I held it up and smiled at my reflection in the dark window. Wet hair, fever cheeks, and a deranged face.
“Are you with some alphas?”
“No, Damien. I have knotty polymers.”
“Don’t be a bitch.”
The word landed badly. Even though I’d heard worse and said worse. It was the speed of it, and the way his worry had converted straight into accusation the second my choices stopped orbiting him.
“Careful,” I said.
“Are you cheating on me?”
“That’s ambitious, given you told me hours ago we were never exclusive.”
“Are you with alphas?” His voice dropped and hardened. “You know how I feel about that.”
“Hurts, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t.” His old bruise, hauled out and set down between us as evidence.
“Just the same as I feel about you constantly cheating on me.”
“You’re overreacting.”
I laughed. “Go on, then, say the thing you always say. What are alphas? Bastards?”
“They are all the same.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. “I can’t do this anymore, Damien. I can’t help that I’m an omega, or that you’re a beta.”
“You’re twisting it.”
“Whatever makes you happy.”
Behind him a door banged, and a group of guys laughed at something. “Come back to campus,” he said. “I’ll look after you.”
“Look after me.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know precisely what you mean, and the answer is no. You called me a bitch minutes ago and now you’re offering to see me through my heat. Do you hear yourself at all?”
“I’m trying to help.”
“You’re trying to win. Goodbye, Damien.”
“Marli, don’t you dare hang up on me.”
I hung up.
The silence afterward was enormous. It lasted four seconds. Then he rang again, and I went into the settings and blocked his number for forty-eight hours.
The phone went quiet, and my hand shook around it.
“There,” I whispered as I stared at myself in the dark window. “Look at you. Almost emotionally competent.”
But a cramp drove me to my knees.
The towel slipped. I caught the mattress with one hand and pressed the other between my thighs, desperate for anything that would answer the ache. My body clenched around nothing.
I crawled onto the bed and picked up the toy on the bed, slid it over my slick-coated pussy before I drove it inside.
“Fuck!” I gasped into the pillow as the knot at the base pressed against my clit, and my mind went to a place it only went to in these moments.
Right before the fireworks crackled and my orgasm hit hard.
But unlike other times, the ache came back deeper and angrier than before. My scent poured through the room, violet gone lush and shameless around blackberry and whiskey until I couldn’t tell what was mine and what my memory had stolen out of the hallway.
I crawled around on the bed as I pulled out the second dildo, and then the third.
By the time I fell back against the pillows with sweat cooling on my chest, I was close to crying from sheer frustration. My body didn’t want pressure. It wanted skin, and scent, and the answer it had smelled three doors down.
I curled onto my side around the ache. Nobody puts this part in the leaflets.
Heat gets explained in diagrams and intake protocols, as though biology were a tidy guest who knocks before entering.
Nobody mentions that it can feel like loneliness made physical, or that a body can decide safety has a smell and then punish you for refusing to follow it.
I should call Maeve.
The thought arrived and hurt. She would answer, of course she would, and use her sarcastic tone while calling me something insulting with love tucked underneath it. She’d tell me to stop being dramatic, but she would send help. She might come herself.
But I had wanted this. Boston, university, a name that arrived without my father’s expectations attached. A normal girl with a normal boyfriend and a normal future in law or business, even if my sketchbooks kept multiplying in drawers.
I’d wanted freedom, and now I had it. A room full of it, three expensive toys, one blocked ex-boyfriend, and two alphas down the corridor who had looked at me like something they were working hard not to touch.
I sat up. The room tilted, then steadied.
On the desk, beside the ice bucket and the pointless harbor print, lay the card he’d pressed into my hand. A lifeline, not an obligation, he’d said, as though a business card could be either.
I crossed the room with the towel clutched to my chest and picked it up.
Hudson and Lincoln Holdings. Private investment. Property development. London, Boston, Edinburgh.
“Dangerous,” I said.
“Hudson and Lincoln.” I tested the names. “Room four one six.”
I put the card down. Then I picked it up again.
“This is absurd.”
The cramp answered by dragging a low, hot sound out of my throat, and I pressed my thighs together and shut my eyes.
I could wait until morning. Or I could ring the clinic again and cry at the nurse who had congratulated me on my inventory.
No, I should ring my sister and admit my brave, independent life had lasted until the first serious biological inconvenience, at which point I’d become a damp, furious heap in a hotel towel.
I felt very far from home.
I found a coin at the bottom of my bag, wedged between a pencil and an emergency tampon. A quarter, American and smug.
“Fine,” I told it. “You can be a democracy.”
I balanced it on my thumb. “Heads, you go to the clinic and tails, you sleep with two alphas.”
I hesitated. Then I picked up my phone and rang my sister.
“Mary, what’s the matter?” She answered without it ringing.
“I’m going to flip a coin.”
“Why?”
“I’m going into heat, Maeve, and there are two alphas down the hallway who are ready to take me through it.”
“You are not doing this with strangers. Book the heat clinic now.”
“I have an appointment for tomorrow morning. Anyway, you did it with strangers. You told me to fly to Prague.”
“I was kidding.”
I rolled the coin over my knuckles. “Tails, I sleep with two alphas, and heads, I go to the clinic. There. Very balanced.”
“Mary McCarthy.”
I flipped it. It turned once and landed tails-up on the carpet by my bare foot.
“It’s tails.”
“It’s probably heads and you just want a reason to walk down that corridor.”
“Democracy has spoken, Maeve. The universe, perhaps.”
“Democracy’s an eejit and so are you. And I don’t want to hear about the universe, because what would be the point?”
“Thanks for your help.”
“I didn’t do anything.” Her voice raised.
“Goodbye, Maeve. Speak to you on the other side. I need to prepare.”
“If you don’t ring me in the morning, I’ll be on a plane.”
“Give me a couple of days before you send the army. I doubt I’ll be in a position to call by morning.”
The ache pulsed, and my hand closed hard around their card.
Confidence is a funny thing. Mine had left the building earlier with Damien’s non-exclusively declaration and had apparently circled back wearing a towel and carrying silicone reinforcements.
I dressed in the least offensive things available. Clean underwear, a loose black dress with the hotel robe over the top. My hair was still wet. My cheeks were fever-bright. My pupils had taken over most of my eyes, and none of that was fixable.
I cleaned the three toys and placed them back into the pouch, and tucked it under my arm.
“Just in case,” I told myself as I stared into the mirror. “They are a little old. I might wear them out.” I smiled, because I was fairly sure that was unlikely.
But if a woman is going to walk three doors down and make a life-altering decision during pre-heat, she should at least bring supplies. I had no intention of crawling back to my own room on my knees if I wore them out.
I took my key card, and what was left of my courage.