Chapter Three
The flat was a furnace. Colin lay on top of the duvet in his pants, the sash window cracked as far as the warped frame would allow, which was about three inches before it stuck.
The night air coming through smelled of wet brick and the bins outside, neither of which was doing anything to help his current state.
He’d already kicked the duvet to the foot of the bed because the radiator under the window was clanking out heat the council had decided everyone in the building needed whether they wanted it or not.
It was the flat. It had to be the flat.
He turned onto his side and the sheet underneath him was damp where he’d been lying. He turned onto the other side. That side of the pillow was hot too. He flipped it. The cool side lasted about ninety seconds before it started radiating the heat of his skin back at him.
No…
His heat wasn’t due for another month. He kept the dates in a little calendar on the back of the kitchen cupboard, and he was meticulous about it because the consequences were dire if he slipped up. It was definitely still four weeks away, give or take a day.
It was the flat that was the problem.
He picked up his mobile from the floor by the bed. The screen lit the ceiling a sickly blue, and he squinted against it until his eyes adjusted. There were three messages from Lysander, all with photos. Colin’s chest loosened at the sight of his beautiful boy.
The first was Lysander on a beach somewhere, hair wet, grinning at the camera.
The second was a plate of something orange and glistening, with a wedge of lime on the side and what looked like an entire chilli sliced into it.
Finally, there was Lysander again, surrounded by a large group of newfound friends holding fluorescent drinks the size of fishbowls.
He thumbed out a reply with the slow care of a man who’d come to texting late in his life.
Gorgeous, love! I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself. Don’t get too adventurous with the spicy food, you know how your tummy is.
He sent it and lay back, mobile resting on his chest, and let himself smile at the ceiling.
Lysander’s tummy. God. He was fourteen years old and pregnant in a care home, and nobody had thought to sit Colin down and talk him through what was on the other side of it.
He’d had the boys on a Wednesday morning, and by Friday he’d been handed two damp wriggling things in matching cot blankets and left to work it out.
The shit had been the worst of it. Nobody warned you about the shit.
Stephen’s had been fine, more or less, the colour of mustard in a sandwich shop.
Lysander’s had been green. So runny and so volcanic that Colin often had to change his own clothes as well as the nappy.
His baby’s shite had been the same green as the smoothie from that morning.
Colin huffed a laugh into the dark, and then immediately wished he hadn’t. The laugh dragged the smoothie back into his head, and then Diwa de la Vega was sitting on the bench opposite him in a soft grey T-shirt explaining what spirulina was.
It was the smell of him that drew Colin back to his memory of that day.
He pressed the back of his head harder into the pillow.
Most alphas he’d ever stood close to had smelled of one of three things: fags, supermarket aftershave, or whatever sweat had soaked into the lining of their high-vis jacket over a long shift.
Diwa had smelled like none of that. Colin didn’t have a word for it other than alpha.
Colin shifted on the bed and the heat rose up the inside of his thighs.
No.
He set his jaw and stared at the ceiling, at the patch where the paint had bubbled the winter the upstairs flat’s pipe had burst, and he thought about the council’s repair line and the hold music he’d had to listen to for an hour and a half.
The woman on the other end kept saying bear with me in the same long-suffering tone of every other council worker Colin had ever come across.
His cock twitched against the cotton of his pants.
Colin closed his eyes. Behind them, instead of the ceiling, was Diwa de la Vega’s dimpled smile. The heat in his stomach curled tighter. Banked like a fire someone had been feeding all evening without him noticing.
He pressed his thighs together. The pressure of his own skin against his own skin sent a hot pulse through him that travelled straight to his cock. He squeezed harder, and that only made things worse. His thighs were slick already, sliding against each other.
He bit down on his bottom lip and sat up.
His chest of drawers stood against the wall opposite the bed. Colin crossed the floorboards. The bottom drawer stuck on the runner the way it always did, so he had to lift it to get it past the warp. Inside, under a folded jumper he didn’t wear, was a cardboard box.
It contained the vibrator that had been a prescription from his omega therapist. She had handed it over casually at the end of a session along with a leaflet about pelvic floor exercises.
Colin took it out now. It sat in his palm, lighter than it looked, a pale lavender silicone shot through with tiny flecks of glitter that caught the streetlight coming through the window.
The shaft was slim, barely thicker than two of his fingers.
The tip tapered to something rounded and soft, and there was nothing on it that suggested an alpha’s anatomy.
It had no flare or ridge, and looked nothing like a cock.
That had been the whole point.
He’d spent the better part of a session holding it, at Aileen’s careful suggestion.
Turning it over in his lap. Letting the silicone warm to his skin.
She’d shown him the button on the base, and he’d switched it on at the lowest setting, and the small persistent buzz had vibrated up his wrist while she talked him through what it might feel like to use, and what it might feel like not to want to.
Some omegas never reach for it, she’d said. Some omegas reach for it every heat. Both scenarios are fine. The point is that you have it.
Colin closed his fingers round it now, and the silicone gave under his grip the way Aileen had said it would.
He padded back to the bed. Halfway there he hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his pants and pushed them down his thighs, stepping out of them without breaking his stride.
His skin felt too tight. The air through the cracked window was cooler than the rest of the flat, and he could feel it on the slick already cooling on the inside of his legs.
The bed was still warm where he’d been lying. Colin lay down on his back, the vibrator in one hand, and listened to the radiator clank. Somewhere two flats over, someone’s telly was on too loud.
He thumbed the button on the base. The buzz started up against his palm, low and steady.
He’d reached for it twice in the year since she’d given it to him. Both times had felt clinical, like flossing. He’d lain on his side with the lights on and taken his time, easing it in slow. Afterwards he’d washed it, put it back in the box, and gone to sleep.
Tonight his thighs were already wet. He spread his legs against the warm sheet and felt the slick come coursing down his thigh. The smell of his own arousal rose off him, faintly sweet. He breathed through his nose and let it settle.
He thumbed the button down a notch. The buzz softened. Bringing the silicone to the inside of his thigh first, he ran it up the slick there. The feel of the vibration against his sensitised skin sent a low pulse through his belly, and his eyes shut.
The toy moved higher and circled his arse, not pushing in yet, just letting the buzz do its work. His hips lifted off the sheet and he drew a breath in through his teeth.
The smell of Diwa came back to him. It surfaced out of Colin’s own memory, warm, and clean, like someone who’d spent the morning out in the sun.
His body responded before his head caught up.
A fresh wash of slick spilled out of him, and his cock, half-hard against his belly, twitched and rose the rest of the way.
Colin’s eyes opened.
He looked at the bubbled patch of paint on the ceiling and listened as the radiator clanked again.
He pressed the toy a little harder against himself and tried to bring himself back to the room, to the scent of his own slick, to the buzzing of the vibrator, to the simple physical fact of his body wanting to be touched. He breathed in evenly through his nose.
The smell of Diwa rolled back over him on the inhale.
His teeth clenched. Underneath him, his hips were trying to move on their own, working the toy in slow circles where he was wet. His free hand had fisted in the sheet. The heat in his belly was waiting on him.
He’d come, he realised. It would only take another minute. He’d get himself off, and the alpha he’d spent forty minutes with that morning would be the thing that did it. Tomorrow he’d wake up and he’d know.
That was a problem, because the toy wasn’t for that.
The toy had been given to him with the idea that his body could be a place he explored on his own, not a place anyone else got into, even if it was only through the imaginings in his head.
He thumbed the button off.
The buzzing stopped. He lay there with the vibrator resting against his thigh, his cock still hard against his stomach, and breathed out.
After a minute he sat up. He swung his legs off the side of the bed and put his feet on the lino.
The cold of the floor came up through his soles in a way he was glad of.
The toy went through to the bathroom with him.
He washed it under the tap with the unscented soap, dried it on a clean flannel, and walked back to the bedroom.
The bottom drawer stuck on the runner the way it always did.
He lifted it past the warp, put the box back where it lived under the jumper he didn’t wear, and slid the drawer shut.
His mobile lit up on the floor by the bed.
It was Lysander again, sending a photo of a small green lizard on a balcony railing, with a caption: daddy look at this little man!! his name is geoffrey
Colin sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at Geoffrey for a long time.
Hello Geoffrey, he typed. Behave yourself for my Lysander.
He set the mobile down on the pillow beside him and lay back on top of the sheet. He’d ring the council in the morning about the heating in the flat.