Trash Panda (Shift Work #3)

13. Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Seb

The enticing aroma of bacon and coffee mingled with the combined scents of home and mate wake me from my post-heat nap. Heat. It was a heat. Not the other word that clings to the back of my mind and makes me shudder.

Even in my feathers, I shy away from the words that don’t match who I am. Alpha words. Alpha reactions to being with an omega in heat. Knots and rut. I aggressively preen my feathers. The sting of too much pressure on a blood feather clearing away the familiar ticker tape scroll of self-loathing thoughts before it can really get going.

The only thing that stops me from plucking out the thick shaft of my flight feather entirely is the fact Bram will notice. He’ll notice and he will not stop hounding me about it. Birds who pluck their feathers are not okay, and nothing will convince my nosy family to drop the issue if I start up with that old habit again. I let myself preen a blood feather a little too aggressively as a compromise, tugging on the shaft until it throbs like a cavity in my human teeth. It hurts and I know better than to do it.

Rollie’s scent lingering on my feathers calms the bonedeep ache that urges me to punish myself. I leave the sore spot along and turn to actually preening. Even though picking cum out of my feathers is a pain. Sleeping in our sex nest has my feathers in desperate need of a good cleaning so I hop and flap my way over to the vanity, perch on the back of the chair that’s already scored with layers of my talon prints and savor the taste and scent of Rollie all over me.

Preening the evidence of his heat from my feathers requires meticulous care. And every taste of him is a visceral reminder of getting to be with him the past few days. A chance to savor all that mind blowing sex with the omega of my dreams. Time for my raven to make it crystal clear that our nest is perfect with just the two of us in it. No need to bring in an alpha.

Rollie is perfect. My perfect mate. My raven lingers over a sense memory of Rollie begging to make a clutch together. I still can’t give him that. My raven croons a broken little cry at the reminder. The thing that always drives me to my worst choices is that I can’t give my mate the one thing I’m made for. Marin called me broken, and it still hurts me every time I hear those words on repeat in my brain because he was right.

I can’t be what any mate deserves. For most things, my raven might not do static human emotions, but the depths of his grief at not being able to raise a clutch with his mate is such a bone-deep longing that I can’t stand being in my feathers just then.

I shift back. I still can’t fix what’s wrong with me, but I can at least make sure I didn’t do lasting harm to Rollie by messing around with our HRT. The shifter specialists at the zoo will make sure Rollie is healthy and get him on the right dose and dosage form. Oh, shit, that reminds me—hopefully I still have the job I left without a word of warning after my first day.

I need to call Bram and Ty. Or Felix? Someone from the zoo. See if I still have the temp contract at all. When it comes to this, my raven is still the broken omega boy who believes to his core every heated word tying my worth to what creep took away from me. Everything I took away from the alpha I thought would be my mate. Except Rollie has known about my diagnosis forever. He knows, and he still wanted to call me his mate.

I was still the only one he wanted in the grips of his heat. Not an alpha. Not the version of me that smells like an alpha, so he can pretend to have the picture-perfect stereotype of what an omega should want. Me. Rollie wants me.

And if the best omega I know can know the depths of my brokenness and love me through it, then maybe I can find a way to believe him instead of the words that have been imprinted on my psyche for far too long. Giving myself over to an alpha who only ever saw me as something to use, carving his words into my heart and flaying myself open in hopes of erasing that mantra has only ever driven the rot deeper.

Maybe it’s time I let that hurt go. It’s certainly time to face whatever Rollie has to say to me. I’ll grovel on my knees for a chance to make things right with him. To prove to him that I can be the mate he deserves. And the first step to being that is taking care of him—no, not just him. Taking care of both of us.

I grab my phone, ready to make the call to straighten out my work situation and find a way to book a more urgent appointment to get us both tested in light of the heat and that…I knotted him at the end. I swallow down the burning lump of pain at having to admit it. We can fix this. I am going to fix it. And that might take an uncomfortable amount of candor, but I can handle it. For the future Rollie deserves, I’ll face down all my demons.

My phone is dead. That’s annoying. I plug it in to charge, then head to the bathroom for a quick shower. Rollie must have used all the hot water, so I take the world’s fastest tepid shower before the water gets too cold to stand another second.

Once I’m clean, I pad naked back into our room and pull on a pair of Rollie’s comfy flannel lounge pants, tightening the drawstring so that they hang loosely from my hips. It occurs to me that wearing his clothes like it is second nature hits differently after hearing him call me his mate in the throes of passion.

It’s a warmth that blooms in my chest. A sense of rightness and belonging. The weight of that shift in perspective staggers me. I’ve known our friendship blurs the lines most people draw between friends and lovers for ages.

It’s just that until Rollie offered me his heat, I didn’t think he wanted more than the mostly platonic intimacy we’ve shared for years. The familiar routines we share. Meals together. Social niceties that assume inviting one of us means welcoming both of us. The comfort of sharing a bed with another shifter.

As an avian, my instincts scream for me to hide any vulnerability from the flock I rely on for safety. It’s ingrained so deep inside my raven’s heart I’m not sure if I can get past the certain knowledge that any sign of weakness means certain death. But Rollie has seen so many of my rawest moments over our years together. Moments every part of me trusts him to hold with all the care he shows me in everything.

Rollie makes even the part of me that is all feathers and talons and instinct feel safe. Ever since I moved out of the apartment, I shared with Bram just before he got mated to Ty, Rollie has been my everything. I glance at the top of his dresser at all the little treasures I’ve given him, proudly displayed.

It’s all there. Every shiny bangle and bauble. A pretty picture frame that he refused to use for anything but a nice picture of us together that he badgered me into taking with him, prismatic glass figurines of our animal forms. A big marble with smokey swirls of blue glass that reminds me of his warm eyes. My own little shrine to the shifter I’ve loved in every way I felt like I could.

Maybe wearing Rollie’s clothes will seem like a declaration that I don’t want to go back to before his heat. A visual cue that I am all in and I want to be his mate if he still wants me. Come what may. Hatchlings or no, getting my hormones to cooperate so I can smell and feel like an omega again or not.

Unless it’s sending too strong of a message? I pluck at the soft fabric, considering. Does wearing this seem like I expect him to keep me now that his heat has passed? I don’t want to bulldoze over what he wants in this. I take a deep breath. There’s still bacon waiting in the other room. And even more delicious, the shifter I want to make my mate in truth.

First, I check my phone.

Twenty percent. Eh. Enough to turn it on and make a call. I tap my fingers impatiently on the side table while the phone boots up. It takes forever, so I distract myself by bundling our dirty linens into a heap by the door to wash after we talk. We have spare sheets in the bathroom linen closet, so I grab them and by the time I have the bed made up in fresh linens and the windows open a crack to let things air out, my phone is beeping away with all the back-to-back notifications from the past few days.

I can hear Rollie singing to himself as he cooks. I glance at our door, antsy to go to him. To touch him and smell him some more. To reassure myself that I didn’t figure out that he somehow wants me too late, just in time for him to change his mind.

Rollie is the most perfect omega I can imagine, so how could he want me for a mate? The signs have always been there. I run through them in my head as I scroll through the notifications that finally seem to have stopped rolling in, one atop the next. I scan each line and dismiss most of them as unimportant.

Signs Rollie has had a crush on me. How he smelled so sad when I stumbled in late and got so protective around my revolving door of alpha lovers. Protective, but not overbearing or trying to control me. He’s always been the best friend I could want, but when we shared alphas earlier on, he’d get so shy around my nakedness that he’d only touch me if the alpha told him to, but lately that has changed.

Lately, I’ve noticed he only gets off during our occasional three-ways when I’m the one making him come. I lick my lips and try on that new understanding. All those little incongruences confused me when I noticed them. So I chalked them up to me misinterpreting everything.

Because the voice in my head that hates me wouldn’t ever entertain the idea that Rollie could ever want me as a mate. Even now, I have to bite my cheek until I taste the coppery tang of blood to shut down the voice telling me that I really must be delusional this time if I think he still wants to promise me forever now that the heat hormones aren’t addling his rational thoughts.

I shake my head and focus on the notifications that remain after thinning out unimportant messages from alphas who don’t matter and all the usual spam. That leaves a handful of messages and missed calls from family and an email from the zoo with my copies of all the paperwork I signed with Pat while I was angsting over how cute their baby was and how I’ll never get to have that. I prod the sore spot where I bit myself earlier with my tongue before I can settle into a gloom cloud about that.

I skim the messages. Bram rambled at me. Winny and our folks checked in to see if we needed any supplies dropped off. Ty left a message reassuring me that they took care of the paperwork to get me an official emergency heat leave.

I even have a voicemail from Jolene, the supervisor I met already, assuring me that my only concern should be taking care of my mate and that I can come back for my next shift once Rollie’s heat is over.

I shoot off a quick message to Ty that the heat has ended, but Rollie and I need a chance to debrief about how it went. I consider what to say, then tell them that I may or may not need a ride into work later this morning. I get a reply from Bram instead. Telling me Ty already left to get Myra to her gran and surrogate grandmother’s place. My brother thinks I should just take the day to rest and recover with Rollie anyway and plan to start back at work tomorrow.

I send back a thumbs up and shove my phone into my pocket. I could easily let Bram goad me into an argument about whether I need to rest after spending days holed up inside my mate. Arguing logistics with Bram is worse than pointless.

I can grab a rideshare into town if I need to. Or use my wings to get to work later. The only reason to stay where I am, sitting on the edge of our bed, is to put off the moment when I have to crack my heart open for Rollie. Let him see that I’m a risk worth taking.

My raven should be ready to burst out of my human skin and flee in terror at the level of vulnerability this conversation is going to take. He’s not though. He just wants to go out there and fuss over his mate. Preen feathers—or fur, as the case may be—that have to be caked in the evidence of our passion. Feed Rollie and snuggle with him and dote on the shifter who I want to be my flock for always.

Well fine then. I get up and let myself scurry toward the shiniest treasure in this nest lined in all the pretties that have caught our eyes over the years together. I slink across the soft, colorful rag rug in the hallway that he got at a surplus place. Trail my fingers under the mismatched picture frames that we filled with a hodge-podge of pictures of and from our siblings and niblings and parents.

Myra drew the last one for us. Me and Rollie in our animal forms with her and her two little siblings from last winter, when Rollie and I were watching the three of them during Bram’s heat. Blah. Not thinking about how the newest nibling due any time now came to be. Not even a little.

Good thing the sight of Rollie bent over to get something that smells mouthwateringly of fresh cinnamon rolls out of the oven drives any thoughts of my brother right out of my head. His heat might be over, but the omega I want to be my mate is still even more appealing than the smorgasbord of breakfast foods he’s already covered our kitchen table in. Bacon, hash browns, coffee with the sweet creamer he knows I love and rarely ask for.

I don’t really have it in me to fuck again right now, but I can’t tear my eyes off his perfect ass. It’s not just that he’s hot. Rollie turns with the finished rolls and grins at the sight of me. I saunter closer to him, taking in every inch of his perfection. His smile reaches his eyes, as if I light up his life the same way he does mine.

Rollie’s eyes flick over me, lingering on the fit of his pants low on my hips. A possessive heat lights up his gaze at seeing me in his clothing. That tugs on something so much deeper in my heart than lust and desire. It’s a reflexive pride that Rollie, gorgeous and kind and oh so sweet in every way, would want to stake his claim on me .

I don’t entertain the thought that, of course, he has to have come to his senses, and the food is a way to let me down gently. A nudge toward a reset back to our friendly routines. Everything he’s said and done screams that he wants the same things he’s been saying since that lucid moment at the start of his heat. Rollie wants me.

“Hey, just in time. I was planning to put these on the table and come wake you up to eat.” Rollie turns to set the pan on the stove top and reaches for the frosting packet, even though they’re too hot and it will all melt. I shake my head, because that is so typically him. He likes it gooey and dripping and doesn’t care if anyone else thinks it’s wrong.

“Hugs?” I ask, sidling closer.

“Mhm, need my hands to finish these.” Rollie nods toward the counter, his focus on the food as he spreads a thick layer of the icing onto the first roll.

“Mm, smells amazing.” I fit myself against him, arms low around his middle.

My body is electric with tingles at being pressed up behind him. I rest my chin on his shoulder and even I’m not sure if I’m referring to his sweet cookie scent or the breakfast he stress-baked for us. Some combination of both, probably.

Rollie sighs contentedly and leans into my embrace. I dip my head toward him, inviting him to preen me even though our angles are all wrong for that and he’s busy. We have more pressing matters at the moment. It’s okay, all I need is the reassurance of touching him.

I want to be close to him for this. If Rollie wants to preen me, then we can work through this. It would mean he wants to figure out where we go from here together. Still best friends—after his heat, I’m sold on the idea that best friends make the best mates. I just hope he can get there too, because in the past when either of us jokingly floated the idea of just agreeing when other shifters assume we’re mated, we’ve nervously agreed that the stakes are too high to risk losing our friendship.

For now, I savor the moment of getting to inhale Rollie’s scent up close and match my breathing to the steady rise and fall of his back against my naked chest. I can feel his pulse this close, like our hearts are thudding in each other’s chests, the two of us merging until they feel like a single pulse sustaining us both.

That’s how much I need him. And it’s probably too much to put on him. He can’t be the only reason I get up each day and resist the void calling me to its embrace with such seductive silence from everything inside me that’s been too loud and wrong for too long. But it’s not up to me to decide what he can handle.

“Mm. All done. Come on, we should eat.” Rollie gently pats my hands, and I let him go. He turns to loop his arms around my neck. His smile dims and I guess my worry must show on my face, because he sobers too. “And talk.”

“Yeah. Talk.” I swallow hard, dread making my belly flip and my skin itch with the need to shift and fly away. Rollie reaches for my hand and I clasp onto him, needing the connection more than I can express.

“Hey, it’s all good talking, Sebastian.” Rollie rubs his hand along my arm soothingly. “Mostly. Once we rip off the bandaid about that stunt you pulled with your omega HRT prescription. But I need you to stay this time. Finish the entire conversation.”

Rollie meets my eyes and I nod. Then he turns to take the baking sheet to the table, so he won’t have to watch his next words land. Because maybe he’s part avian himself for how hard it is for my Rollie to ask for what he needs. “I know it’s hard, but if this is going to work, then I need to know that I can have a conversation with you without having to manage both of our issues, okay?”

“Yeah. That’s more than fair.” I swallow the lump of emotions in my throat. He’s right that it will be hard. And he more than deserves even the most Herculean of efforts from me. “I won’t leave you hanging like last time. I’m sorry.”

“And I can’t…I know you don’t make a habit of lying to me. But finding out you withheld key parts of the truth about the HRT hurt Seb. On levels I shouldn’t have to explain to you. I don’t know if I can handle a betrayal like that from you again.” He blurts it as he fusses with getting the tray of cinnamon rolls lined up at just the right angle on the table. So he won’t have to face me.

I feel like shit for hurting him already, but now that he’s putting all the pieces together for me, I feel sick to my stomach. I didn’t make the connection between his past with his family and hiding things from him. That’s no excuse. He’s right that I should have. At best, it was callous not to realize just how deep a wound I was treading clumsily around with my scheming, despite the best of intentions.

It goes without saying that I did it to help him, only ever to help him. If I could, I’d give him every desire of his heart. Rollie deserves everything that I don’t. To feel right in his skin and in shifter society. To be the omega he was always born to be. He’s the most brilliant bit of shine I’ve ever found and every day that I get to keep him in my life is a better one than I have any right to experience.

I’d sacrifice everything for Rollie. And instead of helping, I made him feel like I was just another in a line of people who took choices about his body and health away from him. Worse, by keeping things so secretive, I withheld his private personal information in the name of knowing what’s best for him better than he does. I made decisions for him that, at best, we should have made together, with both of us fully aware of the potential risks.

Shit. I hurt him in ways he confided to me almost broke him in the past. It would be so easy to make that about me. Sink into self-recrimination when I owe him an apology.

“Rollie, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize—I thought I was just hiding what it would do to me. Not what it would mean for you. I didn’t…” I shake my head at myself. There is no good way to finish that sentence.

I didn’t mean it? My intentions don’t matter and this is coming out all wrong, but I can’t seem to sort out what to say to capture how deeply I regret everything. Self-medicating both of us might have done some sort of lasting physical harm—as evidenced by the impossibility of his heat and my body’s reaction to it—I fucked up. It’s time to own that and fix it the right way.

“I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. It’s not an excuse, but I hope you know the only reason I didn’t tell you everything was so that you wouldn’t say no solely for my sake.”

“I would have.” Rollie shrugs. “I’d have said no, and it should have been my decision. Or at the least, a choice we made together. Maybe if I’d had all the facts, we’d have figured out another way, or not. But what’s done is done. Do you get why I was mad?”

I nod, still too nauseated at the parallels to his past that I should have connected to my actions to join him at the table. There’s a tiny vicious part of me that accuses me of just acting blithely, willfully ignorant to my own patronizing behavior. Not wanting to see that I was acting the part of a typical alphahole. Like how my ex used to dangle presents in front of me to win me over, except I shudder at the comparison. I wasn’t trying to manipulate Rollie.

I wasn’t playing the hero with our meds because I wanted to woo Rollie with gifts no one else could give him. Sure, I wanted to show him the things I could never bring myself to say. Things like love and forever and home that my ex turned into impossible lies. But I did it for him, not to stroke my own ego. I never intended to use anything I did for Rollie as a string to control him.

Rollie deserves a mate who can say the hard things. And one who can treat his tender places with the same care he’s always shown mine, protecting me better than I can protect myself from the things that shred my heart.

“Stop that.” Rollie nudges my chair out from the table with his feet and waves wiggly fingers at it in a flustered invitation to join him.

“Hm? Stop what?” I play innocent and he sees right through me, rolling his eyes at me and sighing affectionately.

“Stop blaming yourself and sit with me.” Rollie points at the chair. I slink closer and sit in it gingerly. I want to touch him, and I feel like I haven’t earned that right. Not until I do enough to fix the hurt I caused. I can’t help the way my inner raven has me tilting my head toward him, a plaintive begging for my mate’s touch. Pathetic featherbrain, but apparently that’s just the right move.

“Ah, come here.” Rollie clucks over me and drags my chair closer to his, close enough that when he takes the invitation to card his fingers through my hair, the firm touch presses my cheek into his shoulder. I sigh into his sweet skin, believing his gentle touches as he invites me back into his space as much as the sweet words he murmurs to me.

“You’re already forgiven, Sebastian. Try as I might, I can’t seem to stay mad at you.”

“It’s my super power,” I tease, nuzzling into his neck and inhaling deeply. “I’m far too charming to stay in trouble for long.”

Rollie snorts, his nails scraping deliciously over my nape. “No, I think you’ve got that backwards; it’s all your charm that gets you into trouble more often than not.”

“Only the best kind of trouble,” I joke without thinking, lifting my face off his shoulder just enough to make a faux-seductive face at him. It’s the sort of calculatedly carefree banter I throw around with cousins and flockmates who have no stake in the perennial good-natured teasing about my active sex life. Mostly, they are fascinated by stories about other species of shifters and their anatomical alpha quirks. Like Gary and his hemipenes. Except with Rollie, I don’t want to pretend.

Rollie nudges me up off his shoulder and fixes me with a serious expression. That makes my heart drop to my toes. What could be more serious than breaking his trust with our meds?

“So, I guess that’s as good a segue as any to talk about the mate thing. It wasn’t just my heat talking: I want to be mates. Do you?” He watches me, his expression guarded.

“Yes.” I nod emphatically, bobbing my head in a way that feels right to my inner raven for swearing myself to my mate.

I can’t help the sudden visceral memory of the night we met. How pretty he was with his clumsy, guileless flirting, even after splattering my shoes in puke. My raven knew from that first moment Rollie was something special. A soothing balm to all my broken bits, too precious to treat like the interchangeable shifters I fuck and discard.

“Yeah? It’s going to mean changing things, Seb. I can’t keep biting my tongue and watching you spiral. I can’t keep answering the phone with my heart in my throat, praying that this isn’t the time you’re calling to say goodbye again.” He holds my gaze and we’re both haunted by the night I almost drove into the ocean. “If we’re doing this, then I need to be the one you come to when you need to lose yourself in sensation.” He drops his gaze to the impeccably set table and won’t meet my eyes. He turns away to pour coffee from the carafe on its pretty tile mosaic trivet into both of our mugs.

I don’t miss the fact that he hasn’t specified which sensations he’s offering me. I can’t imagine him dishing out the rough, uncaring sex that makes me feel like a worthless object for him to use. He won’t let me goad him into tearing open old traumas the way I’ve made a habit of doing with the string of pliable alphas I play with.

Rollie is leagues above the alphas I use before they can use me, so I’ve rationed the barest tastes of his sweetness. A night here and there, with a third as a buffer to guard his heart from me. And keep me from greedily gorging myself on as much of him as he’ll let me have.

He gulps down the first steaming sip of his coffee, looking like he’d rather swallow his next words along with the brew. “I’ve done an abysmal job of setting boundaries, and that needs to change.”

“Absolutely.” I’d promise him anything, but better to listen to what he needs instead of bulldozing in and assuming I already know what that is all over again. “What are you thinking?”

“First, you can’t withhold information that impacts me and my health. Lies, even lies of omission, can’t become a habit.”

“Yeah. Okay. Um. I guess part of that might include you knowing more about the risks I’m taking?”

Rollie looks queasy. “What kinds of risks? Seb, you promised…” Rollie can’t finish the sentence, but I know what he’s referring to. I promised I wouldn’t try to kill myself again. I promised no more drinking and driving. I promised so many things. So I mostly restrict my self-flagellation to sleeping with alphas who hit all my trauma triggers.

“Nothing that bad,” I assure him. “I don’t fuck bare with other avian shifters. Um, or I usually don’t. I already told you I messed up after the party, but I’ll take care of that. And I don’t fuck bare with static humans. I just, you know, find alphas who sound like my ex when they fuck me.” I can’t watch his reaction to this. “Mostly over the top alpha bullshit about how I exist to milk their knots and breed their pups. Most of them don’t actually mean it the way he did, but they also don’t ask too many questions when I ask them to pin me down and rough me up. Most alphas don’t ask too many questions when a hot hookup begs them to pop their knot, even if I’m not really slick enough for it.”

“Seb…”

“I know.” I flash him my most winning smile, but bravado isn’t going to get me through this conversation when he just spelled out why he values honesty above all else. “I know it’s not okay. I’m not okay a lot of the time. I get that it’s fucked up, but it makes me feel more omega. The way I felt before creep. If I’m focused on physical pain and being helpless under an alpha, then the parts of me that creep is taking away and changing don’t hurt as much. I don’t feel as broken.”

Rollie sighs. “It doesn’t last though, dearheart. You come home and you’re still a wreck. It’s just that you give yourself permission to feel the hurt when it’s a hurt you asked for.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. I can work with that. From now on, you are going to ask your mate for what you need. And if you need an alpha’s knot, then we can make plans with one of the ones you actually trust, but if what you need is permission to grieve the things you lost, you’ve got it. Or if you need your mate to remind you that you are as much of an omega as I am, I’ll do that too. What you can’t do is put yourself in harm’s way. You do not deserve to be punished, you are not broken. Got it, omega mine?”

I bite my lip. You’re as much of an omega as I am. Those are the same words I offered him as a lifeline when he was floundering around in endless rhetorical circles over how to tell if he was really a trans omega, or just rejecting his existence as a beta.

It had seemed so obvious when we were talking about him. The way he lit up when I got him a special body spray meant to help him pass as an omega with other shifters. The way he seemed so much more confident when alphas I flirted with at the bar referred to us both as pretty omegas.

We discussed so many nuances of gender sitting on his old place’s creaky porch swing, heads tipped together in the dark while it seemed like the rest of the world slept and the stars were our only witnesses. It almost knocks the wind out of me to have the same trick turned on me.

It’s true that he’s an omega. So I can’t argue that I’m not in the face of him linking the validity of our identities together without tearing him down. Heats and babies aren’t a guarantee for any omega. Bodies aren’t meant to fit in boxes. Just because creep threw my hormones out of whack doesn’t change that I’ve always been and will always be an omega.

Maybe it’s time to stop resenting the only body I get and cope with how all the changes creep and years of neglecting my health have caused. No more making room to carve out an exception for how my body and dysphoria have to define me. Rollie deals with the same dysphoria, but instead of wallowing in how his body doesn’t fit, he’s been working to embrace the parts that do and accept that the parts he can’t change don’t have to define his worth.

Rollie nudges our knees together. “Seb? Are you okay?”

“Yeah?” I meet his eyes again, the word bitter on my tongue. I promised him the truth. “I mean, no. But I think I want to figure out how to be?”

“That sounds really good.”

“If we’re mates, we’ll have to figure out what needs to change about our sex lives. What we’ve been doing during your heat works for me. And as far as sharing alphas, I’m still a fan of the occasional threesome. But uh, how I sometimes make risky choices around sex on purpose might not be the best? So we can negotiate some guidelines that work for us both until we figure out the best ways for us both to get what we need, if you want?”

“That works. You know how I feel about you using sex to hurt yourself, but we can reassess the details as we go. Sex isn’t the most important part of what we have, Seb, but yeah. It’s something to discuss. The part I hate about our current arrangement is worrying when you go out that it’s going to be the time you don’t come home. If we stick to the safety rules we agree to, then I’m content with still having some degree of openness with your trusted fuck buddies. So, what do you say? Mates?” Rollie asks.

“Mates, I agree. I lean in to kiss him. Rollie meets my lips in a chaste peck.

I’m just considering deepening the kiss when Rollie’s stomach gurgles loudly and I can’t hold in a snort of startled laughter. Rollie presses his fingers to his mouth to stifle a giggle of his own and that breaks some of the seriousness of the conversation.

“We can keep talking, but it sounds like my mate needs to eat.” I tease him. He glows at the shiny new title now that it’s more than a sexy temporary role. Or at least, well on the way to becoming our reality.

“Mhm, my diva of a mate slept in while breakfast got cold.” Rollie ruffles my hair. “Who knew heats are more fun with two omegas to share them, huh? Tuckered you right out. Can I fix you a plate?” He reaches for the bacon, hovering his hand over the tongs. I nod and he loads up both our plates with all the delicious food that’s gone cold while we talked but still smells amazing. The fact I’m eating food my mate made for me makes it that much better.

We still have to work out some details, especially about my bad habits. By mutual accord, we keep things light while we eat, exchanging jokes about what our friends and family must think of the two of us holing up together for an unexpected heat.

We agree to handle their questions honestly once we leave our private little nest here. We’re mates, so of course we shared Rollie’s heat. No need to delve into private details beyond that. I work my way through everything on my plate and watch in pleased admiration as Rollie peels apart his second cinnamon roll. Once it’s a long strip of dough, he tears off bite-sized chunks.

Rollie licks the glaze from his fingers delicately between bites. I can’t tear my eyes off him. It’s probably the pheromones or honeymooner infatuation. Yet I can’t believe I’m the lucky shifter who my sweet omega plans on spending the rest of his life loving.

I rest my toes on the rung under his chair, where he’s got his crossed ankles propped. The need to ground myself with his touch is impossible to ignore. I rub my toes along his arch. Rollie nudges closer.

There’s one more thing I need to apologize for before I share the big news about my new job and admit to one more way I didn’t fully consult him on a major life choice. In my defense, that insurance paperwork where I listed him as my mate isn’t a lie anymore, and I did mention it in passing. The hiring process just went way faster than I could have anticipated, so I don’t think it will change anything, but this wound clearly still hasn’t healed for either of us.

We’ve never really cleared the air properly about the night I almost died. How we both know nothing about it was an accident. He saved my life, and I didn’t want him to.

“Rollie?”

“Hmm?” Rollie hums as he savors the last of the icing.

“I don’t think I ever told you that I’m sorry I called you that night. On the cliff when I got my DUI.”

“I’m not.” Rollie snaps.

He scowls and swats the air near my knee so he can get up and plop himself in my lap. I grunt at his weight settling over me, and cling on tight. Rollie makes me feel like he can keep me from going back to the crumbling edges of places in my mind that I know I shouldn’t venture, but can’t seem to resist testing.

Rollie has shown me in his every word and deed toward me that he doesn’t wish I’d been more successful that night. Another way we aren’t the same, because all too often I think everyone might have been better off if I’d resisted that need to hear his voice once more, heeding that desperate tiny part of me that wanted him to save me from myself.

Rollie tangles his fingers in my hair and tugs sharply. It’s just enough of a sting to focus my thoughts. He presses our foreheads together and gazes into my eyes as if he can see through to all the filth in my soul.

“I’m only sorry you got anywhere close to actually doing it. Never for a second think I’d have preferred any outcome that didn’t have you still sitting here with me, Seb. Maybe that’s selfish, but I want you here with me. I want to grow old and cranky with you right here next to me. I want your raven to preen my raccoon’s fur when it’s all speckled with more white than gray, like my gran’s.” Rollie teases me about how much I like his uniquely raccoon shifter agouti hair color. “So you tell me before the void’s call is too loud to ignore from now on, and we’ll figure out how to make sure you’re being my sweet omega diva for a lifetime, okay?”

“I promise.”

“Good. I think that’s the big stuff? Like I said, I can accept sharing you if the occasional alpha hookup is something you need, but only if it’s not going to take you back to the brink of that precipice and thinking the drop is worth silencing your demons.”

“Um. Yeah. Maybe the occasional threesome for fun, with us both. Because I like sex. But it’s better with you.” I shake my head sheepishly. “This not lying by omission part is hard, Rollie.”

Rollie nips at my nose. “You don’t have to tell me absolutely everything about everything. Just things that directly impact me. General guidance, if it’s something that you think ‘oh no, I don’t want to upset Rollie with this information, I better not tell him’ then that’s the sort of thing that might be good to mention. You don’t have to share every time you pop a boner at the sight of a sexy alpha at a club and decide to flirt. I know you’re an incorrigible flirt.”

“Yeah, charming the pants off everyone is my superpower,” I wink at him playfully. “But yeah. Okay. So this is relevant. Most of the time when I’m hooking up, it’s so I can drown out lies that my brain won’t stop telling me. So, I don’t think I want a free pass to fuck around with other people. I want it to just be something we do for fun together. Unless you want to keep that part of our dynamic the same? Knowing we come home to the same bed and I can make you come in that bed whenever we both want now is the part that matters to me.”

“Sticking with some degree of open relationship works for me, but so does fine-tuning our rules to make sure both our needs are met. No judgment, but you seem to have a much higher sex drive than me, so we’ll see what works for us both.”

“Yeah. That’s, uh, a thing. Some people get depressed and sleep all the time and have no libido. I get kind of hypersexual. And the alpha hormones haven’t helped. Like, with the heightened sex drive or making me hate everything about myself and how wrong my body feels.”

“Ty and Winny have that online shifter therapy service through the flock account, right? Maybe you could talk to them about trying it?”

“Yeah. I’ll ask. Or I can see what the zoo offers.” I grin and squirm, excited to tell him all about how I can finally provide for him without taking away his choices.

“Oh? Did you talk to Bram about the temp job?” Rollie grins, reflecting my enthusiasm back at me.

I nod, bursting with pride. My inner raven positively preens as I offer him the best part of it. “Yeah. The day you went into heat, that’s where I was. Ty took me to the zoo office and vouched for me. So Pat, the boss’s assistant, had me sign a contract and work my first shift right there. And I even called the zoo’s shifter health clinic to make appointments for hormone testing for us both. You know, cause of all the side effects from our HRT.”

“Us?”

“Fuck, that’s the other thing I need to tell you. I might’ve told them you were my mate so I could put you on my insurance. I figured enough people in Four Corners assume we’re mates since we’re roommates and there’s only the one usable bedroom. We don’t exactly hide the fact we share a bed and smell like it. So, yeah. Figured it was close enough to true to count. If not in the traditional sense, I’ve considered you my life partner for a long time, Rollie,” I say. There’s technically a second bedroom in the attic, but the angled roof is too low for me to reach most of it without stooping down or smacking my head, so it’s mostly a dusty storage space.

“Like we’re in a QPR?” Rollie asks. “The queer platonic relationship in that comic Myra is into lately?”

“Yeah. Like that.” I nod, breathing a sigh of relief that he gets it and he isn’t mad. “I swear, I was going to tell you that night and make sure it was alright with you, but then you were in heat and there wasn’t a good chance to have a discussion. Are you mad?”

“No. You told me as soon as it was practical, and I’m not going to quibble over whether it was fair to put a conventional label on what we are to each other before we got up the guts to have a real conversation with our hearts on the line and define things properly. Besides, static society setting the norms that define us by how they view relationships and family to deny us access to shifter specialists isn’t really something I’m inclined to get too tied up in moral knots over. Thank you, Seb. I know you’ve been worried about the zoo making your dysphoria worse.”

My mouth is dry at how easily he sees through all my pretenses. That’s not the reason I’ve told Bram I can’t work with him. It’s not the entire reason I’ve said no for so long, just a part of it. It’s true though, and I didn’t need to say it aloud for Rollie to understand me. I can’t be the weird broken omega they plaster on inspiring posters about the good work the zoo does to fix defective shifters.

I eat obediently as I mull over the whole situation with my new job. It isn’t what I expected so far. Bram makes everything seem so intense and even if I told him how I feel about being some disability poster child, I know he’d insist that’s not how it is. And maybe it’s not the intent, but the fundraising push he spearheaded to get Winny’s shoulder reconstruction funded felt that way.

His Pollyanna ability to always see the best in everyone is part of what makes him wonderful, but it’s also a huge reason Winny and I were both so frustrated with his pushiness about helping her fund her surgery.

The worst part is, neither of us can even stay mad at our clutchmate because the reason Bram doesn’t get why it bothers us is that it would never in a million years occur to him to view disability as something to judge and look down on us for. I’ve defined myself by my lacking for so long, it was impossible to see what value I had to offer anyone.

Bram isn’t an objective voice on that. Ty might be. And Felix, their boss, giving me a chance to prove myself carries more weight. The zoo didn’t sign me up as a charity case. They gave me a job because the zoo’s mission is to improve the lives of shifters both through gainful employment and by winning over the zoo’s visitors with cute animals and facts about how for all our myriad differences, we shifters and our static neighbors have more in common than not.

“You can quit if it’s not good for your mental health, you know that, right?” Rollie presses.

“Yeah, thanks.” I smile and push food around my plate. I carefully don’t make any promises about that, and then I wonder if that counts as a lie under our new rules and scowl at him. “I’ll tell you if it’s too much?” I offer.

“Mhm.” Rollie sees right through my squirming efforts to be honest without over-promising and gives me a bemused smile. “I’ll check in about the work next week, once you’ve had a chance to get a better feel for it, but for now eat your breakfast, mate. Got to get up our strength after the heat.” Rollie gestures toward my plate with his fork and shoots me a flirty wink.

I nod and lean closer to him, grateful for his understanding as I consider whether the job might actually be as good a fit as Bram has tried to tell me for years. His entire “we’re ambassadors to the statics” schtick feels like Bram’s pie in the sky thinking, but jobs and research into shifter health are reason enough to support the cause for me.

Hell, getting Rollie the testing and hormones he needs to feel right in his skin and get to the bottom of his impossible heat are more than enough to win me over for life at this point. It’s good work, and I didn’t hate the shift I did with Ty. Rollie and I devour more of the feast he prepared for us than I’d have guessed we would. Days of being holed up in our room apparently built up quite the appetite.

Just when I can’t imagine taking another bite my phone rings when I glance at the screen, I recognize the number from the zoo health clinic.

“Hello?” I ask, waiting with bated breath.

“Hello, this is the shifter health clinic at Willowdale Zoo, Terry speaking. I am calling for Sebastian Korbin.” The same scheduling person I spoke to before is calling. My heart races. Is he about to tell me there was a mistake and I can’t see the doctor? Did taking leave on such short notice screw up everything after all?

“That’s me, Seb,” I say, even as I’m leaping to the worst possible reasons for the call.

“Hi, Seb, I’m calling because we had a cancelation today and Dr. Martinez noticed your file on our list. I see the system has you listed as taking heat leave until tomorrow, but he asked me to call and see if you are able to make it in today, he wants to see you and your mate as soon as possible.”

“Oh, um, yeah. My mate’s heat is over. That would be, um, yeah, that would be amazing.”

“Perfect,” Trent says, then he gives me the details of where to go, what to bring, and what to do when we arrive.

I gather the information while Rollie gazes at me looking like he’s ready to burst with all his questions. Terry has a lengthy spiel about Dr. Martinez and why our case caught his eye. I’m all but speechless by the time I hang up. Bram has been going to this specialist since he found out he was expecting Kyrie and Leighton. I’ve lost track of how often my brother has tried to entice me into working with him by dangling the promise of the doctor’s expertise in managing creep.

I just didn’t realize that the same doctor Bram has talked my ear off about because he’s been so supportive of Bram’s mixed species pregnancies has also co-authored dozens of groundbreaking papers about fertility restoration in avian shifters with creep and interspecies genetics saw my information on the schedule and flagged the fact that I’m mated to a fellow omega as a promising case for his research.

I grin at Rollie as I put my phone away. “We have an appointment to test our hormones and get our medication situation fixed.” I’m already standing to gather up our plates and put away leftovers as I relay the details to my mate. He smiles at me and I savor every touch as we work in tandem to tidy away our breakfast and get ready to leave.

Rollie is going to have the help he needs, and maybe I don’t have to be quite so broken. For the first time in ages, I have hope that I can be the mate he deserves.