Page 31 of Omega’s Forward

“How many?”

He looks at me for a second. Down here his scent has nowhere to go, same trick my kitchen pulled on night one, and it rolls across the rubber floor and climbs onto the bike with me. Orange peel. That dark honey thing underneath. I stop pedaling.

“Six,” he says. “Minimum. The hearing is expedited — two weeks from Thursday. They may go to eight.”

I stop spinning.

“Six games.” I get off the bike slow. “Guys have done exactly what I did and gotten two. There’s fifteen years of two. Ottersen got three and he broke a glove hand—”

“You’re not them.”

“No kidding. I—”

“Why did you have to do that?” He’s close now. Too close for a man in a suit to stand to a man dripping sweat, and neither of us fixes it. “If you didn’t want to be made an example of, you should not have volunteered so beautifully.”

“Fuck you. It’s how the game is played.”

“Don’t I know it.”

We’re a foot apart. Again. There is a whole gym down here, four hundred square feet of it, and the two of us are standing in one, the same way there was a whole kitchen upstairs. I can hear his breathing change. I watch his eyes drop to my mouth and come back up furious about it, and my blood goes loud, and every bad idea I own presents itself at once.

His phone buzzes in his hand. Neither of us looks at it.

“Six games,” I say, quieter. “It’s a quarter of what’s left. It’s the playoff push. The room needs—”

“The room needs its captain to stop handing the league ammunition.” But it comes out lower than it started, and slower, and his eyes have gone dark in a way that has nothing to do with hockey.

“You agree with them,” I say. “Six games. You actually agree.”

“I’m not going to spend money appealing a fighting suspension.” A muscle moves in his jaw. “Yes. I agree with them.”

“Did you even try?”

“No. They’re right. It’s long past time that an example was made.”

“You fucking dickhead.”

He surveys me with those dark eyes. “You knew what would happen. You knew.”

“You’re supposed to have my back. It’s your job.”

“No, it’s not,” he replies stubbornly. And I don’t know if I want to punch him in the mouth or kiss it. Both.

That’s the thought that stops me arguing. Instead, I just sigh. “We’re done here.”

“Fine.”

Neither of us moves.

The furnace kicks on somewhere behind the wall. His scent is everywhere now, in the rubber, in my sweat, wound into the iron smell of the plates, and I’m about to do something that I can’t take back, I can feel it coming the way you feel a hit coming, and then it changes.

The orange goes sweet.

Not the way it’s been sweet all week, under everything, driving me quietly out of my mind. Sweeter. Riper. The honey underneath it warms and thickens and turns into something that lands at the base of my spine and spreads, and my mouth floods, and every muscle I own comes to attention at once. I’ve been around omegas my whole life. Locker room staff, teammates’ mates, my own sister. I know what I’m smelling. Any alpha alive knows what I’m smelling.

He’s started talking again. Hearing procedure, dates, representation. Blah. Blah. Blah. I’ve stopped hearing words.

“Everett.”