Page 33 of Omega’s Forward

If it runs its course in this house — his scent in every room, his big hands one flight down — I am going to give in. I felt it happen in the basement: the give already in me, like ice starting to soften. That’s why I wanted the drug. Not to stop the heat. To stop me.

I am already desperate for him and it’s barely even started yet.

The first time I come to the thought of him, I tell myself it’s simply heat management. I stand in the shower with the water as hot as it goes and take myself in hand, brisk and clinical about it, and that fiction survives roughly four seconds, because the moment I close my eyes he’s there — the bike, the sweat, the forearms — and it takes embarrassingly little. I come with my forehead against the tile and his name locked behind my teeth, and the relief lasts about as long as the steam.

It’s not enough. It was never going to be enough. Heats on suppressants were a fever and a foul mood.

This one, unsuppressed and triggered, is something else entirely.

The want doesn’t sit in one place. It’s in my skin, the roots of my teeth, the backs of my knees — everywhere his hands have been and everywhere they haven’t.

I try distance. I open the window and stand in the freezing air until I shake. I do press-ups until my arms give out, which takes less time than I’d like to admit and achieves nothing.

The second time I’m in bed, and I’ve stopped pretending. I let myself have it properly: his palm flat on my spine on that kitchen counter, the growl he made into my mouth, the sheer size of him crowding me back against the marble. I get a fist around my cock and imagine it’s his hand — double the size of mine and callused right across the palm — and I come all over my own stomach with my heels dug into the mattress and his name almost out loud, in the empty room.

It doesn’t help. The heat wants him.

By the small hours, I’m slick to the backs of my thighs and past caring. I get two fingers in myself, which I have done maybe a handful of times in my life without much conviction.

It’s both revelatory and nowhere near enough at the same time. My body is extremely specific about the dimensions of what it’s missing.

I press my face into the pillow and ride my own hand and let myself imagine it: bent over his spotless kitchen island, held down under one forearm, taken with that same unbearable patience while I say terrible things to him. The noise I make when the version of him in my head finally pushes in is one I have never made in my life.

I have to stop and breathe after that one. He’s somewhere below me, awake — I’d put money on it; alphas don’t sleep through this — and I no longer trust myself to keep quiet.

The third time — or the fourth — I don’t even build the fantasy. I just say his name into the pillow and grind against the mattress, slick everywhere, cock aching. When it finally comes, it leaves me shaking worse than before.

The room reeks of me now, ripe and shameless. And the woodsmoke coming up through the house has changed too. Darker. Closer to how he smelled in the kitchen with his mouth on my jaw. My heat is talking to him straight through the floorboards.

At some point I find myself at the door with my forehead against the wood, listening. Just listening.

He moved through the house an hour ago — water ran, something opened and closed in the kitchen — and every cell in me tracked it. This is what I am now.

The night goes on like that. Wave, spike, relief that doesn’t hold, twenty minutes of shivering clarity in which I consider and trash increasingly unhinged plans, then the next wave.

At some point I cry a little, which I will take to my grave. At some point I must sleep, because when I next look at the window, it’s gray.

My phone starts up at eight. The league — again. I watch it ring out from the far side of the bed. Whatever composure that call requires, I do not currently have it.

Priya I do call.

She picks up on the first ring, wherever in the world she is. “Good morning.”

“I need to be away from the office for a few days,” I say. “Personal reasons.”

The pause is a fraction too long. Personal reasons, from an omega, means exactly one thing, and Priya has kept my diary for years. She’ll also know it’s early.

“Of course,” she says, smooth as ever. “I’ll move what needs moving. The league?”

“Is leaving voicemails. Let them.”

“Understood.” A beat. Then, too lightly: “And Mr. Callahan?”

“What about him?”

“He’s suspended. So he has an excuse not to be anywhere, hasn’t he? For days.” Another beat, immaculate. “Nobody will be looking for either of you.”

“Thank you, Priya. That will be all.”