I close my eyes and let that settle over me and try not to think about how much I don't deserve it.
We lie there. The knot keeps us together and the room is quiet and the fireplace has burned down to embers. Through the balcony doors the sky is starting to shift from black to pale gray. We've been at this for hours. I'm sore, used, satisfied in a way I've never experienced, and his arm is warm around my waist, and his breathing is evening out like he might be falling asleep.
His touch moves. Lazy, drifting along my ribs, his fingertips trailing over my skin. It's good and I lean back into him and then his fingertips find the scar.
He traces it. The thin white line along my left side, just below my ribs. His touch is gentle, curious, following the curve of it from front to back.
"What happened here?" he asks softly. Not pushing. Just asking.
"Car accident." My voice is flat. Tired. "When I was sixteen. The other driver ran a red light. I had internal injuries. They had to operate."
"Jesus." His lips press against the scar, soft. "That must have been bad."
"It was."
He doesn't ask more. He just holds me and traces the scar with his thumb and his breathing slows against my neck. He's falling asleep. He's still buried in me, holding me, falling asleep, and I lie here in the growing light and think about the thing I didn't say.
The accident was bad. The surgery saved my life. But it took something else. The damage to my reproductive system was too extensive. The doctors used a word I'd never heard before, and my mother cried, and my father went very quiet, and I lay in a hospital bed at sixteen years old and learned that I was barren.
Barren. An omega who can't carry children. An omega who goes through heats, produces slick, craves an alpha's knot — does everything it's supposed to do except the one thing that'ssupposed to matter. I've had years to sit with it. Years to build the walls and the career and the persona and the suppressants and all the armor that says I don't need what I can't have. Years to convince myself that it doesn't matter, that I'm more than my biology, that I can build a life that doesn't need a family at its center.
And then Ray Garcia put his hands on me and I did what I always do — I performed. I went into heat. I made slick and opened up and took his knot and came on it, and none of it means anything because the end result is the same. Empty. All that biology, all that desperate need, and for what? My body is a machine that runs perfectly except for the part that matters, and no amount of being knotted in a hotel room is going to change that.
Ray's arm is around my waist. His knot is softening inside me. He's asleep, breathing slow and warm against my neck, and he has no idea. He has no idea that the omega he just knotted is a dead end. That if he stays — if this becomes real — there's a wall waiting for him that no amount of wanting can get past.
I should tell him. He deserves to know before this goes any further. Before he makes promises his biology will eventually resent. Before he wakes up one day and realizes that the omega he bonded with can never give him the thing that alphas are built to want.
I open my mouth. The words are right there. I'm barren. I can't have children. I don't work the way I'm supposed to.
I close my mouth.
His arm tightens around me in his sleep, pulling me closer, and I press my palm over his fingers and hold them against my stomach and stare at the mountains turning gold through the window. The knot slips free. The emptiness where he was aches, a hollow physical absence that mirrors the other emptiness, the one I've been carrying since I was sixteen.
I lie still and let him hold me and I don't say anything at all.
Miles
Iget to the office at six forty-five. Nobody's here yet. That's the point.
The elevator is empty, the hallway dark, and the only sound is the hum of the HVAC system cycling air that smells like nothing. I turn on my office light and close the door and stand there for a second with my hand on the frame, breathing. Carpet cleaner. Toner. The faint chemical sweetness of the air freshener plugged into the outlet by the window. Nothing alive. Nothing warm. Nothing that smells like pepper, ozone, skin.
Good.
I sit at my desk. Line up my pens. Open my laptop. Check my email. Forty-seven unread messages, which is normal for a Monday, and I start sorting them by priority the way I always do. Client follow-ups first, then internal, then the newsletters I'll delete without reading. This is my system. This is what I do. I'm good at this.
I read the first email three times without absorbing a single word.
I lean back in my chair and press my fingers against my eyes. My body is wrong. Everything about it is wrong. My skin is too sensitive — the collar of my shirt feels like sandpaper against my neck, and my shoulder throbs where the bruise is. He didn't break the skin. It's not a claiming bite. It's just a bruise, it'll fade in a week, and until then I'll feel it every time I move. Under my suit, under my shirt, this dark little thumbprint that nobody can see and I can't stop feeling.
I showered three times yesterday. Twice this morning. I used the unscented soap and the unscented shampoo and I scrubbed until my skin was raw and I can still smell him on me. Not actually — logically, there's no way his scent is still on my skin after five showers and forty-eight hours. But my body doesn't care about logic. I spent the weekend being taken apart by a twenty-three-year-old in a hotel room, and every nerve ending I have wants to do nothing except replay it.
I'm not thinking about it.
I straighten my tie. I open the Morrison file. I stare at a paragraph about contractual liability and my brain replaces every word with the memory of Ray's mouth on my ribs and his fingers inside me and the sound of his voice saying my name, just Miles, not Covington, not boss, just my name like it was the only word he knew.
I close the file.
It's seven-fifteen. I have forty-five minutes before the debrief and nothing to do except sit here and not think about the things I'm not thinking about.