Perry
We don’t say anything for a while after I ask. We just lie there in the mess—sheets twisted up, the room smelling like sweat and sex. He keeps tracing circles on my hip, and I let him. I don’t know what else to do.
Eventually, he says, “I should get you something to eat.”
That’s not really an answer to 'now what,' but it kind of is. He’s thinking about the next hour, not the next three months. He’s here, with me, and his first instinct is to take care of me—same as he’s been doing all night. Water when I needed it, hands gentle when things got rough. Now he wants to feed me, probably because he knows how much energy I burned and he’s already doing the math in his head.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“You’re shaking.”
I look down at my hands. He’s right. I’m shaking, just a little, the kind of shake you get when you haven’t eaten in hours. I’ve seen it in clients who sit for six-hour tattoo sessions and forget to eat. I know what it means, and I know he’s right, but I still don’twant him to leave. Some dumb part of me is sure that if he walks out, I’ll never get to smell him again.
“I’ll be quick,” he says, and he’s already moving, swinging his legs off the bed, and I watch the muscles in his back shift as he stands, and I think about how I watched those same muscles last night in a completely different context. My face gets hot.
He finds his pants and pulls them on. I can see the scratches I left on his back—red lines across his shoulders. I did that. My hands were on him while he was inside me, and I was too far gone to care what my fingers were doing.
He glances back at me from the door. His eyes behind the mask are warm. Not the intensity from last night, not the locked-on focus. Something quieter. Then he’s gone, and I’m alone in the room for the first time since I walked onto the floor.
I sit up. Everything aches. I grab the sheet and wrap it around my waist because I’m naked and freezing, and the room feels different without him in it. Smaller. Empty.
I think about the guy in the leather mask.
I think about how he touched the small of my back at the bar. How his scent was cedar and warmth, and how I leaned into it, feeling my body settle. How he got me a drink without asking. How he was patient and easy and good, and how my body threw all of that away in ten seconds because something better walked onto the floor.
Better. That’s what my body decided. My brain isn’t so sure. I look at the bruises on my hips, the scratches on his back, the fact that I cried on a knot in front of a room full of strangers, and I wonder—was this actually better, or just more? Is this what I want, or just what my body tricked me into wanting?
I don’t have an answer. Might not for a while. But I do know this: if I leave this club and never see the black mask guy again, my next heat is going to suck. My body’s locked onto his scent, the way it was supposed to with the leather mask guy, andthere’s no getting rid of it. I know because it happened before—the first time, when I spent three months thinking about cedar every time I got horny.
That was manageable. It was a craving, but not a bad one. Easy to live with. Easy to come back for.
This isn’t going to be manageable. His scent is burned into me, and I’ll feel it every time I close my eyes for the next three months. The worst part is, I’m not sure I want it to fade. Part of me wants to go home, take a boiling shower, scrub him off, and pretend this was just a bad heat—something that happened to me, not something I chose. But another part of me, the part that lost it in front of a dozen people, just wants to crawl back into his lap and breathe him in until I forget what cedar even smells like.
Both of those are me. That’s the problem. They want totally different things, and I’m lying here at six in the morning trying to figure out which one of me gets to decide.
I can either deal with it alone or I can do something about it right now, before we walk out of here like strangers.
The door opens. He comes back with a protein bar, a bottle of orange juice, and a t-shirt that’s way too big for me—probably club staff issue.
“Beta at the bar gave me these,” he says. “She said—” He pauses. “She said to tell you the jeans are in lost and found whenever you want them.”
I stare at him, then I laugh. A real laugh, first one since yesterday, and it hurts my throat, but I don’t care. Of course, the beta saved my jeans. Of course, this place has a lost-and-found for clothes that didn’t survive the heat of the night. That’s the most ridiculous, human thing about all of this.
He’s looking at me, and I can see his eyes crinkling behind the mask. I think he’s laughing too, silent, his chest moving the way it did last night when someone moaned on the floor, and we both found it funny instead of hot.
I eat the protein bar, drink the juice, and pull on the giant shirt. It smells like laundry detergent, not him, which is honestly a relief. I need to be able to think for five minutes, and his scent makes that impossible.
He sits on the edge of the bed, close but not touching. Just waiting. He’s good at that. He’s been waiting all morning, letting me set the pace, not pushing. The leather mask guy was patient too, but his felt like it was just who he was. This guy’s patience feels like something he had to learn.
“The rules say masks stay on until the omega leaves,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“And no names.”
“Yeah.”
“Those are good rules.”