Page 52 of Hide or Die

He licked his lips and glanced away, before dragging his dark gaze back to mine.

“When you were in heat... when Jax and Flynn were there with us, I... felt things,” he said. “It had to be the pheromones. I got hard, at least a little bit.”

“You perfumed,” I said, remembering that teasing hit of lemon and ginger.

“Apparently,” he agreed. “I didn’t think I could... respond that way. At least, I never have before. Flynn—he and I talked a lot, while you were asleep between peaks. He said sometimes sterilized omegas could still respond. Sexually, that is. That there were other ways to have sex, even with—” He freed one hand to make a vague gesture at his lower abdomen. “Anyway, I want to try. And with the pheromones, it will be good for you, too. Not like heat, but... not like what we usually do, either.”

I nodded my understanding.

The two of us were intimate. We had been for years. But where betas were in sexual season constantly, for unbonded omegas, sexual receptivity was tied to the estrus cycle. Without the presence of an aroused alpha—or at least that alpha’s bottled pheromones—an omega outside of heat didn’t experience sexual pleasure. Not as a beta would understand the phrase, anyway.

Kam and I touched each other because it felt good and reinforced our bond. It wasn’t a way to chase orgasms, because in the normal course of things, we’d never catch them. Slow massage. Sensual kisses. An embrace, skin to skin. That was how we bonded. That was how we comforted each other when times were hard.

What Kam was proposing now was something different. It was honestly outside of my experience—though after my heat, I supposed it was no longer outside of Kam’s.

“I want to soak both of us in alpha pheromones,” he said, not breaking eye contact. “I want to lick your clit and fuck you with one of those dildos, while you suck my cock and fuck me with the other one. I want to drown in you and penetrate you and be penetrated by you.”

My lips parted, as shock at hearing my sweet omega talk like that combined with a heavy twisting sensation in my belly. In that moment, I felt hopelessly incompetent to do any of those things without making a hash of it.

“You want the dildo in your...” I trailed off, aware that he must mean exactly that.

He swallowed. “It’s how some beta males do it. I, uh, did some research. And I also douched before I came here, so it won’t be messy.”

“Okay.” I pressed a brief kiss to his lips. “You already know I’m clueless here. You’ll have to show me how to do it without hurting you.”

“I will,” he said. “It’s all right. I just want to try. Conventional beta wisdom is to use lots of lube and lots of patience. And the lube is for you, too, since I don’t know if you’ll make slick or not. We’ll only do what feels good. I just want both of us to feel good, Leo.”

I knelt forward and kissed him again, longer and deeper this time. He returned it—and whatever else did or did not work tonight, at least I had myodamaback. I fell into his arms with profound relief and held him tight.

“I love you, Leo,” he murmured against the shell of my ear.

“Love you, Kam,” I told him, and nipped the side of his neck.

He helped me out of my clothes, peeling everything off a piece at a time. I did the same to him, struck by how seldom I’d actually seen him completely naked. Mostly, he kept his boxers on when we were together, or wore a pair of low-slung pajama pants. It occurred to me that he was making himself vulnerable in a way he usually didn’t. He would be exposing his scars to me, up close and personal.

I’d seen the scars on his chest many times, where they’d cut out his extra nipples. They’d healed well enough to be relatively unobtrusive. Kam was a purebred omega, though he didn’t like to talk about his lost family. I was a throwback, born to two beta parents, my body barely distinguishable from a beta female’s without a thorough medical and gynecological examination. If, god forbid, I ever ended up pupped, I’d be unlikely to whelp more than twins, and two nipples would be plenty to get the job done.

But the purebred lines that had avoided beta interbreeding tended to whelp multiples—usually three or four, but sometimes up to six. Purebred omegas almost always had extra nipples. Kam had been born with four, but of course the beta butchers couldn’t let that so-calledcrime against naturestand.

There was also a scar at the juncture of his right shoulder and neck where they’d gone for his mating gland. Ironically, they hadn’t bothered to check if he was right or left-handed first. If they had, they might have realized he was one of the seven percent of omegas whose mating gland was located on the left side rather than the right.

Small mercy, since it was unclear if a mating bite would take in the absence of the hormones that his body could no longer produce. Unsurprisingly, research into such things was basically nonexistent.

It was the scar he usually hid that was by far the worst. Kam’s womb and ovotestes had been pulled out through his birthing passage, which had then been sutured shut. He could never again have normal omegan sexual relations. He could never bear pups.

And now, he wanted to find out if the arousal he’d felt in response to the pheromones of the heat nest had been a fluke—or if he might still have some kind of sexual future after all. He’d come to me for that, and I couldn’t express how grateful I was for his trust.

With a final kiss to the corner of my jaw, he stretched across the bed and retrieved the vial of pheromones.

“Please let this supplier not be a fraud,” he joked weakly, and opened the stopper.

A scent of gunmetal and sage wafted into the air, backed by a faintly unpleasant chemical tang. It wasn’t terribly appealing from an aesthetic standpoint, but within moments, my body began to sit up and take notice.

“It’s real,” I said, sparing a brief thought to wonder about the alpha who’d produced it.

“Apparently so,” Kam said, taking a deeper sniff. “Though it does make you wonder what the price tag would be for an alpha who doesn’t smell like a gun battle over Thanksgiving dinner.”

He didn’t compare the smell to the mouthwatering scents ofouralphas, for which I was eternally grateful.

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