by Tanya Chris
Chapter 9 Gage
As Gage ambled slowly back to Ryker’s, he could feel a burn in his right ass cheek with every stride. The sharp pinprick from Dr. Petra’s instrument of torture had congealed into a lump, like a deep bruise, which would ease as the liquid absorbed into his body. Yesterday’s bruise had already faded thanks to his stupid wolf metabolism which cleared out anything it perceived as foreign. He wished he could explain to his body how much they needed the osterone, that there was some way to convince his metabolism to hang on to it a little longer.
Other than the bruise, his ass was pain free. He didn’t have any lingering soreness from having been fucked hard the night before because he hadn’t been fucked the night before. And that hurt more than any pain could.
On the surface, they’d had a normal night. He’d cooked for Ryker, who’d eaten as appreciatively as ever, and when they’d gone to bed, Ryker had petted him and told him he was beautiful and even gotten hard—they’d both been plenty hard—but he hadn’t fucked him. He’d only curled around Gage and then somehow fallen asleep—the bastard—his cock drooping as his breathing deepened.
Gage had gone into the bathroom to look at his stash of Arti-Slick. He’d inserted a capsule and when the slick started lubricating his channel and leaking out of his asshole, he’d jerked off. Which was pathetic and also wasteful because he didn’t need slick to masturbate.
Images from Ryker’s porn collection had flickered across his mind while he’d stroked himself, both arousing and depressing him, which meant it took him a long time to get off. When he’d finally reached an unsatisfying orgasm, he cleaned up as best he could and went back to the wide bed that was only warm on one side. He kept his lower body angled carefully away from Ryker’s because slick was still dripping out of his ass, and Ryker didn’t try to pull him back into his arms, even though Gage was pretty sure he wasn’t sleeping anymore.
This morning he’d made breakfast and then immediately put his clothes on and headed for the door. He couldn’t be around Ryker and be naked and not be fucked.
It was Saturday, so Dr. Petra had asked him to come to her house instead of the lab. She had his shot waiting for him and Carmen was waiting there too, finishing up a cup of coffee at the kitchen table, wearing what looked like a see-through raincoat with her hair piled high on top of her head.
That was her interview ensemble, apparently, and it must have worked because Carmen babbled excitedly about being Dr. Petra’s lab assistant as they walked through the square afterwards. They went to Macy’s apartment so Carmen could give him a tour, then Macy served him lunch while his sister filled him in on their plans for a mating ceremony in November.
“Isn’t that a little soon?” Gage protested. As the older sibling it seemed like he should point out that they’d just met.
Macy rolled her eyes and said, “Please. You’d have let Ryker claim you in his office that first day,” and he couldn’t argue with that. In fact, that was the whole problem. Ryker hadn’t claimed him. Ryker was offering to mate with him, but it wasn’t the same.
So he gave Carmen his blessing, not that she needed it, and then went to poke around the market since he still didn’t feel good about heading home.
He was flipping through bolts of fabric, trying to choose between the pattern he liked best and the one he thought Ryker would like best, when he felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to find Prince Angel’s husband, Leo. Leo was maybe half an inch taller than Gage and a whole lot stronger. He obviously wasn’t worried about having a perfect omega body, and his alpha wanted him anyway, but that was the luxury of being someone who’d been born into their own skin.
He asked Leo what kind of opportunities to work with kids were available in the town, since he was going to need a job. He’d have to trek back to New During and quit his old job and close up his apartment, bring his winter clothes back to North Leland, or at least buy a fucking coat. Today looked like the day the snow might start falling, as Ryker had been predicting all week.
“Hey, thanks for letting Dr. Petra use you as a pincushion,” he said when they’d exhausted the work topic. It embarrassed him a little to talk about his treatment, but Dr. Petra had told him that the osterone she injected him with came from live samples, and that Leo had agreed to make daily donations until she could figure out how to synthesize the hormone. “Does it hurt having the osterone drawn?”
“Eh, wolves heal. There was a time when I had way too much osterone, so I get what you’re going through. When our levels are out of whack, either too high or too low, we go a little crazy.”
Gage nodded in acknowledgement. He’d heard a little of Leo’s story through Ryker, so he knew the whole reason Dr. Petra had ended up in North Leland was because Leo had suffered a spate of unrelenting heat and had finally gone to a human hospital for treatment. Even though Gage would love to experience heat himself, he could understand that it would stop being fun after a while. From what he’d heard, Leo had just about starved to death before Angel had found him and rescued him.
“Hey,” Leo said brightly, “you heard my mother-in-law approved your status as an omega, right? So any time you want to get that mating paperwork filed, nudge nudge.”
He just shrugged.
“What?”
“Ryker doesn’t want me.”
“Are you kidding? You’re the only one he does want. Ryker’s never come close to taking an omega before.”
Because Ryker was holding out for the perfect omega, not because he was holding out for Gage. He shrugged again.
“You want to talk about whatever’s got you so down today?”
“Not really.” It wasn’t a thing talking could fix. Only action could fix it, and only Ryker’s.
He said goodbye to Leo and then, lacking anywhere else to go in this village, he trudged towards home. As he walked, his strides aggravating the ache in his ass, he told himself to get over it. Ryker was the best thing that’d ever happened to him. Ryker wanted him to stay and be his omega. Ryker was even willing to mate him, to tie their lives permanently together, and he’d gone all the way up to the Head Alpha herself to make sure their mating forms would list him as an omega.
It was all more than he’d ever imagined possible, and if he told Ryker he wanted to be bitten—claimed—he had no doubt Ryker would do it, because wasn’t Ryker exactly like that? Hadn’t he, from the first moment they’d met, been Gage’s perfect, storybook alpha? If there was one tiny little thing Ryker needed prompting on, was that really so horrible?
Gage picked up his pace. He’d go home and be forthright with Ryker and then put it behind him that he’d had to ask to be claimed, something no omega would ever—
Well, who could say that? He didn’t know the full range of omega experiences. Maybe Ryker wasn’t the only alpha who needed a nudge.
He opened the door to Ryker’s cottage determined to make up with him—to at least get fucked, for Moon’s sake—but before he’d stepped both feet inside the door, Ryker grabbed him and ripped his shirt right off which, fuck, he’d just sewed those buttons back on last night. He was going to have to buy Velcro clothes or something.
Ryker’s hands moved to his waistband and he almost protested having his pants meet the same fate but then, hell, it was hot. He went ahead and let Ryker rip those off him too. There was nothing beneath the pants because Ryker had already destroyed both pairs of underwear he’d packed in.
Ryker gave an approving nod at his bare flesh. “Naked.”
“I’d just walked in, you know,” he complained, but he was totally faking it.
Ryker was naked too. His hair was loose and his eyes were wild and his cock was hard and heavy and Gage wanted to impale himself on it. He just couldn’t decide which end to impale first. But Ryker didn’t give him time to think about it. He picked Gage up by the waist and threw him over his shoulder with such force that the only word that came out was, “oomph.”
OK, they could talk later, but—
“Wai
t, wait, wait,” he called out, halting Ryker en route to the bedroom.
Ryker stopped and lowered Gage to the ground and, for the first time, Gage sensed distress hormones coming off of him.
“No, I just— Can I use the bathroom first? Then we can go right back to that. That was good.”
Ryker grinned and released him and Gage scrambled for the bathroom to insert an Arti-Slick suppository.
“Come on, come on,” he told his body. His cock was raring to go back out and join Ryker. It sucked that his ass needed time to catch up. He couldn’t wait out the Arti-Slick’s slow drip. His cock would just have to do the talking for him.
He let it lead the way out of the bathroom, though he hadn’t done more than open the door before Ryker was on him again in a flurry of commanding hands. Gage found himself in the bedroom, on his knees, with Ryker’s cock down his throat faster than he could mentally form the wish to be exactly there.
Ryker shoved in deep. His hands ripped at the bun Gage had pulled his hair up into until it tumbled around his face, forming a curtain between himself and the beauty of his alpha’s torso thrusting towards him until Ryker gathered it up again in his own hands, using it to pull and steer. The tug on his scalp made him moan. He felt the first release of slick inside him as his body heated to scorching levels.
“Your mouth is so beautiful,” Ryker said reverently as he continued to thrust in and out of it. He brought one hand up to cup Gage’s jaw and ran his thumb along the stretched-tight lips. “You look so good with my cock down your throat.”
Gage moaned again, the only agreement he could offer while said cock was down his throat. He could already feel Ryker’s knot rising against his lips. His tongue darted out to swipe at it each time Ryker’s pelvis made contact with his chin, the flesh there hotter and more alive. It pulsed with Ryker’s passion, beating for him.
Ryker pushed Gage’s head all the way down and held it there. “That’s it,” he said, “work that knot good. Get it big for you. I’m going to fuck you so hard with it, ram it in your tight hole and fill you with it so good you may never get free of it again.
And, oh, Great Moon, Gage had seen that porno—the one where the alpha walked around with his omega hung off his knot like a cock sock. OK, sure, totally unrealistic but fucking hot.
Gage imagined Ryker at his desk at the Immigration Office with Gage on his lap, stuck on his knot; Ryker playing with Gage’s cock while he conducted official business; Ryker carrying him through the square suspended on his knot with Gage’s legs dangling uselessly in front of him. Totally hot.
He moaned again, realizing he was actually a little dizzy. He coughed and Ryker pulled out and swung him up onto his feet.
“Alpha’s cock too big for you?”
“So big. Love it.” Slick oozed from his ass, a long drop running down the inside of his thigh. Ryker traced it with his finger, then brought the finger to his lips.
“I guess you do,” he said. “Getting all wet for Alpha’s cock.”
Gage nodded vigorously. He loved being wet for Ryker’s cock.
“Knot’s already up,” Ryker observed. He was stroking his cock with one big hand, which was only making the knot bigger. “You know what that means. I’m going to have to fuck you hard to get it in you.”
“Please.”
“Please fuck you hard? That what you want?”
“Please, knot. Please fuck me.” He swayed. His head spun from being suffocated by Ryker’s cock and from the overwhelming pheromones Ryker was giving off. He grabbed at Ryker’s meaty biceps, pulling himself in closer to the smell, feeling Ryker’s fist rub against his stomach as Ryker continued to stroke himself until his knot reached its full size.
Ryker leaned over and brushed his lips against Gage’s neck in a surprisingly gentle move that made him shiver.
“I want you in full presentation today,” he whispered into Gage’s ear.
Gage whimpered, too turned on to step back and go for the bed, clinging helplessly, but Ryker guided him onto his knees on the bed, pressed his chest down and tugged his ass high. He spread Gage’s knees wide and used his hands to cant Gage’s hips at the right angle.
“You’re perfect,” Ryker told him. “Do you understand that you’re perfect? Perfect for Alpha. Say it.”
“I’m perfect for Alpha,” he repeated, feeling the words warm his chest until he was hot from head to toe, a perfect, open, ready, hot omega. “Perfect,” he repeated as Ryker’s cock penetrated him—just the tip and then, too slowly, the shaft.
Ryker’s knot pressed hard against his sphincter—so hard and full, the physical manifestation of Ryker’s words—but Ryker didn’t work it inside yet. He just pumped slowly but shallowly in and out, stroking over Gage’s flank, tracing the runnels of slick, reaching around to coat Gage’s hard cock with the viscous fluid.
“I wish you could see this,” Ryker murmured. “How gorgeous you are like this.”
He whimpered, pressing back, wanting Ryker’s knot inside him. He felt the blunt weight of it against him and then it was gone and so was Ryker.
“Alpha?”
From the direction of the bathroom came a loud sound, like wood cracking. Ryker was in a destructive mood today—first Gage’s clothes and now whatever he was ripping down in the bathroom.
“Ryker?” He picked his head up, looking over his shoulder and half rising to his knees.
Ryker’s growl answered him. He rushed to get back into position as Ryker returned carrying the full-length mirror that had hung on the back of the bathroom door.
“Look,” Ryker said, holding the mirror over his body.
He turned his head until he could see his reflection hovering over himself, could see his bowed back, his trembling ass, the ring of his sphincter shiny with slick and pulsing with hunger. His back was long and smooth, the bumps of his spinal cord trailing in a perfect line to the bend in his neck. His arms stretched plaintively over his head and his mouth gaped wet and open like his ass, begging the way his ass begged.
“Say it again,” Ryker demanded.
“I’m perfect for Alpha.”
“Yeah.” Ryker tossed the mirror off the bed carelessly and Gage heard a sound that was definitely broken glass that he couldn’t be bothered to care about, not when the tip of Ryker’s cock pressed back up against him.
“Hang on, little one.”
And with that, Ryker thrust deep. His knot slammed into Gage and forced him open, not wide enough to allow full admittance, but enough to stretch and burn. Gage whimpered and pushed back to meet Ryker’s next thrust. The widest part of Ryker’s knot lodged in his sphincter, holding it wide, poised to pop through as Ryker held himself right there and then, with maddening slowness, eased forward until Gage closed around him.
“Fuck, Gage.” Ryker leaned forward and nuzzled into his neck. “You feel so fucking good. I gotta do that again.” He reared back and shifted his hips and his knot pulled slowly, excruciatingly free. Ryker made a few languorous strokes, letting his shaft slide back and forth in his unresistingly channel, then he pulled back and paused and Gage tensed, ready, and Ryker slammed forward, burying himself and popping free and burying himself again as their matching moans grew louder until Gage’s cock spewed its load and Ryker came to rest deep inside him, his own load pumping into Gage’s body.
Gage howled when Ryker’s teeth tore into his neck, a new level of ecstasy washing over him. His come pumped from his cock in rhythm with the blood pumping from his neck, in rhythm with the throb of Ryker’s knot in his ass.
Ryker draped himself over his back, pressing him into the mattress. He wrapped his hands through Gage’s as their heaving breaths settled in concert, as the bleeding slowed and the pulses of pleasure echoed between them. Gage was safe and sated, Ryker a warm and solid blanket on his back. A fucking heavy blanket.
As if reading his mind, Ryker rolled them over. Some careful maneuverings got Gage rotated so that he lay on Ryker’s chest. He snuggled into the valley betwee
n Ryker’s pecs, breathing in the scent of sex, surrounded by Ryker’s warm, furry arms. Ryker alternated licking at the wound he’d left and licking into Gage’s mouth, sharing his own blood with him.
“You claimed me,” Gage said, his voice filled with the wonder he felt.
“I did. You’re mine now.”
“Forever?”
“Forever.”
“But what if the shots don’t work? What if …?” What if he couldn’t stay there. He couldn’t be misidentified all the time. He just couldn’t. He wanted to be with Ryker, but—
“Shh.” Ryker’s big hands rubbed up and down along Gage’s back. “If you can’t stay here, then we’ll move. We’ll live in human territory. But wherever we are, we’re going to be there together.”
“You’d live in human territory for me?”
“Of course. I’m your alpha now, and that means the most important job I have is making sure you’re safe and happy. I’m not much as alphas go—not that smart, not that strong, definitely not rich, no one important, not even at my own job—but I’m going to be a good alpha to you.”
“Not much of an alpha?” Gage repeated in disbelief. “You’re not much? You’re … you’re …” How could he even explain what Ryker was? “You’re everything. You’re perfect.”
“Yeah,” Ryker said. His nose nuzzled along the bite he’d left. “I know.”
And then Gage understood. Ryker was perfect, and he was perfect too.
~~~
He danced along at Ryker’s side, swinging their joined hands together. They’d been over to Town Hall that morning to file their claim paperwork and Head Alpha Marta herself had stamped her seal of approval on it. Alpha Ryker was officially mated to Omega Gage, right there in black and white, signed, sealed and filed in triplicate.
Now they were on their way to the Immigration Office so he could fill out an immigration form and once Marta approved that, he’d be a full citizen of North Leland. A full omega citizen of North Leland. Hopefully the shots would work and they could stay. He didn’t want to make Ryker live in human territory, no matter how much Ryker claimed it’d be OK.