by Aiden Bates
Ty gave him half a grin. "Yeah. Of course."
"I'll see you tomorrow, okay?"
"Tuesday is a late night for me." Ty stood up. "Wednesday, maybe?"
"It's a date." Ben stood, less gracefully, and headed for the door. "I'll see you then."
He thought about the kiss all through the next day at work. He didn't let it distract him, of course. He couldn't let it distract him from his job, not too much. That could be dangerous. On Tuesday he had to go out to a job site, at the addition to the new hospital not too far from where Ty went to school. Most of the time he'd be working in the garage at Corporate, but they couldn't exactly bring a crane into the garage, so out went Ben.
The job was an all-day problem, but he didn't mind that. He got paid by the hour, after all. He pushed the kiss to the back burners of his mind and focused on getting the crane up and running again, losing track of pretty much everything else. At around one in the afternoon, even he picked up on the way that most of the workers had slacked off their jobs and started milling around watching some kind of fuss over near the site entrance.
He beckoned one of the apprentices over. "What's going on?"
The apprentice, Javier, spat on the ground. "It's Hartmann. He's the developer involved with the land deal. He likes to just drop in to see how progress is going." His thin, dark lip curled. "Then he complains when his suit gets all dusty."
Hartmann, if Javier was correct, was emerging from a giant white limousine in a white silk suit. Ben tried to hide a snicker. Who wore white to a job site? Especially silk? He tried to ignore the hubbub and focus on his job again, but the murmur of the crowd got to be too much as it moved toward the crane.
As Hartmann neared the crane where Ben worked, Ben picked up on his scent. Hartmann was an omega, one with a scent like tulips and incense. He wrinkled his nose. It wasn't a common scent for omegas. He couldn't tell if it was appealing or not. "What's going on over here, hm?" Hartman knocked on the crane and then pulled his hand away, looking at the dirt on his hand with horror. "Who are you?"
Ben paused in his work. "I'm Ben Maxwell. I'm the mechanic."
"You weren't the mechanic last week. I'd remember you, Alpha." Hartmann looked Ben up and down, like he was sizing up a new outfit.
"The previous guy left due to an injury. I started yesterday." Ben tried to keep his tone neutral, but he couldn't help the chill that ran down his spine. He wasn't meat, for crying out loud. He'd be much happier if this guy would stop looking at him like he was on display at the butcher counter.
"And how did the crane break?"
"Looks like this belt here wore out. There was no way to tell it was wearing down during routine maintenance. Fortunately we had the part in stock, and it's certainly fixable. It'll be up and running by end of day today."
Hartmann looked him up and down again. "I'm sure that's true, in your… capable… hands." He leered and walked away.
Javier shuddered. "He likes you. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing."
"Me neither," Ben muttered, thinking of the scent of strawberries.
Chapter Three
Ty went to class and then to work on Tuesday, mind still full of that incredible kiss. What the hell was wrong with him, anyway? Sure, it had been nice to get the attention. It had been a while since he'd had someone else's hands on him, someone else's mouth. And of course he liked it. He was an omega. Omegas had higher sex drives than betas, on average anyway, that was just science for crying out loud. Adding an alpha, with an alpha's pheromones, to the mix was like setting a match to gunpowder.
But did he have to go messing around with this alpha, in particular? He'd wanted the kiss, wanted more. He still wanted more. Thinking about Ben's kisses made him feel dreamy and sappy and more than a little uncomfortable, in only the best ways. He'd pretty much only known Ben for a few days, and all he could think about was getting naked for Ben. Or maybe down on his knees for Ben, getting him to make the noises he liked to hear so much.
That didn't mean it was a great idea. Ben's reasons for ditching back in Sandusky made perfect sense. It had been the right thing to do. It would have been better if he'd taken Ty with him, but maybe that wouldn't have worked out so well. Maybe they'd have hated each other, if they'd had to deal with each other during Ty's adolescence.
Penny noticed his distraction after he'd been at Gray House for all of twenty minutes. She always noticed that kind of thing. "So," she said, drawing out the vowel and pretending not to grin. "Who is he?"
Ty rolled his eye and blushed. "There is no he."
"You're full of crap, Ostry. Come on. Out with it. Who put that super-vacant, I'm not home right now expression on that pretty, pretty face of yours?" She tapped her pen on his desk.
He leaned back in his chair. "I mean it. I don't know that there is a 'he' at this point. I told you the neighbor lady moved out."
"You did. Did a studly personal trainer move in next door, someone who can run shirtless with you and fulfill all of my voyeuristic fantasies?"
"What? No!" Ty laughed out loud when his friend pretended to pout. "First of all, Penny, if I had someone to run with I'd never be on time for anything again. There'd be no sex, no romance, just running."
"That's just creepy."
"You should try it sometime," he told her, staring at the little cat-shaped purse where she kept her cigarettes. "Anyway, second of all, it's not a personal trainer, but he is an alpha. More to the point, he's the alpha." He cleared his throat and scratched at the back of his neck. "The one from Sandusky."
"Wait — that one?" Her eyes widened in horror. "Do you need a place to stay?"
"No, no. We hashed some things out. It's cool. Or, uh." His cheeks burned hot.
"Oh, Ty. You didn't." She wrinkled her nose at him.
He shook his head, a few blond strands of hair falling into his eyes. He tucked them behind his ear. "No. Not yet, but only because he was stronger than I am. He was all, I want to wait because of the history between us and we shouldn't push things too far." He tugged at his collar. "Which was the smart thing to do."
"You totally blew off the water restrictions and took like a half hour cold shower, didn't you?" Penny shook her finger at him. "I see you."
"It was only twenty minutes," Ty grumbled. "But yeah. Emergency measures." He sighed. "Look, I know it's stupid, and it's just going to get me hurt and everything. But he's right there, and he smells so good…"
"Maybe you'll get it out of your system." She gave a practical shrug and tapped the stack of files she'd brought over. "Oh, so you'll love this. Apparently Dick Heartless filed a lawsuit with the city to try to force them to take Gray House by eminent domain."
"Wait, what?" Ty had been about to pick up a cup of coffee, but he pulled his hand away. "You've got to be joking. Does eminent domain even work that way?"
"I don't think so, but Hartmann can afford better lawyers than we can." She twirled her shiny necklace around her hand. "They'd know better than we would. I was talking to Mike, our director, and he said that he's got our chief counsel planning ahead to fight eminent domain just in case."
"What exactly is Hartmann's problem with Gray House, anyway?" Ty stood up and glared at the door. "We're a great organization. We help hundreds of people, every year. I mean, I get that he's well outside of any of the groups that we'd typically help, he's not a battered omega and that's the closest service he'd be likely to want to use, but everything that he's doing has been targeted right at us. Not at the land or anything, but at us."
"I don't know. And even if I did know, I'm not sure that there's much we could do about it." Penny drummed her fingers on the stack of files. "All we can do is keep doing what we do best: helping people, in our case young people, and hope he gets what's coming for him."
Ty faked a little smile, but he couldn't have much faith in the system to keep Gray House safe. Still, he went about his day and did his job, and when eight o'clock rolled around he headed home and locked himself into
his apartment to work.
The next day he found reporters from all of the local news sources camped out on the front steps of the facility. He went inside and found Penny, who grabbed the agency director. "We need to get rid of those vultures before the kids get out of school," he told them. "If the kids see that circus, they're not going to be willing to come in. They're going to see it as a threat to their safety, and they'll be right."
The director, a guy by the name of Derek Wing, gave a tired grin and sighed. "That's very true. I was hoping you could help us with that."
Ty grimaced. "Me?"
"I'd like for you to come out with me and talk to them." Wing scratched at his graying red hair. "You've been a client and a resident, and you are an employee. You can answer their questions on both counts, and hopefully that will help to clear them out sooner rather than later."
Penny patted Ty's back. "You can do this, Ty. We believe in you."
Ty's stomach churned, but it wasn't as though he could say no. He nodded, slowly, and followed the director out to the front stairs of the building. He tried not to flinch as the reporters rushed forward and tried to get pictures. Instead, he focused on sensory attributes around him. The sky was an incredible shade of blue today. The roses someone had planted were doing very well despite the drought, and their scent filled the air. His body still carried the ache of his morning run, and Wing's drone as he gave a statement to reporters was almost soothing. He still had the taste of coffee in his mouth from the little shop in the student union.
"And now please let me introduce Ty Ostry. He's one of our counselors now, and he was one of our residents when he came to San Diego ten years ago. He can give you some idea of the kind of community we build here. Ty?" Derek brought Ty forward.
Ty hated public speaking. He hated it more when he hadn't had a chance to prepare ahead of time. "So, this isn't rehearsed," he told the reporters, and got a titter of amusement in return. "My parents kicked me out of the house when I was fourteen. They didn't want an unmated omega living on their dime anymore, so they dropped me off at the bus station. I figured San Diego was probably the warmest place to live on the streets, so I bought a ticket here." He swallowed, remembering his terror. "I was found, thankfully, by police who realized that I was too young to be on my own before I got into too much trouble. One thing led to another, and the family court system dropped me off at Gray House, my new home until I was legally old enough to be on my own.
"I was scared, and I was angry. I had five roommates, some of whom had stories that made mine look like something from a Little Golden Book, and we were all scared and angry. We all knew what was expected of us, outside these walls. We were supposed to become hookers, drug dealers, drug addicts, criminals. Statistics."
He smirked. "I'm going for my Master’s in social work now. I work here. I got scholarships and grants. One of my other roommates? He's in med school. Another one's finishing up law school. I've got another couple of roommates who are in tech, pulling down good money for our age, right? Another one just got an award for his first novel. Not too shabby.
"The thing is, every one of us, all six, was a throwaway kid. We're all successful in our field, or well on our way to it. We might have been the statistic everyone expected us to be if we didn't have Gray House. Gray House didn't make us successful. We did. Gray House showed us that we could. Gray House gave us the tools that we needed when the people who should have shown us the way didn't. They are still doing it. One of my clients got a notification about a scholarship just yesterday. I'm so incredibly proud of him. He's going to go far."
A blonde wearing so much makeup it looked like a mask stepped forward and shoved a microphone in his face. "What do you say to the charges that Gray House brings an unstable, criminal element into what is becoming an upscale neighborhood?"
"Well, I'd say that the charges are false, first of all. Gray House isn't a pre-release program. We help children. We help abused women and omegas. We help people in trouble." He frowned. "There's nothing threatening about that, unless it's to someone's conscience."
Wing snorted behind him. The blonde stepped back, blinking as though she'd been slapped, and Ty was allowed to go back to work after only a few minutes.
The reporters cleared out after that. Wing rejoined Ty in the Adolescent Services office. "That was impressive," he told Ty. "I think you made the woman from Channel Two decide to sell cars for a living instead."
"Sorry." Ty wasn't, not really. "The question was offensive."
"It was." Derek shrugged. "You'll get a lot worse in your career, but your answer was kind of awesome too."
Ty tried to feel good about that, but the whole scenario ate at him for the rest of the day. An organization that had been around, and helping people, for a hundred years and more shouldn't have to sit there and justify their very existence. He knew that Hartmann was the one putting up the lies, of course, and he knew that Hartmann was trash, but the fact that a person could be such complete trash boggled his mind.
He finished his work and went home. His stomach sat in knots for the entire drive. Maybe Ben had forgotten, and wouldn't want to see him or have dinner together. Maybe Ben had just re-evaluated this whole weird dynamic between them and decided that just playing it neighborly was more than enough for him. After all, Ty hadn't been enough to interest him before; why would now be anything different?
That was a ridiculous thought, and Ty knew it. He'd still been a child. He'd think a lot less of Ben, now, if Ben had been interested then. Would he still get so worked up about the past rejection if he hadn't had to deal with Hartmann's lawsuit, and everything that went with it, today? Ugh. Why was it that a simple little factor like a prior encounter, one from ten years ago, would make his life so much more complicated now?
He made it up the stairs and back into his apartment without any encounters, good or bad, with Ben. He had enough time to change out of his work clothes before Ben knocked on his door, though. He greeted him with a quick kiss and ushered him inside, but he could see that not everything was right with Ben. "What's wrong? Bad day at the job? Is it not what you thought it would be?" He went to the fridge and got them a couple of beers.
"No, no. The job's great. It's everything it was supposed to be, and my supervisor's awesome. It's just…" Ben bit his lip, adorably, and then he took a giant swig out of his beer. "I'm probably making a mountain out of a molehill, you know? Just worked up because I'm in a strange place and I don't know what's normal and what's not."
"You mean for San Diego?" Ty took a more moderate sip of his beer. "How about if you run it past me? I'll tell you if it's normal or not."
Ben's hand froze in mid-air, bottle halfway to his lips. "Okay," he said after half a second. "Like, I've had all of the sexual harassment training, at something like six different companies. I know not to go sniffing after omegas in the corporate office, or whistling after women on the street. Which I wouldn't, because while my parents might have encouraged some very negative behavior, they didn't raise me in a barn. The thing is, there's this guy. He's some rich, gross developer and he's an omega."
Ty's stomach flipped. "Dick Hartmann."
Ben's eyes bulged as he turned to face Ty. "You know him?"
"Yeah. We've met. We don't really run in the same circles, though. What about him?"
Ben squirmed. "He showed up to a job site I was on, fixing a crane, yesterday. And he was, well, he was appreciative."
Ty put his beer down. "Well, I guess I can see why." His voice sounded like it was coming from far away. "How appreciative are we talking here?"
"He came by the office today. He keeps calling me Alpha." Ben shivered. "He brought chocolates, man. I mean really."
"I'm sure they were expensive chocolates, too." Ty didn't know if he should laugh or cry. He settled for getting up and heading for the kitchen. He knew his movements were jerky, they felt jerky, but he had to do something. "I've got pasta, with chicken and peas. That okay with you?"
Ben
followed him into the kitchen. "You okay, Ty?"
Ty forced a smile. "I'm fine. Hartmann's just not a friend to Gray House. It's funny that he's connected to this side of my life too." He smiled over at Ben.
"Do you want me to be connected to your life?" Ben put his hands on Ty's hips.
Ty only hesitated for a second. "Absolutely." He leaned back into the alpha's arms and inhaled his scent. He didn't know how long this might last, but he was going to enjoy it while he had it.
***
"Small world, huh?" Ben wasn't sure how he was supposed to feel about the whole thing with Hartmann in the first place. Finding out that the creepy omega who'd been coming to leer at him was somehow connected to his omega, and in a not-so-great way, didn't help clear the waters. "I mean what are the odds?"
Ty snorted and stood up fully, focusing on the dinner. "What were the odds that you would move into the apartment next to mine? I guess small world doesn't even begin to cut it." He laughed a little. "Honestly, though. You don't seem to be comfortable with Hartmann sniffing around."