A New Chapter

by Aiden Bates

  “That’s all right,” Myrick’s voice came out almost shrill through the speaker, and it all but confirmed what he was suspecting was going on. “I’ve, ah, got stuff here, so don’t worry about a thing!” He was a touch worried still; Omegas without a mate, if left unchecked or unsupervised, could sometimes develop hypertension or injure themselves while in heat, overeager and not being worn out in the same way as Omegas that had mates—even those who had Betas as a lover were able to get more relief than those that were without one.

  “Sounds like a bad fever,” Tristan said, opting to let Myrick slip out of the conversation gracefully; he wasn’t aiming to humiliate the man, after all. He got his answer, no sense in making the poor man suffer. “I won’t keep you. Just make sure you’re resting plenty. And we wouldn’t want you to be thirsty, so uh,” he debated just saying something innocuous, a ‘take care of yourself,’ but his inability to resist poking fun won out, and he opted to end with, “make sure you get…plenty of fluids in you.” He barely held back a chuckle. “Take care, now.” He ended the call, and though he managed to polish off the last of his lunch without thinking about Myrick suffering in the midst of his heat, when he started to work on the next set of reports, he couldn’t help but feel a little bad at having a laugh at his expense.

  The man seemed clearly unused to having to deal with what he was going through, and he wasn’t sure what to do with himself. He made no assumptions about Myrick and his personal life, though from what Isabelle had vaguely hinted at while she was showing him around his new position, he could guess that intimacy of any nature—sexual or otherwise—didn’t come easily to his boss. The worry that he might harm himself—even as slightly as overusing a muscle—nagged in the back of his mind, so he figured he could at least pass on a helpful tip, something he had remembered an old Omega roommate of his asking him to get for him when he went through a particularly bad heat. Not wanting to call the man when he was likely in an even more compromising situation than when he had first called, he instead opted to send him a text.

  ‘I’ve heard taking muscle relaxers or pain meds helps.’ Again, it was vague enough that he could play the fool—say that he meant it would help him sleep through whatever illness he had without having to suffer unduly. Message dutifully sent, he went back to his work, trying incredibly hard not to think about the possibility of his boss, nestled in a little bed nest, rutting himself into a coma.

  It was better that way, even if the hours ticked by slower for it.

  Still, his day was productive, and he even managed to open negotiations for potential clientele that Myrick could review and approve upon his return. Though he only had a few hours after his lunch break, he helped the leads of a few departments looking for guidance. By the time he was heading out to his car, he had a spring in his step, his day fulfilling and satisfying.

  Mostly, some insidious part of Tristan whispered, a petty part of him that still ached with the knowledge of what Myrick was going through. He grimaced, stepping into his car and turning the engine on. While he would never force himself on anyone, such intrusive thoughts were still an issue that he had to grapple with, and the thought always unnerved him. It was the one feeling he hated most: uncertainty, imbalance, and inner discord. Anything that made him feel like he wasn’t in control of himself or his feelings made his skin crawl. There was an instinctive part of him that demanded things of others in such a way, in such a dehumanizing, brutal way never sat well with him, and he’d fought against the preconception of Alphas ever since he presented as one.

  It had been a journey filled with prejudice, though masked prejudice for the most part; he, as well as other Alphas, were often looked to for leadership, or for guardianship, though the whispers of them being rapists, monsters that were more instinct than human, were never quiet enough for him to not hear. So he swore to himself that he would be better, that he would hold other Alphas accountable wherever he saw them even remotely act up, because they had to be better than the stigma. He had to believe that. He had to.

  My, he noted bitterly to himself as he rolled to a stop at a red light, his thoughts had grown rather melancholic, hadn’t they? And here he had had such a good day leading up to this, too. His mood had soured ever so slightly, though he refused to let it sit there. When the light changed and he could leave, he changed his destination from home to the gym—he always liked sweating out the negative things that clouded his thoughts, and he could think clearer when he was working out because there was nothing else to focus on but what he was doing to better himself.

  Thankfully, the gym was closer but on the same path as home, so he made it there in no time. He kept his gym bag in his car for this reason; whenever he would have a rough or stressful day, he would work it all out at the gym. Considering he helped run the marketing department of one of the biggest companies in the state, it was hardly surprising that he was as muscled and athletic as he was, with how often he was here, he thought wryly as he shrugged his suit coat off and left it in his passenger seat. He already felt a little lighter, a little cooler as he stepped into the gym, swiped his membership card, and went to change in the locker room.

  Tristan changed out of the rest of his suit, folding it carefully in his locker and setting his shoes beside his clothes. His basketball shorts and loose shirt felt cool and light on his skin, and he breathed a sigh of relief as he locked his locker and pocketed the key. He opted to keep his phone on him, in the event of an emergency but mostly to listen to his music as he worked out. The warm-up room was sparsely occupied, thankfully, and he was able to do his stretches in peace, though he tried not to glare at the other men in the cardio room that gave him a wide berth; some of them were Betas, though he spotted the odd Alpha, too preoccupied to care about him. Just as well, he thought. Stepping onto one of the vacant treadmills and turning on some of his favorite music, he started off at a light jog, an easy warm-up that would get his blood pumping.

  Once he was sufficiently sweaty, he opted to lift weights, working on his shoulders and arms. Rather than try to build even more muscle on his massive frame, he decided to just lift lighter weights, just heavy enough to keep him fighting fit without straining him. It didn’t take long for him to settle into a rhythm with his workout rotation, and he felt the tension of the day bleed out of him as time passed. It was gratifying, to be able to loosen himself up in such a way that wasn’t destructive.

  Tristan was ripped out of his tempo when his music cut off, the ringtone of his phone overpowering it and filling his earbuds so suddenly that he damn near dropped the weight he was lifting. With a grunt, he set his weight down and pulled his phone out, curious as to who was calling him.

  “Myrick?” He was surprised—if the Omega was as occupied as he thought he was, what on earth was he doing calling him? Still, he answered. “Hello?”

  “Tristan!” Something deep and instinctual clenched at the way he heard his name ripped from Myrick’s voice in a sob. “I—I opened a window—it was so hot—and—” There was a loud, thunderous pounding, the sound of someone throwing their weight against a door. Fear and restlessness grappled for dominance in Tristan’s gut, and the warring emotions made him feel vaguely ill. “There’s someone—I locked the door, but—”

  “Is there somewhere you can lock yourself in?”

  Tristan’s whole world closed in until it was just him and Myrick, out of his reach, but in desperate need of his help. He felt desperate to get to him, already running to his locker to grab his things. He swallowed and forced the fear that began to bubble to the surface back down; Myrick needed him focused and at his best. He could panic later, when Myrick was safe.

  “Y-yeah,” Myrick sniffled, and it was clear that he was in need of direction—panic was closing in on the Omega, but he needed to act fast to protect himself until Tristan could get there.

  “Hide. Now. I’m on my way.” Tristan didn’t need anything else—his boss was in danger and that was more important than anything in that momen
t.

  8

  Heat of the Moment

  Myrick had, however begrudgingly, resigned himself to having to endure a particularly bad heat the moment that his body cried out for more almost immediately after his third orgasm.

  He hadn’t planned on letting it get to this point, truly he hadn’t; he’d managed to take a few more ibuprofen between his second and third bout, hoping that it would, if nothing else, help him to feel even a little less amped up, his muscles ache a little less from the near constant clenching that he had been made to endure by his own body, though it hadn’t entirely kicked in yet, he could feel; his mind felt slower, less focused, but the actual pain relief that usually accompanied it had yet to grace him. Even with his stomach aching to the point of him nearly crying from it, even with the whole of his body slick with sweat until there was nothing left in him to perspire, still, still his body demanded more of him, somehow still not sated in spite of his efforts.

  So Myrick lay there, tangled in the nest of pillows and blankets he’d managed to toss together, with his legs spread wide and bent so that his heels were dug into the sheets as best as they could be with the silken sheets slick with his sweat as they were. It felt as though his body couldn’t stop trembling as he forced his aching thighs to bounce him on the toy cock that was still hilt-deep inside of him.

  Broken sobs tore out of his throat as he fucked himself on the dildo, the head of it pressing against his abused prostate, the gland hyper-sensitive from the near constant stimulation of the last few hours. Even with the toy aiding him in his endeavors, the Omega still felt shockingly empty. The contradiction baffled him; he was full with a toy that had been more than enough any other time, on the right side of being stretched, and yet it had never felt like a cheap imitation of the real thing until now, in his nest, with him desperately slamming down on it in the hope that it would suddenly feel like it was more than it was. Because of that, his climaxes, however dizzying their heights were, felt incomplete, as though he were being led somewhere with no real destination in mind. Like he was climbing and climbing and never reaching that peak.

  He’d done his level best to try and make it better, stroking his cock as he bounced on the toy, pulling lightly at his own hair, anything to make it feel more like there was someone else there doing this to him rather than him taking matters into his own hands, as it were, but his body knew the truth, that there was nothing at the end of this trip but his body being utterly spent, wrung of everything he could possibly force out of himself, and nothing to show for it. Not even a sense of relief.

  Not that it stopped him from getting off.

  With an undignified whine, he began to grip at his torso blindly with clawing hands, short nails dragging across his skin experimentally here and there before reaching up to his chest and pinching his nipple, rolling the pebbled flesh between his finger and thumb. As his back arched against the sensations he was working through he tried to gulp in air between pants, but it felt as though it was almost impossible for him to catch his breath despite his best efforts. He knew, even without reading a thermometer that his body was too hot to be considered good for his health, and he could feel the fever starting to take hold even though he popped enough ibuprofen to kill a bull.

  Though it had been several years since he had been forced to endure the full brunt of a heat and his head was swimming with pain and the pain medication that was trying to overcome it, he fought to recall if it had been this bad the last time; he’d been infinitely more uncomfortable, and hadn’t had any sense of safety or privacy, alternating between being buried under blankets on his friend’s couch and hiding out in the bathroom in his basement and biting down on his hand hard enough to draw blood to keep quiet, so the experience had been its own brand of hell. But had the heat itself been as bad as it was now, with his brain conjuring images of his vice president dominating him and knotting him until he saw stars?

  It was almost impossible not to think of Tristan at that point; he was the one Alpha his mind had accepted as a safe Alpha, and he was so starved for affection that his overactive imagination had been more than happy to fill in the blanks while playing out a thousand different scenarios centered around the well-built, muscular mass of a man. Tristan and his strong, roughly callused hands worshipping him, holding him down and soothing his every need. Needs that his own thin, bony hands were doing a poor job of handling. As he felt himself building back up for a fourth, agonizing orgasm, he thought of Tristan and what he could only imagine was his thick, throbbing cock, one that made him sob wildly just to fantasize about. How wide and overwhelming his knot would be. His scent—a known element in this, likely the only known in this equation—was heady and thick, smelling faintly of a forest after a rain in the middle of summer. His thoughts never lingered on any of those imagined things the way that it had zeroed in on what fantasies he had conjured of the Alpha’s knot.

  He needed it, craved his knot stretching him wider than he had ever been stretched, and he needed that sensation worse than he had ever needed anything. It nearly drove him mad that he had nothing but ephemeral dreams, ponderings to cling to, to try and satisfy himself on. The frustrated huffs he let out in harsh pants as he fell over the edge for the fourth time punctuated his thoughts on the night up until that point; an enjoyable ride that ended in an abrupt and empty disappointment that left a lot of mess to clean.

  Then there was the fever.

  It had only spiked with every orgasm that he had torn from his body, and the room was positively stifling. Even as he eased the dildo out of himself once more, the heat burning beneath his skin made no effort to abate, and he was beginning to grow delirious under its blaze. He felt dizzy, and his thoughts were unclear in that moment; all he had managed to think of were his body’s needs and how they could be met: he needed to be knotted, and it was just so hot in there. His body had rolled onto his side, he dragged himself to the window, and cracked it open. It was just enough for him to gulp the sweet air in, the cold hitting his fevered flesh.

  And shocking enough for him to regain his common sense.

  And his fear.

  He slammed the window shut and locked it for good measure, practically ripping his curtains off of the curtain rod as he pulled them closed. Five ibuprofen hadn’t been enough to get his fever controlled in the last few hours, but the sudden icy grip of panic that throttled his senses was enough for him to suddenly feel like he was freezing. If there was even one Alpha in the general vicinity, that was it; he was in such a level of danger that he didn’t know what to do—how had he gotten so dazed, so addled with his condition, that he had gone against half of his instincts and potentially exposed his nest to Alphas, if only for a second?

  With trembling hands he pulled on his discarded pajama pants, uncaring of how soaked the back of it was becoming from his fluids when he was in such desperate need to not be exposed any more than he had accidentally made himself. That it was only for a second didn’t matter, not at this point of his cycle, he knew.

  His heart began to pound in his ears when he heard someone’s footsteps crunching loudly against his gravel driveway—they were coming closer, and he didn’t know what to do apart from give into his instinct of hide! That compelled him to grab his phone on the way to diving at the bookcase in the corner of his room, pulling at a fake book that acted as the unlocking mechanism for the bookcase to reveal the door to his panic room—one he had installed ages ago out of a deep fear of potentially being robbed, though now he was just glad to have it.

  He scrambled inside and barred himself in, sliding the bar into its locking position to keep the door from opening without him choosing it to open. Breath ragged from the tension in his every muscle, he wheezed out a sob, sinking down into the center of the carpeted floor of the room. Now that he was alarmingly clear-headed, he wondered why he hadn’t just made his nest in here, but he would have likely overheated himself even faster than he had; the panic room wasn’t a very large room—it didn’t need to
be—and he would have likely actually made himself sick if he’d nested in it from how hot he’d have gotten.

  It was still a better alternative than this.

  Breathing shallow and body quaking with the rolling waves of anxiety that crashed against the shores of his mind, he strained his hearing, waiting for any sign that might clue him in as to what was going on and only growing more stressed, when there was a heavy, eerie silence that greeted him.

  Was silence a blessing? Or delaying the inevitable?

  There was a distant crash, and he nearly jumped out of his skin; he could tell that it came from his front door—had he locked it when he came in? He couldn’t recall, and he had been distracted at the time, so he likely wouldn’t have, and it didn’t matter anyway because there was someone in his house. There were heavy footsteps, thumps that sounded frantic and hurried, and before he could rethink what he was going to do, he was already dialing Tristan’s number and holding the phone to his ear hard enough that it hurt.

  “Pick up,” he wheezed, eyes filling with tears as his panic reached its peak. “Please, please pick up, I need you.” He heard a faint shuffling, and held his breath, hopeful that he would answer the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Tristan,” he sobbed his name in a harsh, relieved whisper; he was far from out of the woods, but suddenly he didn’t feel cut off from the world, didn’t feel quite so much like a caged animal waiting for the slaughter. “I—I opened a window—it was so hot—and—” There came another crash—this time from the door to his bedroom being flung open, he realized. His would be attacker was getting closer. “There’s someone—I locked the door, but—” He was quickly devolving into hysterics, much as he was trying to keep himself quiet.