Slow Heat

by Leta Blake

  “I do.”

  Wolf-god, did he ever. He needed it like breath.

  “Then know I find you appealing in ways I never thought I could.”

  Relief and a surge of lust flowed into him. He fumbled into his pocket and pulled out another little pill, popping it quickly.

  Vale frowned. “What’s that?”

  “Alpha quell,” Jason admitted shyly.

  “Fair enough.” Vale hesitated and stared at Jason like he was a wild thing. “Is it working?”

  “Yes.”

  Vale nodded slowly, then leaned against his desk and crossed his arms. “Stay outside and we’ll talk.”

  “Really?”

  “For a little while. You aren’t the only one who feels the pull of Érosgápe.”

  He wished he believed it, but Vale seemed so calm, and he felt so raw. He wanted to tug Vale into his arms and not let him go until he was sticky with sweat, saliva, and come. He didn’t get the impression Vale wanted the same thing at all.

  “How’s your morning been?” Jason asked softly, trying for something basic.

  “Lost my job. Gotta say, it’s not off to a great start.”

  “I promise you won’t have to ‘pay the price’ for this,” Jason said. “It’s not your fault I took so long to find you.”

  “You weren’t even born.”

  “I was, actually. You were sixteen when I was born, so that means that I was six when you needed me.”

  Vale’s hand twitched like he’d almost reached out to Jason but thought better of it. “And what would six-year-old Jason have done for twenty-two-year-old Vale?”

  “Given you hope? For some kind of future?”

  Vale’s eyebrows tightened, and Jason wished he could grab the words from the air. His shoulders hunched, and he cast his eyes down.

  “I had a future. Everything that happened until you appeared out of the blue yesterday afternoon was that future. It was my life.”

  “I’m sorry.” Jason looked up, hoping Vale would understand. “I only meant that maybe it would’ve been less painful for you. I don’t know anything about your life. I shouldn’t make guesses. My professors are always saying that learning is listening. I’ll get better at it. I promise.”

  Vale’s lips twisted. “You’re young, but, if that’s your attitude, we’ll manage.”

  “Will we?” Jason’s heart leapt into his throat.

  “There’s a lot to deal with and sort through, but you seem to have a good heart, Jason.” Vale’s body relaxed, and he smiled genuinely. “That makes me glad.”

  “I want you to be glad of everything about me.”

  “Omega persuasion,” Vale whispered with some derision.

  Jason blinked at the offensive term from his omega’s beautiful mouth, as well as the accusation that maybe Jason didn’t really mean these things.

  “Maybe. But isn’t that right? How it’s meant to be?” Jason asked.

  “Oh, you’re so young.”

  He’d come here to know his omega better, but now Vale grew more and more distant with almost every sentence out of Jason’s mouth.

  “What’s your favorite color?” he asked desperately. He wasn’t going to leave here totally empty handed.

  Vale humored him. “Blue.”

  “All blues? Or is there a particular shade?”

  Vale tilted his head in consideration, his lower lip tucking into his mouth. “Hold on. I have a piece of fabric, an old ribbon bookmark.”

  He moved deeper into the room, and Jason leaned against the windowsill, tempted to crawl in after him, to keep the distance between them the tolerable few feet it had been before. But he steadied himself and waited with his gaze glued to Vale as he sorted through a messy drawer in his desk and pulled out a strip of blue ribbon imprinted with a gold star on one side and words on the other.

  Vale brought it to the window, holding it up. “This blue.”

  “Deeper than a robin egg, but not cornflower, either.”

  “It’s called cerulean.”

  “Yeah?” Jason reached out to take the ribbon from him and Vale let him, carefully avoiding skin contact. The ribbon was soft and worn, but the color was still vibrant. The words read POET OF THE YEAR, and Jason traced them with his finger. “Did you win this?”

  “I did. My last year in Mont Juror.” Vale chuckled, and sweetness zipped up Jason’s spine. “The poem was entitled ‘when the sun sets on your skin’. It was terrible.”

  “No, you won!” Jason argued. “It must have been good.”

  “It was student work.”

  Jason smiled, his heart tripping. So Vale was hard on himself and a bit of a snob. He could handle that. That was good. That was information he could work with to gather more. “And you’re a professor now.”

  “Was, apparently.”

  Shit. Another misstep. He was an idiot. Vale would never believe Jason was actually intelligent at this rate.

  “Back to poetry,” he said hastily.

  “Yes, it’s much safer,” Vale said, a sarcastic but amused tone ruffling his words.

  “Chancellor Rory said you should write poems and publish them.”

  Vale rolled his eyes. “I’ve been publishing them for years.”

  “So I could buy them?”

  Vale’s cheeks paled a little. “I can’t stop you from it, but I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re personal.”

  “How?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  Jason’s feet were starting to hurt, and he wanted to crawl in the room and throw himself into one of the comfortable looking chairs. He leaned against the sill and shifted his weight. “Why?”

  “Wolf-god, you’re annoyingly persistent.”

  “I want to read them, but if you don’t want me to…then I feel torn. I want to know more about you, but I want to please you, too. One is the real me. The other one is instinct. Give the real me a reason not to go to the book store on my way home.”

  Vale’s jaw clenched and released like it had on the phone with Chancellor Rory when he’d been especially pissed off. “I’ve written and published poems about my experiences with heat, Jason. I’ve been through many heats since I came of age. Rarely alone.”

  Jason sucked in a breath and took a step back from the window.

  He’d known. Okay, so he hadn’t known, but Vale was thirty-five. There was no denying the implication. Not to mention the alpha he’d been with the day before had been covered in Vale’s scent. There was no way they hadn’t…even when there was no heat to be pacified.

  “Oh,” he said.

  Vale stared at him coldly, measuring Jason’s response. “And?”

  “And what?”

  “Do you understand what that means?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why you shouldn’t read my poems.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “You look like you’re going to pass out or run away.”

  Jason put up his chin. “I’m progressive. I believe in in omega rights.”

  Vale sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose again. “You’re so damn young. What am I going to do with you?”

  “And you’re so damn condescending, what am I going to do with you?” Jason snapped, irritation at being so easily dismissed charging out of his mouth.

  Vale stared at him a moment and then threw back his head in laughter.

  Jason half wanted to do just as Vale had suggested and run away. “What?”

  “If we can both get past how incredibly strange this is, I think we could learn to like each other, Jason Sabel.”

  Jason crossed his arms over his chest and stood his ground. The scent of mint wafted to him from beneath his feet. “What’s your favorite dessert?”

  “Cherry tart. Yours?”

  “Rhubarb pie.”

  “Oh, my. That’s sour. You must have a very sweet heart. That’s what my pater always said: a taste for sour foods reveals the sweetest h
eart.”

  “Is your pater…?”

  “They’re both long gone. It’s just me in the world.”

  “Not anymore.” Jason approached the window again to reach one hand inside, palm up. “I’m here now.”

  Vale slowly crossed from his desk, his eyes on Jason like he couldn’t quite trust him, and then he gently pressed Jason’s hand back out the window.

  “Yes. You’re very much here and you shouldn’t be.” He smiled kindly. “You should go home now. Or else I’ll have to call your parents, and neither of us really want that.”

  Then he lowered the sash and shut the curtains, leaving Jason alone in the garden.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Where have you been?”

  Father jerked Jason in through the front hallway and toward the back of the house where Pater liked to relax and listen to music on their newfangled record player.

  Dressed in crisp dark pants and a white shirt, Father looked like he was ready for business. In the conservatory, though, Pater was reclining on the navy leather sofa, wearing his softest pants, an old t-shirt from a trip to the zoo when Jason was nine, and slippers. He was smoking, too. That was never a good sign.

  Smoking meant Pater was upset.

  Smoking meant Father was going to get worried.

  “Hey,” Jason said weakly, as Father dragged him deeper into the room.

  Neat and tidy, with every book and sheet of music filed alphabetically by author or composer, the conservatory was masculine but soft. Comfortable blankets draped over the backs of padded leather chairs and the sofa, and the windows and glass door opened out to a well-tended garden, bursting with robust autumn flowers and warm with fading leaves. Three guitars, a piano, a violin, and a tall, thin drum that produced a soothing tone when patted were all on prominent display.

  The solid wood side tables and large card table, mainly used for sorting through Pater’s music, leant a thick stability to the room, and the radio and record player had places of honor on a sideboard next to the piano Pater sometimes played.

  A flat circle of thick vinyl spun on the record player, and the music drifting from the horn was lyric-less and moody, some dark piece with violin and piano combined. It didn’t bode well, so Jason was unsurprised Pater looked even more fragile than usual when he leaned up on one elbow and focused his worried hazel eyes toward them.

  “Where have you been?” Pater whispered, a tired echo of Father’s earlier demand. He sat up slowly, in obvious physical pain, his cigarette dangling from two fingers.

  Jason winced. “Are you okay, Pater?”

  Pater ignored him. “Did you go harass that man?”

  “I didn’t harass him. I only—”

  Pater’s eyes flickered. “So you did go to him?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Did you assault him?”

  “What?” Jason blinked in shock.

  “Did you touch him? In any way?”

  “No.” Jason swallowed hard, a thunderclap of hurt rolling in him. “I wouldn’t…I’d never…”

  Pater reached in his pocket before holding out the pill Jason had abandoned on his bedside table. “The dose we left for you was the right amount, Jason. Anything less and…” He raised his brows, letting the implication dangle.

  “I’d never hurt him. Never.”

  Pater measured him carefully with his eyes and then glanced over Jason’s shoulder to Father. After shrugging at whatever he saw there, he took a drag from his cigarette and turned to Jason again. “Sit down.”

  Father moved into his usual ‘Jason’s in trouble’ position. He stood solidly behind Pater, hands on the back of the sofa, his shoulders broad, as though guarding Pater against some threat, and facing Jason with all the alpha authority he could muster. It seemed unfair—two against one.

  “I didn’t do anything bad,” Jason said, as he took his place in the stuffed wingback ‘punishment’ chair—so called because it was where he’d been steered for lectures ever since he was child. “I only talked to him.”

  Pater threw up his hands, cigarette ash breaking off and falling onto his t-shirt. “You went and disturbed that man’s peace? Out of the bounds of protocol?”

  “I wanted—”

  “You probably scared him to death, you realize.” Pater sucked at his cigarette. “An imprinted alpha showing up on his doorstep with wolf-god only knows what intentions! He probably—”

  “I just wanted to talk to him.” The words burst out painfully.

  “And did you?” Father asked, waving away Pater’s exhaled smoke with a grimace.

  “Yes.”

  “And how did that go?” Father’s eyes narrowed.

  “He was…fine with it.” Jason squirmed, stubborn defiance warring with a hint of shame. Maybe he had scared Vale—all right, there was no maybe about it—but it’d turned out fine in the end, hadn’t it?

  “Start talking,” Father said, rubbing Pater’s shoulders.

  Pater shrugged off the touch and then leaned to stub his cigarette out on the brass plate kept on the side table for that purpose.

  Jason frowned. “Let me tell you the whole story before you talk over me, okay? Hear me out.”

  Pater waved his hand like he was being extraordinarily gracious to let Jason speak. Biting back the irritation, Jason cleared his throat and began. He told them about waking up and realizing they weren’t going to treat him like an adult.

  “Just like now,” he pointed out. “I knew it would be this way. You aren’t going to tell me the real things I need to know about Vale. You’re going to try to decide for me—what I want, what I should contract for, what’s important. That’s not all right with me.”

  “You don’t trust us to have your best interests at heart?” Father said, surprise and hurt flashing on his face.

  “Of course, I do. But my best interests aren’t what I’m interested in. What are his best interests? What does he want? Who even is he, really, underneath all those stupid facts the investigator is going to dig up?”

  Pater sighed and rubbed at his forehead. “Jason, you can’t just go to this man’s house and demand entrance.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You’ve already admitted you did.”

  “No. I didn’t! I talked to him through the window.”

  “Wolf-god. Talked to him through a window. The man must have been terrified.”

  “He seemed okay, actually. Most of the time. I mean, he was scared at first, but then he realized I wasn’t going to force myself on him.” Jason felt a trickle of sweat on his forehead and rubbed it away. “He trusted me enough to talk to me for a while.”

  But not enough to take hold of his proffered hand.

  Jason could still feel the tingle of where Vale’s fingers had pushed against his knuckles, making him retreat so he could close the window.

  “And what did you learn about him?” Father asked softly.

  Jason hesitated. He wasn’t about to tell them what Vale had said about his poems—or about the heats he’d gone through with surrogate alphas. Though he supposed it was only a matter of time before the private investigator gave his parents that information anyway.

  “He likes the color blue. This blue.” He pulled the ribbon from his pocket, smiling at the memory of Vale shifting through his messy desk drawer looking for it. “And he’s a terrible housekeeper. Which is fine. I’ll hire someone.”

  “Oh, Jason,” Pater whispered.

  “And he has moss-green eyes, and really beautiful lips. But when he laughs it’s like bells play up my spine, and—” he broke off, unwilling to say things that could be construed as romantic or sexual. His parents were all too ready to write his opinions off to the effects of imprinting anyway. “He’s angry that he’s been asked to leave the university.”

  “He told you that?” Father asked.

  “No, I overheard, and he knew I overheard.”

  “It’s a shame, but—”

  Jason interrupted Father. “I promised he
wouldn’t have to pay that price. Can you get Chancellor Rory to let him be reinstated?”

  “No.” Father rubbed his hands over his head, sending his blond hair askew. “Son, you can’t be on campus with him until you’re completely bonded. That goes beyond the consummation of an imprint, beyond a contract. You must be fully Érosgápe, bonded, you realize. It’d be too dangerous for you and your classmates otherwise.”

  “I’m not going to go insane because a random alpha—”

  “It’s nonnegotiable.

  “And you’ll be living at home until…” Pater shook his head.

  “Until this is all settled,” Father finished for him.

  “I have to live here at home? Why?”

  “Because obviously you can’t be trusted not to scamper off to your omega’s house. We can’t put that responsibility on the university. We’ll have to deal with you ourselves.”

  “You can’t keep me here like a prisoner. I’m not a child.”

  “No, but you’re not ready for this, Jason.” Pater darted a glance at Father, a request for backup, and Father squeezed Pater’s shoulders reassuringly but was flung off again.

  Sighing, Father moved to sit down in the chair next to Jason instead. “Miner is right. Your body is going to crave him like a drug, and you’ll give in to that desire without close supervision.”

  “Xan can watch out for me.”

  “Xan is even more of a child than you are, and absolutely not,” Father snapped.

  “But—”

  “No,” Pater said quietly, blowing smoke in a long stream. “There’ll be no further discussion of it.”

  Jason clenched his teeth. “Xan and I have plans. Back when we were fourteen years old, we swore we’d be roommates at university. He needs me.”

  “Your attachment to Xan will lessen as things settle with your omega,” Pater said, a hint of knowing his voice that made Jason wonder if he guessed some of the things Xan and Jason did together.

  More smoke drifted up toward the high ceiling, curling and shifting in the air. It smelled like sadness to Jason.

  “If things settle with this omega,” Father muttered.