Slow Heat

by Leta Blake

Heading up the walk, he studied his house objectively. What would Jason think of it? How long would he be allowed to keep it once they contracted? If they contracted? The front yard was tidy enough, he hired out for that, but the back and sides looked like an unruly mess. Jason would likely want to sell it. He couldn’t blame him.

  Vale stopped in his tracks at that thought, remembering the house in earlier years. His pater had been much better at housekeeping than he was and everything had always looked fresh and bright. He studied the oak tree by the fence, remembering his father’s strong arms swooping him up to the lowest branch, and his pater’s voice calling out, “Climb carefully, baby. There’s only one of you in the whole wide world.”

  Life had seemed so easy before his parents had passed away. This house was all he had left of them. But if they contracted and Jason wanted to sell the place, he had no legal right to object.

  Vale swallowed down the tightness in his throat and headed inside.

  Jason fiddled with the microscope slide, attempting a wet mount of a droplet of wine. Usually it was easy enough, but he felt unfocused and his fingers were clumsy. He resented the cool alpha quell running through him. Missing Vale already felt like a sickness deep inside, but at the same time, he’d been glad to see him go.

  The night had been awkward and strange, and he hadn’t been alone in that assessment. He’d been able to tell through subtle changes in scent and expression that Vale had been uncomfortable at times, too. It wasn’t right. None of this was how it was supposed to be. Érosgápe were supposed to fit perfectly from the start, right? Did the age difference between them really matter so much?

  He sighed and pressed his thumbs against his eyes. He would be strong. Be the alpha Vale deserved.

  Jason consulted his biology book again for the directions on making a wet mount. He’d done it plenty of times before, but he just couldn’t seem to get it right tonight. Frustrated when he read the same sentence for the sixth time, he leaned back in his chair and looked around his room.

  What would Vale think of it? The walls held framed paintings of sailboats Pater had chosen for him when he was moved from the nursery into this room as a boy. In addition, fluttering on the walls were pictures he’d drawn of the wonders he’d found beneath his microscope lens and the occasional life drawing he’d made while bored in the park or while waiting in Father’s office at Sabel Motor Parts or the shipping yard. Childish things in Vale’s eyes, he was sure.

  Vale’s own bedroom was probably the one he’d spotted with the lace curtains billowing in the breeze. He’d have his own furniture, chosen himself, and paintings on the walls he’d specifically bought to his own taste. To suit himself. Because he hadn’t needed to suit anyone else. And there probably wasn’t a single hand-drawn fluttering bit of paper taped up anywhere. Or if there was, it was probably one of his own handwritten poems made up of devastating words and sharp little sentences that tore into the reader with meaning and light.

  Vale was a marvel, and Jason had so little to offer him that was his own. He squeezed his eyes shut. Why did he have to be so young? Why hadn’t he been born when Vale needed him? Then they could have grown up together, developed their tastes as one, and lived the entirety of their lives, side by side.

  The slide he still held slipped from his sweaty hand and landed on the rug, smearing the carpet with a small red stain. He stared at it morosely before gripping the stem of the full wine glass on his desk and taking a large swallow. He’d stolen it from the bar when his parents were distracted paying the beta help in the kitchen. Drinking interfered with alpha quell—but it also interfered with unwanted thoughts of his inadequacy, so he took another big swallow.

  He remembered Vale putting on his coat at the end of the night, the musky smell of his slick entirely dried up. The night air had rushed into the foyer through the open door, stealing the sweetness of his skin away from Jason, too. He’d been so proud when Vale had produced slick on sight and then he’d been humiliated as it’d dried up over the evening. Of course he’d been unable to hold Vale’s thrall as his alpha. He shouldn’t be surprised by that. He’d barely spoken to the man.

  He closed his eyes and remembered the worst moment right at the end.

  Father had thanked everyone for coming as he shook everyone’s hands. Pater had followed suit, but Jason had hung back, unsure of himself. Vale had wrapped his scarf around his neck, obscuring his beautiful throat, and then turned to Jason to say with a sad smile, “It’s been a pleasure.”

  Jason slammed his fist against his desk remembering. He hadn’t been enough. He should have been dashing and strong. He should have told Vale that he had…that he wanted…wolf-god, he still didn’t know what he should have said to the man, but it should have been something.

  Vale’s guests had made noise about how it had been a lovely evening and they’d enjoyed themselves immensely. Lies. It’d been weird and strange, and every single one of them knew what a little twit he was now. It was horrible to imagine what they might have said about him to Vale on their drive home. Even now they might be with him, filling his ears about how Jason wasn’t old enough to give Vale the life he deserved.

  The sole good thing about the way the evening had ended had been when Vale had turned to Father and said, “We can start negotiations when you’re ready. There’s nothing more I need to know before moving ahead.”

  But then Father had ruined it by saying, “I should warn you that there are several items I won’t budge on.”

  Vale’s eyes had gone inhumanly cold. Jason felt his heart shrivel just remembering that look. “Then I should warn you of the same.”

  Jason’s breath came raggedly remembering his father’s stern glare and irritable growl. Jason had instinctively stepped between them but remained silent. For that small bit of gallantry, he’d been rewarded by Vale’s genuine smile, and the soft touch of two fingers on his own. “Thank you, Jason. It’s been a lovely evening.”

  Jason groaned, his cock growing hard against his leg. Such a small touch, but it’d burned into his memory. He could still feel the tingle on his knuckles. No other man could ever be satisfying again. He pressed the heel of his hand to his dick, closing his eyes and imagining Vale was there.

  Instantly, he cringed. No, Vale couldn’t be here in this room so full of Jason’s boyhood. Better to imagine them in Vale’s room instead. The fantasy shadows of Vale’s bedroom seeped into his mind, calming him.

  In Vale’s room, he could take and own and claim without worry or shame. There was nothing of his past there. It would be just the two of them.

  But just as he moved to unbutton his pants and free his cock, he froze. Urho had been in Vale’s room. Taken him there. Seen him exhibit lordosis behavior, heard him beg for a knot, and satisfied his needs. Urho had helped his Vale, his own omega, through heat.

  He growled and pressed his head into his hands.

  Ridiculous, Pater had called this reaction in alphas. Even Father had agreed jealousy was primitive and undesirable in a modern man. And yet Jason hated the idea of Urho’s hands on Vale. Hated Urho. Hated how much he hated him.

  What if Urho was there now? What if he was touching Vale, pleasuring him, while Jason sat alone and tortured in his room? They weren’t contracted. Vale might not care a whit for the protocols. He might not care at all that they were Érosgápe.

  Jason bit back a scream. Desperate, he grabbed his wine, tossed all of it down, and shuddered as the burn battled the cool of alpha quell in his veins.

  He couldn’t stand it. He wouldn’t stand it. He had to make sure.

  Heart hammering, he slid the window over the roof open and put one foot out.

  At the sharp knock on his door, he jumped and bumped his head against the window frame. How could his parents have possibly known what he was planning?

  “Jason? There’s a phone call for you.”

  Father’s voice sounded annoyingly smug to Jason’s ears. How could Father sound so calm when Jason’s insides were shred
ding apart?

  Father went on cheerfully. “You can take it in my study.”

  “I don’t want to talk to anyone.” He was sick of the calls from his school pals trying to ferret out gossip about his situation.

  Father laughed. “I think you’ll want to talk to this person.”

  Jason rolled his eyes, took a deep breath of the cool night air, and pulled his foot back inside. “Tell Xan I’ll return his call tomorrow.”

  “It’s Vale, son,” Father said with an amused huff. “Come on down and speak with him.”

  Vale.

  His heart leapt and his knees went weak. “Yeah, um, hold on. Just a second.”

  He paced over to the mirror by his closet and looked himself over. His pants were wrinkled, his shirt a mess, and his hair scrubbed every which way. Unacceptable. He patted desperately at his hair and tried to hold back the excitement inching up his throat.

  The door opened and his father peered in at him, laughing. “It’s a phone call, son. He won’t have any idea what you look like. Calm down.”

  Jason ran his hand over his hair one last time and darted past his chuckling father and down the stairs, practically running to the study. After shutting and locking the door, he collapsed into the large leather chair behind his father’s massive wooden desk, before gripping the phone receiver in one hand.

  “Hello?”

  Could he have sounded more breathless and wild? Probably not. He cleared his throat and prepared to try again with a more even, steady tone, when Vale spoke.

  “Are you surprised to hear from me tonight, Jason?”

  The buzz of his name in Vale’s mouth zipped up his spine. “A little. But I’m glad, too. I think. I mean, I don’t know why you called. Maybe I shouldn’t be glad.” He was babbling like an idiot. “I hope I should be glad?”

  “I’m not calling with bad news if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Oh, good.” Jason clunked his forehead down on the desk and rolled it back and forth. Wolf-god help him, he was a failure at this. A total failure.

  The wine climbed through his veins, undoing the alpha quell’s work a little more with each breath. He was too hot; he unbuttoned the top of his shirt so he could breathe better.

  “We had so little privacy tonight.” Vale’s voice was delicious. Jason wanted an entire bathtub filled with it so he could luxuriate in that honey for hours. “Do you agree?”

  “Yes,” Jason said, his heart lurching. “Did you want privacy with me?”

  Vale laughed. “It would be imprudent to be entirely alone right now. But I did wish I’d had more of a chance to speak with you one-on-one. I don’t know that we exchanged more than pleasantries all night.”

  “I wanted to talk with you, but Pater kept interfering. I think he wanted you all to himself.”

  Vale hummed. “Omegas do enjoy each other’s company more often than not. There’s a certain shared experience that comes from being sent away to omega schools so young, among other things.”

  Other things like heat. Submission. Pregnancy. All things an alpha couldn’t ever truly know or understand.

  “I read your poems. The ones Pater gave me.”

  “I know, we discussed it earlier.”

  “Not really. You just found out that I’d read them, but we didn’t talk about them.”

  “Do you want to talk about them now?”

  “Yes,” Jason said, ecstatic with the opportunity to pose the questions he’d longed to ask when he’d read the poems alone on the roof.

  “All right. What would you like to know?”

  “Have you truly seen a whale at sea, or was that something you wrote from your imagination?”

  Whales had been nearly extinct for so long that sightings were unbelievably rare. Jason didn’t know if he’d ever met someone who’d seen one with their own eyes.

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I could picture it so perfectly with your words that I thought for sure you must have seen it. But then I remembered how impossible it is to describe my favorite microscope slides to Xan. I can’t ever find the words for what I see. So I end up just making him look for himself. So maybe it’s easier to make up words for something you imagine than to describe something you’ve experienced yourself.”

  “Xan is your friend from the library?”

  Did he hear a hint of jealousy?

  “Yes, he’s been my roommate since high school, and we’d planned to room together at university. But I guess not anymore.”

  “I see. He wasn’t at your house tonight,” Vale said slowly. “I was asked to bring my closest friends. I’d have liked to meet yours, too.”

  “Yes, well.” Jason’s mind tumbled. How to explain what was happening with Xan? He couldn’t tell Vale the truth. “He’s…We…I don’t know. Maybe you’ll meet him soon? I can’t promise, though. It’s complicated.”

  “So much about this situation is,” Vale murmured. “To answer your question, I’ve never seen a whale, but I’ve read about them from recovered Old World texts, and when I was a young boy my pater took me to a theater showing a salvaged Old World film of whales in the southern seas.”

  “Really?” Jason’s inner scientist perked up. “There were so many animals that went extinct before and after the Great Death. It’s amazing to see old photographs of them. I can’t imagine how compelling a film of so rare an animal might be.”

  “I can ask Professor Bitar about it. He’s a friend of mine who presides over the film archives at the university. If there’s a copy in their vaults, he’d know about it.”

  “But will he show it to me?” He opened a few more buttons on his shirt, still feeling hot and shivery all at once. Vale’s voice seemed to do that to him, especially with the liquor beating up the alpha quell quite handily. “I’m just a first year, and I don’t have a good reason to ask him about it other than curiosity.”

  “Intellectual curiosity should always be rewarded. I can put in a good word for you, of course, and I can’t see why he’d say no. You’d have to make some effort, too.”

  “Oh, I will,” Jason agreed heartily.

  Vale released a soft sound that went straight to Jason’s dick. He squirmed as he grew hard again, and he pressed the receiver to his ear, trying to capture Vale’s every breath.

  “Was there anything else you wanted to know about my poems?”

  “‘Snowflake burn in heat of night’. That was a reference to alpha quell, wasn’t it?”

  “Did it seem like it was?”

  “Yes, because the speaker in the poem is really into viscosity and so-called ‘slippery slopes’, but he’s held back from it all by this snowflake burn. Cold burn. That’s how it feels at first, slipping into my veins, chilling me from the inside out. I think Pater just didn’t get the symbolism.”

  Vale laughed. Jason gripped the edge of the desk as lust roared in him. He breathed through it, edging open his pants to let his cock pop out to the cooler air of his father’s study.

  “Well, I’d like to say you’re reading into things, but, yes, it was a poem featuring lines from a friend’s description of his first experience of alpha quell.”

  “So it’s about sex.”

  Vale laughed again. “Yes, in many ways, almost all of them are.”

  “I knew it! The lines in ‘viscount, are you dreaming?’ with the cherries and the burst of flavor over the tongue is described as ‘pumping summer’s glory’ are totally about oral sex. Tell me I’m right.”

  “You’re right.”

  Jason went a little lightheaded and he squeezed his eyes close. “Wolf-god, you’re a filthy man.”

  Vale purred, “Is that terrible?”

  “No, I love it.”

  Vale choked quietly, his breath coming in strange gasps. “Darling, are you hard?”

  Jason stared down at his throbbing, red dick with pre-come slipping from the head. He gripped his fist around it, squeezing until another drop slipped down the side. “Yes,�
�� he growled. “And I’ve got my dick in my hand.”

  Why had he said that? Vale would probably be offended and end the call. What kind of out-of-control alpha was he that—

  “Jason, I’m hard, too, and I’m unbuttoning my pants now.”

  Holy wolf-in-heaven, was this happening? Was this actually happening?

  “What’s it look like?” Jason asked, needing to know. “Tell me. Now.”

  “Mm, well, it’s not terribly thick, but it’s longer than average.”

  Jason whimpered. “Yeah?”

  “And I’m cut like they used to do to so many boys in the Old World before the Great Death.”

  “Why?” Jason’s cock thudded against his palm, arousal undeterred by this news.

  “Childhood issue. The foreskin was too tight and wouldn’t draw back. It was deemed for the best.”

  “Huh.” Jason closed his eyes, holding the receiver tight against his ear. He tried to picture a cock without foreskin. He’d heard of such a thing but never seen it.

  “Does that seem strange to you?” Vale sounded—could it be?—vulnerable, and Jason rushed to reassure him.

  “I can’t wait to see it.”

  Vale moaned. “I hope you like it.”

  “Do you? Really?” Jason grunted and had to bite his cheek to keep from falling over the edge.

  “You sound wonderful, darling. You sound like you’re about to come for me.”

  “You’ll come for me first,” Jason gritted out. It was an order, because that was how it was done. Omegas first, alphas second, and he wasn’t the kind of man to fail his omega even over the telephone.

  “Will I?”

  “Yes.”

  Vale whimpered. “Oh, I think I might.”

  “You will.” Jason closed his eyes, listening to the heavy breathing on the other end of the line. His balls ached, and he was ready to come as soon as he’d secured his omega’s pleasure.

  “Talk to me,” Vale whispered, strained and breathless. “I’m so slick and wet for you.”

  “You want to make your alpha proud, don’t you?”

  “Yes!”

  “Then come for me,” Jason muttered. “Now. Let me hear you.”