by Leta Blake
Jason’s eyebrows rose. “Good to know. I think I’ll like living with you.”
Vale’s throat clicked as he swallowed.
“Stop flirting with your omega and get back to work,” Mox called from where he hacked at a thick set of overgrown vines. He glared at Jason through a hank of dark, dirty hair. “If you want this cleared by this afternoon, I need all the hands I can get.”
Jason called out, “I’m just negotiating lunch.”
“We’ll take ours out here. Right, boys?”
The other two betas nodded, not even looking up from where they cut, chopped, and tossed broken branches, dead bushes, and overgrown weeds into giant wheelbarrows.
“I’m eating inside,” Jason said, turning to face Mox. “And then I’ll be back out.” His long fingers gripped the windowsill.
Vale closed his eyes as a flash of his dream hit him again. Dream-Jason had known what he was doing, nailing his prostate with every twist of his fingers and working his omega glands expertly, but this Jason couldn’t know anything like that, could he? Had he even been with a beta? Wolf-god, he was going insane.
Mox huffed but only said, “If we don’t finish today, I’m guessing you’ll be giving us another day’s pay. Go ahead, I say. It’s your money.”
Jason turned back to Vale and teased, “Should I climb in here or…”
“Come around to the kitchen door in fifteen minutes,” Vale said, jerking his thumb toward the side of the house. “I’ll have sandwiches for everyone then.”
Luckily, Rosen had left behind leftovers and some staples, like bread, eggs, and milk, for Vale. If his friends didn’t look out for him, he didn’t know where he’d be in life. Hungry, for sure.
The brown bread was soft and easy to cut into sandwich slices. He slathered on some mayonnaise and dotted on mustard. The slices of leftover duck lay nicely over the bread, and the green spinach leaves gave a dash of healthiness to the offering. He rummaged around in his cabinet until he found the unopened bag of dried pineapple slices he’d been saving for a sweets craving, and put two on each plate.
He’d just finished when Jason’s knock came at the back door.
“Come in,” he called, and gathered three plates in his hands. He passed them out to the workers, who carried them toward the back yard with grunts of thanks.
“Don’t they need something to drink?” Vale asked, watching after them, while Jason tugged to get his dirty work boots off before stepping into the kitchen.
“They have thermoses.” Jason grunted as he pulled his second boot off. He stood with a grin and shut the door behind him.
The house felt quiet. A sense of alone fell hard. Vale’s breath tingled in his lungs. The bubbly fizzy feeling lingered as Jason gazed down at him, his eyes almost obscured by the swoop of his blond hair.
“I should wash my hands,” he said, but it sounded like seduction somehow. Gritty and full of lust.
Vale stepped back and motioned toward the sink. “I made sandwiches for us, too.” They sat on plates on the table, along with tumblers of cold water, waiting for them to sit down.
Jason didn’t say anything as he washed his hands thoroughly and then bent low over the kitchen sink, splashing his sweaty face with water. Vale’s stomach flipped, an undercurrent buzzing between them. He stood frozen, waiting.
Jason wiped his face with a kitchen towel Vale had left out on the counter, and then turned to him. “Come here.”
“Why?” Vale’s gut squirmed and his cock thickened.
“Just do it.”
Vale swallowed and took a step closer, his heart in his throat and skin prickling all over.
When he was close enough, Jason took hold of his chin gently. The room felt too small and too big at once, and so did his body. He wanted to run away, to lean up on his toes and take Jason’s full lips, or to dissolve into a quivery, slick-damp mess all over the kitchen. He almost didn’t care which, just so long as something happened.
“I’m going to kiss you,” Jason announced, steady and sure. “Do you have a problem with that?”
Where was his insecure baby alpha now?
“No.”
“No, you don’t have a problem, or—”
“I don’t have a problem with that.”
He was thirty-five and he’d kissed many men, but nothing prepared him for the sweetness of Jason’s lips on his. Soft and wet, determined but respectful, he felt the kiss in his toes, his dick, his gut, and his melting, aching, burning heart. His asshole gushed with slick, and Jason growled in reaction to the scent. Knees trembling, he wrapped his arms around Jason’s neck and held on, tasting him over and over.
When Jason pulled away, he rested his forehead on Vale’s, panting softly, his hard dick shoved tightly against Vale’s stomach. “That’s enough now.” His mouth was wet and red, and his chin was scrubbed shiny pink by Vale’s beard.
Vale thrummed with lust. His mind turned over a singular, wondrous question: how had his delicious, young alpha learned to kiss like that?
Jason’s chest shook with the beating of his heart, echoing Vale’s own inner pulsing.
“You taste so good,” Jason whispered, his eyes drawing down to Vale’s mouth. “Too good.”
Vale groaned, fisted his hands in Jason’s shirt, and shoved him back against the counter as he took his mouth again. Jason let him, and they moved against each other, hard and eager. Jason shook and moaned and then gripped Vale by the back of the neck, hauled him close, and kissed him until Vale’s knees buckled.
Holding Vale up with one arm around his waist, Jason broke free of the kiss. “You smell so good. Wet and open for me. So easy. So ready.”
“Always ready for you,” Vale answered, like he’d been programmed to say it.
Involuntary. Compulsory. True.
“Yes,” Jason hissed.
Vale’s hole quivered. “I need you.”
Jason’s fingers clenched the back of his neck hard and he squeezed his eyes shut tight. “Wait, hold on.”
Vale’s heart hammered. Was his baby alpha going to back out now? Get him riled up and then fail to plug his desperate, opening hole with his giant, hungry cock?
Wait…giant, hungry cock? Wolf’s-own lust, what was he thinking? He was already so far gone.
Jason gritted out. “We need to make a decision. A smart one.”
Vale hitched his hips against Jason’s, his dick aching and his asshole soaked. It was all he could do not to demand Jason fuck him now. “I can’t think when I can still taste your spit,” Vale whispered, licking his lips for any hint of more.
“Fuck,” Jason said, gazing down at him wide-eyed.
“But we shouldn’t…” He couldn’t even make himself truly protest. This was why they weren’t supposed to be alone.
“Turn around,” Jason said, flipping Vale to face the counter as he said the words.
It was hard and quick. Jason plastered himself against Vale’s back and kissed his neck, his ears, and rubbed the crotch of his work pants against Vale’s soft trousers, pressing against Vale’s ass.
Vale arched back against him, eager and ready for whatever Jason wanted to do. “Yes,” he moaned. “Please.”
Jason grunted, shoving his hard cock against Vale’s ass. He kissed Vale’s neck, sending shivery sweetness cascading over his skin. Then Jason cursed softly and ripped himself away from Vale.
“No,” Vale whimpered, gazing mournfully over his shoulder. “Come back.”
Jason shook his head. His eyes were glazed over and he panted, physically trembling, but he held himself away. “Let’s eat.”
Vale stayed braced against the counter with his cock thumping hard down the leg of his pants. “What?”
“Let’s eat now,” Jason said, voice gravelly, looking away from Vale and out the kitchen window onto the side lawn. “We’ll finish this at a better time.”
Vale turned around slowly to stare at him. “Are you insane? Or just an asshole?”
Jason laughed. “I�
��m trying to prove something to you. I can control myself. You’re making it hard, but I figure if this is a test, I’m going to pass it, even if it’s just barely.”
Vale blinked at him, utterly lust-addled. He stayed silent as Jason adjusted his cock and then gingerly moved to sit at the kitchen table. It took several stunned moments to join him there. When he did, Jason still had the haze of lust in his eyes, but he smiled hopefully.
“So we’re just going to eat now?” Vale hissed.
“Yes.” Jason picked up his sandwich and took a bite.
“You’re serious?”
Nodding, Jason chewed and swallowed. “Hey, this is good! Rosen didn’t do your sandwich skills justice.”
Ignoring the tease, he said, “Earlier you wanted to come inside and take me. Now that I’m willing you just stop?”
“Earlier I was going to take you up to your room and do it right,” Jason said calmly, though his neck was flushed.
Vale gritted his teeth.
“It’s a good thing I dosed up on more alpha quell before coming in here, huh?” Jason lifted a brow. “Or I’d have failed the test for sure.”
“It wasn’t a test.” Vale stood up, his body a livewire of denied arousal. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”
Jason nodded warily. “I know. Well, I mean, I know you wouldn’t do it on purpose, like in advance. But later, you’d be thinking about it, and you’d wonder how you could be with an alpha who took you for the first time in the kitchen, without care and preparation, and without following protocols.”
“I don’t give a shit about protocols,” Vale said, gripping the edge of the table hard. “I’m not the kind of man who could demand you follow them.”
Jason put his sandwich on the plate to give Vale his full attention. “That’s not true. You do care. You insisted from the beginning we follow them.”
“Because I was scared,” Vale admitted. The wood beneath his palms dug in sharply. “I didn’t know you.”
“And now you do?” Jason’s eyebrows rose.
He had a point.
Jason tried a grin. “I think you’re suffering from pheromone delirium, Professor Aman.”
Vale glared at him.
“Eat your lunch,” Jason said, nudging Vale’s untouched plate. “You need to keep your strength up for all that reading and napping you’ve still got to finish today.”
Vale snorted but didn’t take up his sandwich. “I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?”
Vale stood and waved toward the laundry room. His underwear was soaked again, and he wasn’t going to eat lunch with the annoying, slippery wetness a constant reminder of how Jason had led him on. “I need to change.”
“But I like the way you smell,” Jason said, his eyes hooding. “Knowing you’re wet for me, I like that.”
“You would.” Vale gritted his teeth and went to change his clothes.
He took a few minutes to clean himself up and get his head together, but when he returned to Jason and the table, his hands were still shaking when he picked up his sandwich. How long would Jason have this effect on him? Would his body calm down if he gave in to his desires, if they contracted and consummated? How long until they both relaxed into something more normal?
“So, what’s new?” Jason asked like he hadn’t just been the biggest tease in all of human history five minutes earlier.
Still on edge, Vale chewed his bite of sandwich and then shrugged. “Not much. I think I told you I saw Rosen the other day. He’s working on a new painting.”
“Oh, yeah. He’s an artist/chef/philosopher, right? Is he any good? At the art part, I mean.”
“In my opinion, yes, but everyone has their own tastes about art, of course.”
Jason popped a loose piece of spinach into his mouth. “I like abstract better than figurative. What does he do?”
“A bit of both.” Vale wasn’t hungry for food. He shoved his sandwich aside. “What draws you to the abstract in art?”
Jason cocked his head, thinking a bit. “Are you going to eat that?”
Vale shook his head.
“Do you mind if I…?”
His growing alpha had been working outside. Of course he was hungry. “Go right ahead.”
Jason took a big bite of his own sandwich and then added Vale’s to his plate. His chin was still pink from the scruff of Vale’s beard. “I guess I’m drawn to abstract over figurative because I spend a lot of time looking through microscopes, both at school in my studies, and at home for fun. Sometimes I pretend what I’m seeing is art. I try to imagine what it would be like to recreate the image in some other way. Sometimes I try. I wouldn’t call myself an artist but I do some drawing sometimes. What I see under the microscope is usually a mess, but an interesting mess. And that’s what I see in abstract art—the same things I see under the microscope. It’s the makings of the world, you know?”
Somewhere in that little speech, Jason had been adorable enough for Vale to forgive him for insisting on following protocols (after not at all following protocols). Maybe it was his sincerity or the way his eyes shone when he mentioned the microscope. Vale said, “I haven’t spent much time looking into microscopes. In fact, I’d say I haven’t looked into one since I graduated from Mont Juror all those years ago.”
Jason’s eyes lit up like sun on the sea. “Oh! I’ll have to show you my favorite slides sometime soon. I know you’d like them.”
Yes, it was the way he glowed. That was why Vale forgave him. That, and the knowledge deep down, beneath the lust, that Jason was right. If he’d taken him at the counter, Vale would have judged him harshly later for it. He was an asshole that way. And somehow, already, Jason knew that about him.
“Maybe if I showed you my favorite slides you’d write a poem about what you saw?” Jason swallowed hard. “Or maybe you wouldn’t. Either way is fine. But I’d like to show you, if you’d like to see.”
“I’d love to see. And maybe I will write a poem. ‘ode to jason and the art of science’. All lowercase letters, of course.”
“Of course.” Jason grinned. “Will you write a poem for me? Truly?”
“I’m sure I’ll end up writing one about you someday,” Vale said, cocking his head, curious at how eager Jason seemed for him to do it. “It seems unlikely I’d share this experience with you and not write about it at all.”
“Good.” Jason nodded sharply. “No matter what my father says about it, ignore him. It won’t go into the contract. I promise.”
Vale’s blood slowed, suspicion squirming in his gut. “No matter what your father says about what, exactly?”
“Oh, poetry. He doesn’t want you to write poems, especially about me. But I do. I want you to write loads of poems about me. Your best poems yet.” Jason’s nostrils flared, and he shot Vale a hot, possessive look. “So get to it whenever I inspire you. The sooner, the better. I don’t care what they say, either. You don’t have to flatter me. They can be ugly poems. Just make them as real as you can.”
Vale swallowed back a burst of laughter. “Oh, Jason. Wolf’s own hell, what am I supposed to make of you?”
“I don’t know. Figure it out. In a poem.” Jason grinned again, happily chewing on a dried pineapple ring. “When can I bring my microscope over and show you some of my slides?”
“Perhaps I can see them the next time I’m at your house. Wouldn’t that be easier?”
Jason’s nose crinkled and he darted a glance away.
“What?”
“I guess I could bring it downstairs to the conservatory or Father’s study. It would be easier than carting it across town. But…” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Vale studied Jason’s flop of hair and his flushing neck. “What are you worrying about?”
Jason shrugged. “It’s not important.”
Vale crossed his arms over his chest and fixed Jason with a glare that had him buckling within seconds.
“Fine. It’s silly. I can bring the micros
cope downstairs, but then my parents will be there and it won’t be private. If I bring it here, then we can look at it together without people around. I like it better when we’re alone. Don’t you?”
Aside from the way Jason had ramped him up and left him hanging, he did, yes. “I could come up to your room. If your parents don’t mind, that is. We could leave the door open so they’d feel more secure and—”
Jason huffed. “Do you leave the door open when you go to Urho’s room?”
Vale chewed on the inside of his lip for a moment, taking in Jason’s hunched shoulders, and the gleam of embarrassment in his eyes. “What does Urho have to do with your microscope?” he asked softly.
“Nothing.” Jason bit into the last of Vale’s sandwich ferociously, and then, with a heavy sigh, tossed the final bit onto the plate and pushed back. “My room is a kid’s room. I don’t want you to see it. You’ll think I can’t be an alpha to you.”
“For what it’s worth, I’ve never been to Urho’s room,” Vale said. “Not in his home here in town, anyway. From what I understand, he keeps it exactly as it was when his omega was alive.”
“His omega?”
“Riki. I never knew him. Urho was desperately in love with him. They were a bonded pair.”
Jason’s shoulders relaxed a little. “But he’s been in your room.”
“Are you jealous of Urho?”
“Yes, but I’m not going to lose control over it. And you can’t pretend to be surprised by that, because you already knew I was.”
Vale smiled. “I did.”
“I just don’t like that you think of me as a kid. Going into my room would only make that worse.”
“Maybe I want to see your room.” Vale reached out and took hold of Jason’s fingers, feeling their strength as he twined them with his own. “Look, nothing is going to make us the same age or even close. If you haven’t changed your room much then that’s because it still speaks to you, and I’d like to see it, just the way it is. You’re my alpha, and if I’m going to contract with you, there’s no use in pretending that you’re not nineteen and that you’re not exactly who you are, and who you have been.” Vale squeezed his fingers. “Because I can’t pretend that I’m not who I am and who I have been, either.”