by N. J. Lysk
Iesu followed him up, raising his hands at the same time as he got upright, like his abdominal muscles allowed him to move in any direction he liked independently of gravity. He wisely didn’t try to move from his position next to headrest, though. “Okay, let’s look at who is saying this to you.” He pointed at Sergi.
Ray snorted. “And you want me to believe it’s the same thing?”
“Yes, we bonded, that means we cannot leave,” Iesu said simply.
“It does mean you can make yourself a house down the road and come visit me,” Ray pointed out. “It does mean you don’t have to keep sleeping with him.” Ray had known he was right, but watching Iesu’s expression crumble didn’t give him any satisfaction. He let himself lower his eyes to concentrate on keeping his breathing even.
He felt a tentative hand on his arm, just fingertips patiently waiting for their welcome. He froze, angry and sad, and so fucking lonely. He knew he was right; he’d known all along… but he wanted what they had. More than anything. Maybe even more than freedom. But it was a catch-22, because freedom was what you needed for real love. To choose someone, you had to be able not to choose them.
He hadn’t chosen them, not really. But he could choose this much, he could take the comfort they offered. He turned into Sergi’s body, felt his strong arms surrounding him, supporting him, as he sobbed. He had lost control of his breathing from one exhalation to the next and now he was shaking, tears running down his face and into the bare skin of Sergi’s shoulder. His alpha didn’t react at all, like he couldn’t even feel it. He just held Ray firm, a solid point in a world that wouldn’t stop changing, where the foundations of his life crumbled like primary school art projects and nobody seemed to understand…
At some point, Iesu got him some tissue, and later, when Ray could breathe enough to drink it, water. He had got another bunch to clean up Sergi, who didn’t even look his way as his lover dried the mess Ray hoped was only tears. Ray remembered Sergi’s ability to focus from when they’d been boys intent on getting the other to concede defeat over every little thing. Now there was no anger in the alpha’s expression, but it was even more intimidating to be looked at that closely in concern. Sergi was really looking at him, not at some built-up image of who he was.
“I didn’t realise,” he said. Ray shrugged. He didn’t have the energy to tell him that he hadn’t realised what it meant to be an omega before he had become one. But Sergi continued, “That you were this unhappy. I thought… the pregnancy was hard of you, that you were scared of what your body could do. And I got that, as much as I can, because it’s miraculous, but if it was happening to me…”
Ray looked up in surprise. He wanted to speak, in anger perhaps. How could anybody not realise? He still remembered the first months after he had been given to them: the sheer bleakness of his first time, the deep dragging knowledge of the babies inside him…
“I thought you were better,” Iesu said, dispirited, from where he was standing beside the bed. “You’ve been laughing more since the babies were born, you don’t even seem to mind if we see you breastfeed them now.”
Ray flinched at the word, too worn-down to hide it now. And what was the point anyway? Hiding his pain had got him into this mess in the first place. Iesu made a small, hurt noise. Ray kept his gaze away from him, not wanting to see the pity on his face, having enough with his own pain.
“You do mind,” Iesu said. “Why would—?”
Ray sighed. “I knew this was coming.”
“This?” Sergi asked. “Sex?”
“Yes. Hard to… can’t really have it dressed.”
“So you’ve been letting us see you like that because…” Iesu said in a strangled voice.
Ray shrugged, consciously trying not to hunch over to hide his chest. “It’s my life, Iesu, I’ve got get used to it.”
“Get used to it?” Iesu repeated. “You don’t have to get used to us! If you don’t like something—”
Ray sighed, heavily. “You can’t possibly believe that. Do the maths, let’s say everything goes well; I’ve got… two more months before I go into heat, eight months until I…” The words dried in his mouth, but he made himself finish the sentence. “Till we have another litter.”
That gave Iesu enough of a pause that Ray glanced up at him. He looked stunned for a long moment, then he spoke, “So what? If you don’t want us to look, we won’t.”
Ray thought about Gabriel doing a lot more than looking. It’d felt good. Physically. He was grateful to Gabriel for stopping, but he also couldn’t help but feel like he’d done something wrong. He should have wanted it. He could want it, he only had to grit his teeth long enough for it to stop feeling so wrong. Once, getting fucked had felt like that. And now he had just had these two men inside him and he was managing a very intense conversation with them. He had enjoyed it; he’d learned to enjoyed it. That was the life he wanted, not one he had suffer through.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he tried to explain. “I don’t want… some things are going to be too… They’re going to keep happening, for a long time. If I’m afraid of everything… I don’t think I can live like that.”
He didn’t need to look at Iesu to know he’d lost all traces of his usual smile. “So you’re just going to grit your teeth and… what? Think of England?”
Ray met his alpha’s eyes with open defiance, too angry to be pulled back by the wolf. “Yes,” he said. “I will grit my teeth until I get used to it, and then it’ll stop being a big deal. That’s how life works, Iesu, and I don’t have time for idealism.”
“You are going to say yes to them,” Sergi said suddenly, voice full of anger and horror.
Ray startled, turning to him, suddenly unsure, but then he remembered what he had just said. “I will do what I have to do.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Sergi insisted, leaning forward to take hold of Ray’s wrist.
Ray froze, but he didn’t think Sergi knew it for what it was: the omega wolf reacting to its alpha. It wasn’t an actual demand, thankfully, so with an effort, Ray could talk again. He hesitated, but foolish as it was, he didn’t want to undermine their efforts. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told Josh; find me a solution that gets more adults into the pack without it.”
He clenched his fist until his nails dug into his palm, using the pain to pull away from the lulling effects of Sergi’s touch. To his surprise, Sergi’s hold loosened as he turned to Iesu. Ray caught the look their shared out of the corner of his eye, but couldn’t interpret it. “What?”
“Well,” Sergi said. “If you are looking for a guy that can charm people into wanting to be in our tiny pack without asking for a lot…”
Ray looked at Iesu, too. “What does he mean?”
Iesu’s eyes were darker than ever. “He means we will try,” he replied, and Ray didn’t need a map to understand that Iesu didn’t want to tell him what the plan was, for whatever reason. He had never seen him so far from a smile before, but he’d never seen him try and solve a serious problem before. He didn’t want to hope, but his heart stuttered anyway.
Chapter 4
Ray had left them to it and gone in search of Josh, firmly keeping his mind on the corridor he was traversing and the possible ways to decorate it to make it look like a home before the kids started noticing those sorts of things. He’d have to talk to his mum about it. Despite how little money there had always been to go around, their place looked cosy.
He found Josh in his own room, lying on the bed and getting his hair played with—read: pulled—by Maria’s tiny hands as he lay on his side, facing the door. Ray wondered if Josh had been expecting him. If he had, he’d got distracted in the meantime because it took him a moment to look up from where he was petting Jamie’s light brown fur. It'd only been about a month since the babies had figured out they could control their own shifting, and at the beginning if one of them shifted, the others had tended to follow—but not anymore. They were becoming their own people, Ray realised
, heart squeezing at the thought. He could barely stomach the idea of them not needing him around all the time, even if part of him longed for the freedom.
Josh's face brightened from his casual smile into true pleasure at the sight of Ray, like… He had seen that before, he could admit that, it didn’t hurt anything to admit that. But that being true didn’t make anything else possible, not as things stood. He shook himself out of it and blocked the door with his foot to keep Sasha inside before crouching to pick her up. She shifted back into a baby, and he had to scramble to get a hold on her as Josh laughed from the bed—beautifully lazy and completely entrancing. With his daughter secured, Ray raised his eyes to his friend.
“Did Alec…?” he asked, trailing off in hopes he wouldn’t need to say more.
Josh looked at him blankly for such a long moment that Ray thought he would have to ask. Then his face flushed, his eyes widened, and he straightened up so fast Maria lost her hold and fell back on the bed. Josh was ready to catch her, turning his upper body around without disturbing the sleeping boy next to him, and she ended up laughing when she bounced on the mattress. After checking she was not going to roll off in a fit of hilarity, he turned to Ray.
“Ray...” he breathed out the name like it was a spell.
Ray looked down at Sasha's dark hair, rubbing her back to keep her from squirming. “We can go to your room,” he offered. It was probably best, anyway, since the babies had grown used to napping on the huge bed in his own bedroom.
“I—Should we get… I don’t know, Alec?”
Ray cursed himself, silently but viciously. Why hadn’t he asked someone else to come over? He shook his head and pulled out his phone. He hesitated for a moment, then texted Iesu with his free hand. Sasha tried to cling to him when he put her down on the bed, as if she could sense his distress.
“No, stay,” Ray said firmly, and straightened. Josh sneaked a hand between them and tickled her, distracting her long enough for Ray to take a step back.
“I’ll come to you in a bit,” he told Ray, not looking up from the giggling babies. And Ray didn’t even answer before he got out of there. He met Iesu at the door, but the alpha just nodded and walked around him.
&
Ray considered undressing, but if he had felt uncomfortable about the others seeing his chest, it’d be even worse with Josh. Josh wouldn’t push, or even mention it. Hell, Josh must have needed Ray as badly as the others—if not worse since it’d been longer—and he had never let it show at all.
He couldn’t help but wonder where Josh’s self-control came from. He’d been the first to offer to mate Ray, after all, so it couldn’t be lack of interest, could it? But of course it was easy for an alpha to be interested in an unmated omega; all that was needed was the most basic of mating instincts. That was why sexual orientation was not considered a problem when it came to male omegas. You didn’t need to have any interest in males the rest of the time to want an omega in heat, and afterwards… Ray knew how alphas justified it: male omegas weren’t really men anymore, not when they were bred, when their bodies softened with the curves of pregnancy and breastfeeding, when they submitted just like a woman would. Nobody had ever used the word ‘bitch’ to talk about him, but they didn’t need to.
It was a bad line of thought to have right before Josh came to fuck him for the first time in months, but Ray couldn’t help it. He needed to know if everything that Josh did for him, to him, was just an alpha’s instincts.
It shouldn’t have mattered. But of course it did: he hadn’t really wanted to get fucked by any of the alphas. Not in the circumstances in which it’d happened. But if he had any hope of forging something real—whether a sexual relationship or anything else—he needed to know. Talking to Gabriel had hurt: remembering being a kid—unsure and ashamed about feelings he couldn’t control—when he’d lost all the freedom he’d had as a kid had been like rubbing salt into the wound. But at least he knew where they stood now. They both did. And maybe now they could actually move on, build something together. Ray hadn’t wanted to be an omega, but he’d always wanted a family. He didn’t regret that. And if Gabriel could see past his own shame and regret, he could be a lot more to the pack than an efficient leader.
It was harder with Josh. Josh had never left him. Ray had never had to accept that he could no longer rely on him. And Ray had never really managed to stop thinking about men in ways he knew weren’t appropriate. And Josh had been there. So some of those thoughts had been about Josh. If one was that way inclined—and now Ray didn’t need to pretend to himself about it anymore—then it was a little hard to ignore Josh’s soft pink lips, hazel eyes and floppy blond hair combo. He remembered a particularly cold winter when they’d been thirteen when he had huddled into his coat all the way from and to school just so he could avoid looking at his best friend’s reddened lips and flushed cheeks.
It’d felt like a betrayal to want something like that from Josh. He had always been so sure Josh would feel nothing but disgust if he knew, and not even because Ray was a boy, but because he was Ray. He was Josh’s best friend and he wasn’t meant to want something else.
It’d felt like a betrayal when Josh had done it too. When Josh had declared he wanted Ray. Just not the way Ray had always been. He wasn’t that far in denial, if Josh had kissed him at thirteen, or fifteen, or the week before he’d presented…
But he hadn’t. Only when Ray had become an omega, not just his friend but a desirable mate, had Josh declared his interest. Not in his best friend, but in the part of him that had been forced upon Ray by an accident of birth or circumstance. Josh had been the last person he had wanted to see him as an omega, and he had been the first there in the hall waiting to receive him, to…to take him.
He had more or less managed to stop thinking about running after they’d bred him, but the instinct that had made him flee his uncle’s hall was still there, tugging at him. Half wild, half human, but all need. It didn’t feel right, no matter how much he struggled: he couldn’t stop what the wolf wanted—needed—and he couldn’t stop his own thoughts and feelings, either. Was it the same for Josh? Or was it just the wolf?
He wanted to know. He just wasn’t sure he was ready to ask.
“Ray?” Josh asked behind him and Ray turned around fast enough he stumbled. Josh didn’t try to catch him. Of course not, Ray realised dumbly, it wouldn’t really hurt Ray to fall to the ground. “Are you okay?”
For a moment, he didn’t know the answer, then he blurted it out, “Do you like men?”
Josh blinked at him, smelling wary. And then he nodded. He didn't try to walk into the room, even though it was his own and in all fairness his wolf's territory.
“What about women? You always went with girls when we were kids.”
Josh licked his lips nervously. “I like girls, too.”
“So it’s not just omegas…” Ray confirmed. “You would go for, I don’t know, Alec.”
Josh’s face twisted. “I don’t like all men, Ray. Definitely not Alec. But not just omegas,” he added a little hesitantly.
He wanted to ask more, but he didn’t think he could get through this if Josh said the wrong thing and, whatever he felt, they had to do this if he wanted to be safe during the full moon. He turned away from Josh, opening his jeans and kicking them off—they were loose since he had insisted on wearing them until he hadn’t been able to close them anymore over his belly. Unlike Ray’s abdomen, back to the usual flatness, no amount of washing would shrink them back. He sat heavily on the bed and glanced up at Josh, who hadn’t moved. The door was still wide open besides him; anyone could have walked by and seen Ray half-naked. There wasn't anybody around who hadn't already seen it all, but his skin still itched.
“Are you coming?” he asked a little sharply.
Josh nodded and walked in, still looking confused. He could deal: Ray was confused as fuck and he could still do it, why should it be any different for Josh?
Josh pulled his shirt off, exposing th
e glowing skin of his chest. He dropped the shirt on the back of a chair and thumbed his jeans open with the lack of self-consciousness Ray had grown used to around shifters. The same confidence he’d lost himself. It hurt to remember, but even so, it was impossible not to watch.
Josh was beautiful; the planes of his chest culminating in pink nipples Ray wanted in his mouth, the dip of his hipbones calling to Ray’s thumbs. He stepped closer, right up until his knees bumped Ray’s. Ray looked up from the happy trail leading into his tented boxers to meet his face. Josh was already watching him, face soft and open. Ray pulled on his too long hair to get him to lean in close enough to take his mouth into a kiss. Once it started, Josh went for it full-tilt and soon he was on top of Ray, his legs bracketing Ray’s thighs, his tongue exploring Ray’s mouth, his hands holding onto Ray’s biceps where the t-shirt he still wore left them exposed.
Ray arched into him, seeking contact. Josh gave it to him, grounding his hips down until their cocks were shoved together through two layers of cotton, each sliding against their own precome. Ray couldn’t take it for long; he leaned back and hooked his left leg over Josh’s hip to force him closer. That was all it took, he was getting wet for it. He groaned as Josh’s arousal and need hit him and his body reacted, but he couldn’t help squirming. He wanted Josh, he had wanted him before, but it was Josh’s need that was affecting him so thoroughly now, like Ray’s body was made to provide what an alpha needed of it.
“Oh, Ray,” Josh moaned, grinding harder. “Please,” he added incoherently, “Please, I want… I need to…”
Ray was regretting not taking off his underwear earlier, but he’d have felt stupid sitting there on just a t-shirt. Josh found his mouth again, feeding him his tongue like he would die if Ray didn’t suck on it. Ray didn’t risk it, he tangled one of his hands into Josh’s hair and smashed their lips together even as Josh’s rhythm against his hip got more desperate and the wave of arousal inside him got more and more intense. The orgasm left him trembling, as if his nerves were about to give out under the onslaught of sensations, both his and his alpha’s.
