by Aiden Bates
"Oh come on, Oliver." Sam shook his head. "You haven't lost everything. You've got a roof over your head. You're going to have a baby. That's what all omegas want."
Jake cringed and put his fork down. "You didn't seriously just say that."
"I wanted kids—with an alpha, as part of a loving family. I have a small one-bedroom apartment. I have no family support and no child care options. When this child asks me who its father is, I'm going to have to tell it that its father so despised me that he threw me away after two nights, and sat here and looked me in the eyes and said it wasn't so bad because I still had a roof over my head." Oliver clenched his hands into fists.
"I don't despise you, Oliver. I love you!"
"I don't think you can spell love, Sam."
Sam fell back against the back of the booth. He looked like Oliver had slapped him. Oliver couldn't find it in his heart to feel bad about that.
Oliver wasn't done. "I used to dream about being with an alpha and raising a family together. Even before I knew I was pregnant, after you threw me away, all that I could think about was staying away from alphas. I knew that most of them were the same. I thought you were different. You're just as bad as any of them. I'm angry, and I'm resentful, and I'm hurt.
"And I wonder what the point of any of this is, because you don't care. You're going to give me some speech about how it's all for my own good, because you don't hear my words. They bounce off some kind of helmet. Nenci knows best, after all, and us dumb little omegas should just do as we're told and accept that it's better than some alternative that involves our own agency." Oliver took a deep breath and gripped the edge of the table.
Sam looked up and into Oliver's eyes. "I'm real sorry you feel that way, Oliver. I was never going to approach you. You have to understand that."
"Oh I know. Devlin thought it would be hilarious. I'm still weighing a lawsuit. You can participate or not, I don't give a crap." Oliver leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest.
Sam was quiet for a long moment. "You've been pretty good about maintaining radio silence," he said finally.
"Why would I want to talk to you?" Oliver lifted his eyebrows. "We have nothing to say to each other that hasn't been said already. It's painful. It's painful to be in your presence."
Jake turned to face him. "I don't think I've ever seen you speak so angrily to someone in your life."
"I guess I'm due, then." Oliver rubbed at his jaw. It hadn't been all that long since Sam had kissed along that jawline. Even through all of his pain and his grief and his misery, Oliver wanted that again. He hardened himself against it.
Sam sighed. "I know you don't see it right now, Oliver, but it's still for the best that we're not together. Even if we want to be."
"Spare me, Sam." Oliver hung his head. "You've said it all before, and you saying it over and over again doesn't make it right. Maybe it's the right decision for you. I'm sure it is. You get off free and clear. I'm the one who has to figure out what to do about a baby."
Sam shuddered. "My baby."
"Biologically, anyway." Oliver rubbed at her temples. "I don't expect you to be a father. It's not like you were ever going to be a lover."
Sam's eyes blazed. "That's not fair!"
"Oh, so you were planning to stick around that night?" Oliver rubbed at his face. This was all getting out of control so fast. He didn't want to be this. He didn't want to be so raw and so angry. He liked being the nice guy from the lab. "You were planning to make me feel good instead of used? You just forgot?"
Sam pounded a fist on the table. "What went on between us has nothing to do with the baby."
Jake snickered. "Do I have to explain to you how pregnancy works?"
All of the energy ran out of Oliver then. "Just go away, Sam."
"Excuse me?" Sam's eyes widened.
"Just go away. You're not going to be a father to this kid. You're not going to be a partner to me in this whole mess, not even platonically. You're going to avoid any kind of responsibility here and you're going to pretend that you're being noble about it and tell me it's for my own good." He held up his hand. "That's making me angry and turning me into someone I don't want to be. So just go away." He huffed out a little laugh. "You're good at that."
"Ouch." Jake cringed.
"Were you even going to tell me?" Sam leaned in. "Or were you just going to write me off, like you just did?"
"You wrote yourself off, Sam." Oliver looked up at his former lover. "If a guy can't reach out after taking a guy's virginity and check on him, or hold him for an hour after sex, he's probably not father material. I mean, you were once. You raised two great sons, but sometime between then and now that part of you just withered and died."
"Everything that I've done, I've done for you, Oliver. Why won't you see that?" Sam shook his head.
Oliver pursed his lips. "Tell me, Sam. What's the outcome you want here?"
Sam opened his mouth. He closed it again. "What do you mean?"
"Do you want to be part of my life? Do you want to be part of this child's life? Do you want to be this child's father? Because you've said none of those things. All that you've done, through this entire conversation, is try to justify the way you've treated me."
"Well you've been pretty goddamn accusatory," Sam shot back. "I have the right to defend myself."
"And yet, you've never said, Look, I want to be part of my child's life. I've given you the opportunity. I've asked, for crying out loud. You still haven't said it. When the subject of the baby has come up, you've avoided it or told me I should he happy I'm having one."
Sam looked down. "You still haven't answered my question either."
Oliver rolled his eyes. Sam was never going to admit that he didn't want the baby. "No," he said. "I wasn't going to tell you. You're out of my life, by your own insistence."
Sam looked up and met his eyes. "One of the things that I always loved about you was how much you trusted me."
"You took that." Oliver didn't have to think about his words.
Sam rolled his shoulders. "I destroy everything I touch, Oliver. I'm sure you can see that it's for the best that I stay away from the kid. Joey and I haven't spoken in years, except yesterday when he came over to light into me about you. I chased Jake right out of the house too. I destroyed you. Now you want me to have another kid?"
"I don't want you to have another kid." Oliver narrowed his eyes. "I want you to take responsibility for yourself and your actions. I shouldn't expect something so difficult from an alpha." He stood up and threw some cash onto the table. "That's for the food." He walked out of the restaurant.
Jake followed him. "Wow. That was some harsh stuff to hear, but I think he needed to hear it. What do you want to do now?"
Oliver considered. "Let's head home. I'll head into the lab. I've got some work to do on that murder/arson in the Blue Hills."
Jake nudged his shoulder. "It's the weekend. You should relax. Take care of yourself. Do you want to go look at some baby stuff? This place has a bunch of cute baby-stuff stores."
Oliver bit his lip. There was a lot to be said for cute baby stuff, but who was he kidding? He couldn't let himself get excited for the baby yet. He didn't want to get excited about the baby. He just wanted to get back to work. "I still haven't decided what to do about the baby yet," he admitted. "I don't want to buy a bunch of stuff if I'm going to give it up or just not have it."
Jake paled. "Would you really get rid of it?"
Oliver shrugged. "I don't know. I have to consider all of my options here." He blinked back tears. "I don't necessarily like the idea, but, I mean, it's not like I should be having a kid."
Jake put his hands on Oliver's shoulder. "Oliver, forget about the fact that the baby would be part of my family for a minute. A termination in men is surgical. This early, it would have a forty percent chance of leaving you sterile."
Oliver rolled his eyes. "And this is a problem why? I should look into that anyway, even if I carry
the baby to term." He shook his head. "There's still time, I need to think about this carefully, but let's face it, Jake. I'm an idiot. I make bad choices. I shouldn't be out there having kids."
Jake gave him a little shake and then threw his arms around Oliver. "C'mon, bro. Don't let him do this to you. You're a fantastic guy. Don't let my dad change you into himself."
Oliver ducked his head. "I don't want to. Lord knows, I don't want to. I'm trying. I'm just really, really lost here."
Jake kept an arm around his shoulder and guided him out toward the parking lot. "We'll go home and watch some B movies, you love those. Come on."
Oliver let his friend drive him home. They did curl up on the couch and watch some truly awful movies. Jake brought some popcorn and yogurt, urging one or the other on Oliver since he hadn't eaten his lunch. By the time bedtime rolled around, Oliver had started to feel a little bit more human.
He still hadn't come to a decision about the baby. His mind hadn't changed about his own fitness as a parent, but it was less clouded with despair. He would figure out what to do with clear eyes and a calm heart, and he would make a decision based on reason.
***
Sam needed someone to talk to, and he needed it badly. He'd gone home after the disastrous meeting with Oliver and Jake, and he'd tried to puzzle through everything that had gone wrong. He couldn't figure it out. There was no point at which he could say yes, here's where things unraveled, here's where I lost control.
Maybe he'd never been in control to begin with.
He called in to work and made an emergency appointment with Dr. Trujillo. It did bother him, on some level, that there wasn't anyone in his life with whom he was close enough that he could call and talk things out, but there wasn't anything he could do about it now. He needed to get his crap together.
Trujillo had an opening at ten, so Sam drove into Arlington and sat himself down in her office. "You look like you're in a bit of a crisis, Sam." She pulled out her recorder. "What's going on?"
"The omega's pregnant." The words had been echoing through his brain all night. Hearing them finally find their way out of his mouth still made him jump. "He's pregnant."
Trujillo pursed his lips. "Use his name, Sam."
Sam opened his mouth. He closed it again. Oliver's name was on his lips, but he couldn't get the word out. "If I say it, that makes it real."
"Why do you think that I want you to say it?" Trujillo smiled, just a little bit. "You can't come up with a plan, or even confront the situation properly, until it's real."
Sam closed his eye. He grabbed one of the throw pillows on the couch and hugged it to himself. "Oliver is pregnant." He opened his eyes and found them wet. "Oliver's pregnant, with my baby, and he told me to go away."
Trujillo's eyes widened. "That's a little extreme, even for someone in a hormonally charged situation. Why don't you go ahead and tell me what happened. From the beginning."
Sam swallowed. He told her about Ryan Tran's visit, and his revelation about Devlin's manipulations. He told her about Joey's visit and his announcement. He told her about the disastrous meeting with Oliver and Jake, and about how he'd spent the whole of last night rocking on the floor and looking at baby pictures of the twins.
She spoke only to ask questions until he was finished. Then she sat in silence for two full minutes as a cold sweat ran down Sam's back. "Your boss' behavior troubles me," she said finally. "We'll get to that in a minute. But first, it sounds like Oliver is very angry. Why do you think he's angry?"
Sam cradled his head in his hands. "I don't understand it. Not really. I've explained that we can't be together because of my age and everything, and he doesn't really have the right to expect that I'll just roll over and claim him in spite of what I've told him. But the things that he said, that I treated him like trash?"
"From what you've said, you were out the door or urged him to be out the door within minutes of intercourse. This isn't normal sexual behavior, but he's been led to believe that it is. And, given his sexual history, for Oliver it now is normal sexual behavior." Sam felt his face getting red with anger, but Trujillo held up a hand. "I'm not passing judgment here, Sam. I'm trying to help you to see things through his eyes, because you already know how things look through your own eyes. That's one of the things we're working on, remember?"
Sam forced himself to unclench his fists. "Yeah. Sorry. I'm just—he knows I love him. I've told him."
"He told you that your actions don't line up with your words. I think that one of your issues, something we've talked about, is control, Sam." She took off her glasses. "You are a good man. I know that you are. Unfortunately for you, the loss of your first omega exacerbated normal alpha tendencies toward control. You've developed a need to be in control of a great many things, because when you weren't in control something bad happened. This is an understandable outcome.
"The problem is, that this tendency has had negative consequences for you and your family. You've lost your sons because of your attempts to control their careers, as you've discussed. Your attempts to control the entirety of your relationship with Oliver have exacerbated the rift with Jake.
"And now you have the situation with Oliver."
Sam shook his head. "That's completely separate from my issues with my family." He hugged the pillow tighter.
"Well, it isn't. Your sons are backing Oliver, for one thing. They know what you're like, and they're demanding better treatment for their friend. Which, I want to point out, means that they know that you're capable of behaving better toward Oliver. Furthermore, Oliver is carrying your child. That makes this a family issue for you as well as a romantic one."
"He told me to go away. He said he didn't expect me to be a father." Sam slid down on the couch. "He doesn't think I can be better."
"That should trouble you." Trujillo rested her elbows on her knees. "You're trying very hard to get better but you're going to lose him."
"I'm not trying to get him!” Sam picked at the corner of his pillow. "I told Joey to claim him."
"Does Oliver not get a say?" She raised an eyebrow.
"It's for his own good." Sam shook his head. "It's a better provision for him, and the baby, than I could offer. I mean, look at me. There's not a single person in my life that I haven't pushed away yet. Except you, and that's because I'm paying and because you like the challenge."
Trujillo chuckled. "Valid. Have you ever tried to get any of them back?"
Sam scowled. He was going to have to talk to this pillow's parents if he held it any closer. "Why would I do that? They're right about me. When Joey came over, I wanted to hug him and talk to him about himself. I hadn't spoken to him in years. For all I know I'm already a grandfather. Instead, I was nasty with him, because he started mouthing off about Oliver and I got mad. I couldn't make myself tell Oliver that I wanted to be in the baby's life, even though I'd just been thinking about it. I just couldn't do it."
"You have a hard time showing that kind of vulnerability." Trujillo nodded. "You've been burned before. And, to be honest, it's probably difficult for you to put aside your parental side when dealing with your sons. You haven't had a co-parent since they were five. It's going to be difficult, to say the least, for you to learn to let go and accept that they're adults."
"I want to." Sam spoke into the pillow. "I just don't know how."
"Write letters."
"Excuse me?"
Trujillo grabbed a notepad and a pen and handed them to him. "Write letters. I'm not saying that you should only employ non-verbal communication for the rest of your life, but if you start out by writing letters, it will be easier for you to sort out your thoughts and feelings in your own time. You can do it when you're calmer, and you can do it when you don't have that emotional stimulus right in your face. Also, it's something that they can refer back to if they're having doubts." She grinned. "You can tell them your therapist made you do it if you want."
"Okay." It sounded like a lot of half-assed science to Sa
m, but he'd give it a try.
"Now, about your boss. Why would he do something like that to you? Does he seem like a deliberately cruel man?"
"No." Sam didn't have to think about that one. "He's always been a good guy. He's stood up for me a bunch of times, when my mouth has gotten me into trouble." He hung his head. "I honestly should just let him get away with it and not say anything. He's done so much for me."
Trujillo bobbed her head from side to side. "So he's done a lot for you. And you say that you've been interested in Oliver for a long time."
"Yeah. For years. I thought that I'd kept it well hidden, but apparently not." Sam looked over at her. "You think that he did it to help."
