The Scent of Love

Chapter 14

Josh is gone. 

The apartment is dark. 

Her smart TV has turned itself off. 

It’s the middle of the god damned night. 

And some i***t is pounding on her door. 

“f**k it, Josh,” she grumbles, loudly enough that he’s bound to hear her, while pulling herself from the warmth of the blanket cocoon she’d constructed on her couch. She’d been mostly asleep, a few seconds ago. She’s glad she had the forethought to put on her hoodie before nesting. “If you forgot something, you could have called me—”

It’s not Josh at the door. 

For a moment, she’s convinced she’s finally cracked. She must have, to hallucinate Sean at her door, right now. Smelling like that. Looking at her with something between hunger and frustration. 

She’s just sort of holding the door open, staring at him, wondering if maybe she should stop sending her heat scent out into the hallway over a mirage, when he steps into her apartment. In the haze of heat, she just steps back, letting him close and lock the door behind him. 

Her hard heat hasn’t hit just yet. She is, for the most part, clear headed. She feels less than spectacular, but she can move, and think, and process information in real time. So the fact that she’s obviously having a fever dream is pretty weird. 

“You smell like another Omega,” Sean says by way of greeting, with a frown. 

Beth just closes her eyes. She can’t take his voice, right now. “Josh was here, the past couple of days.” He was here, because I didn’t want to ask you to be. “Sean, why are you here?”

He smells divine. He always does. She can’t remember a time she didn’t want to smell like him. Like she was his. It’s been ages since her heart didn’t know him. 

Her mind gets a little fuzzy, like being drunk off his scent, as he crowds her against the wall. “We’ll talk after,” he says, his hands ghosting up her sides. “I don’t want you to smell like Josh anymore.” It’s a little possessive, and very Alpha. She can almost, almost forget that he doesn’t want her, that all the possessiveness and posturing came as a reaction to her heat and not from the real him. 

It’s enough for her heat. It has to be. 

She wants to ground herself, to savor this moment, to be present for her time with him. Her heat makes it impossible, whiting out her mind before he even gets her undressed. 

He keeps her on her back this time, or on top of him. His hands stay on her waist, or her wrists, or in her hair, and sometimes on her legs as he opens her further to make room for himself. His lips stay mostly on her scent glands, the hollow of her throat. When he kisses her, it’s only to quiet her down. 

It’s quiet in between, too. He doesn’t talk to her, and she finds it takes too much energy to bother pretending to be okay for him. He probably doesn’t care anyway. Sometimes he’ll run his hand over her hair, but usually, he keeps his hands primly on her waist. It’s nothing but s*x for biology’s sake. 

No feelings here. No, sir. 

He doesn’t want to be here, she realizes, laying on top of him as his knot keeps them locked together. She can’t piece together why he even came here. Probably to yell at her, or something. It doesn’t matter. 

It takes a moment for her to realize he’s petting her hair, that comforting  Alpha purr vibrating in his chest, under her cheek. Her wet cheek. Her cheeks are wet. She’s crying. 

Of course, she’s crying. Why would she bother keeping it together? f*****g hormones. 

He doesn’t ask, and when her heat rolls over her again, he just arranges her against him and rocks against her, coddling her. And she keeps crying, right against his scent gland. 

It’s not fair. It’s really not. 

Anger swells inside her chest, hot and tight and awful, worse than this stupid heat. She hears his words in her head as though he’s saying them all over again. 

It’s not supposed to be like this. 

I didn’t want to get attached.

Her throat tightens so badly she can barely breathe, sucking air through her gritted teeth, struggling to keep up with Sean moving inside her and the fever swimming in her head and the rush of rage that washes over her. She squeezes her eyes shut and grips Sean’s arms, tighter, her nails digging into his biceps, just trying to ground herself, to knock back the inescapable feeling that she’s being betrayed, that she’s being used. 

Except she can’t keep it back. She can’t keep up. She feels like she’s drowning, her head barely above water, nothing but raging waters around her. 

With a wrenching sob, she opens her mouth above Sean’s shoulder and bites down. Hard. 

“f**k!” 

Sean’s hips snap up, his hands tightening almost painfully around her waist. One of them finally ventures away, tangling into her hair with a light tug, but she can’t— she can’t let go. Not yet. His blood tastes like his scent liquified on her tongue, and she can literally taste how aroused he is by this, and it’s the only thing keeping her together as she sobs against his skin. 

“f**k, Beth, I—“ he groans as she clenches her jaw, his hips bucking harder against her once again. This time, when he tugs on her hair, she lets go, sitting up to meet his eyes. The heat is consuming now, dimming her vision, blurring the world at the edges. Yet against his pale skin, she can clearly see her own teeth marks, shiny little crescents red with blood. 

Sean pants underneath her. She wonders if he’s struggling for control. His face is tight, his eyes screwed shut as though he doesn’t want to look at her. 

Alpha, her mind screams. Alpha, please. 

Clenching her teeth, her chest heaving with the remnants of her sobs, Beth reaches up to stroke her mark on his skin with one finger. Sean grimaces the moment their skin meets. It tightens her chest, the anger brewing there beginning to boil again. 

“Alpha,” she whimpers. Sean’s eyes snap open. She trails her finger over the little red teeth marks, staring at them in a daze. “I want one to match,” she murmurs huskily. 

The snarl that escapes Sean’s lips as he grabs her is barely human. 

She’s on her belly, underneath him, finally, as he fists his hand in her hair and forces her back to arch, his other hand under her hips. She cries out with relief, the taste of his pleasure and his blood on her tongue, and it feels like nothing else. Like heaven. Filthy and obscene and right. 

His teeth dig into the scent gland on her neck, and she hits the edge, finally where she wants to be. 

Your Alpha is here, he’s taking care of you, you’re safe—

Sean growls into her neck and pulls out, and she can’t help it— she screams, begging him not to stop, to go back, to please god make the pain stop. He flips her, kissing her again to shut her up, and thrusting back in just in time for his knot to lock him in. 

She wants to fight him off, to scream that he’s not taking what he wants, to cry and cry and cry. 

“Wait,” She wails, pushing against his chest. “Go back, why did you stop—“ he nips at her neck, but for once, it only stills her for a moment. She writhes against him, pushing until he pulls her up to sit in his lap. 

“Why did you stop?” She demands. Her voice is too shrill, too sharp, and she can’t stop, now that she’s let herself start. What little control she had over her own emotions slips right through her fingers. She thumps her fists on his chest, earning a perplexed and unimpressed look from him. “You were right there, you could have finished this, you could have taken what you wanted—”

“Beth.”

She’s hyperventilating now, her Omega brain fully in control of her mouth, even as the last sane slice of her mind begs her to please, please shut up. “I don’t understand, why did you stop? Again!”  She thumps him on the chest again, and he just collects her wrists in one hand and holds her to him. 

“Beth.” 

“I don’t know why—“ why he’s here. Why he came that night, after being with another Omega. Why he’s done any of the things he’s done, as though he actually cares about her. Or wants her. 

It’s harrowing, the pain. Not from her heat, but from the horrific realization that, once again, he’s here to f**k her and leave again. Never mind that he won’t bite her, he doesn’t even like her, outside of heat. He’s proven it time and time again, no matter what bullshit he’s told her. 

“Why—“ she sucks in a breath, her sorrow rapidly transforming into anger. “Why?” Squeezing her eyes shut, she shouts, “Why am I not good enough for you?” 

His knot has gone down in record time— because there’s nothing like a distressed Omega to kill the mood— and she hauls herself off of him and onto her feet, ignoring his shocked expression. “Get out,” she tells him, keeping her back to him. 

“What—” She can hear him struggling to come after her. “Beth, hang on—“ 

“No!” She can’t remember ever having been this angry. Not once in her life. Whipping around, she points an accusing finger at him. “You obviously don’t want to be here with me, and you don’t want to see me through my heat, so you can just go!” She’s shaking with fury, and the urge to raise her voice is nearly impossible to ignore, but somehow she manages to keep her volume level. “Get out of my home, and don’t come back.” With that, she sails into her bathroom and slams the door. Her name is muffled behind it, Sean’s tone more irritated than anything. 

It doesn’t matter what he does, she decides, turning the lock. He can stay while she showers his scent off of her. Her skin is absolutely rioting at the thought of having water anywhere near it, but that’s just too damn bad. She’s going to shower, and then she’s going to binge clean her way through the rest of her heat, and then she’s going to take enough sleeping pills to knock her out through the next two days—

“Omega.”

Her stupid, traitorous body halts in the action of reaching for the shower faucet. 

Sean’s voice is one-hundred-percent Alpha. Deep and gravelly and commanding. “Open the door, Omega.” 

Any other time, she’d be able to power through it. To ignore her base desire to obey an Alpha command, especially from an Alpha she’s so chemically compatible with. During heat, however, her Omega is in complete control, the second her Alpha gives her instructions. 

What’s left of her sanity inwardly face palms as she turns around and unlocks the door, opening it to reveal Sean’s rather disgruntled face. She hopes he can see it in her, the black glare of rage she wishes she could give him. 

“Good,” he says, in his Alpha voice, and she feels her muscles relax instantly. His hand slips around her waist, pulling her forward, his c**k hard as a pike against her soft tummy. “Good Omega.” 

She can do this, if she focuses. She can open her mouth and tell him exactly where he can put his d**k— preferably in a blender, right now— if she just focuses her brain on the words, and opens her mouth—

His free hand falls, firmly and squarely, onto her mating gland. 

The world freezes. 

Beth’s brain reroutes, away from telling him to go f**k himself, and directly to his hand on her back, stroking in slow, soothing, arousing circles on her gland. On the pulses that spread through her body, silencing the anger, muffling it beyond recognition.

Sean’s gaze is so intense, it shakes her to her core. How can you look at me like that and not want me? She thinks. How can you not love me? 

“Do you want me to leave, Omega?” He asks. “Do you want me to leave you alone, for good?”

She shakes her head. There’s not much else she can do, because she’d be lying if she told him she wanted him to leave. 

“What do you want, Omega?” 

“I want you to stay, Alpha.” She doesn’t even think before the words are out. “Please don’t go. Please. Stay.” 

He starts to purr again, that deep vibration liquefying her bones where she stands, dissipating her anger entirely. She wants him to mount her again, for him to take care of her like a good, obedient Omega. And somehow, the sane part of her agrees. 

Enjoy it while he’s here. Let him see you through your heat. Figure the rest out later. 

He presses more firmly against her gland, and she whimpers, her legs weak. “Is this what you want, Omega?” She nods vigorously, trying to arch into his hand and against his body at the same time. She doesn’t remember deciding to hold his hips, but her grip on them tightens, and she gasps as he rakes his nails over what feels like uncovered nerve endings. She can’t breathe right, and her body is so into this, she can’t fathom how he’s not inside her yet. 

“You want me to touch this?” He asks, and her legs buckle. She finds herself in his arms before she can form a coherent response, and seconds later, she’s back on her bed— her bed, which smells like her Alpha— and he coaxes her onto her belly again, his fingertips still brushing her gland. “I can’t believe how good you smell, Omega,” he purrs. She can feel how close he is, right behind her, his free hand sliding under her pelvis to tilt it up. “And you taste even better.”

There aren’t words to describe it, when his tongue sweeps across her gland. She can’t even think to describe it. 

She can’t even think. 

“I want to touch it all the time,” he growls. The words sink like a salve into her skin. She’s lightheaded from him. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

He’s in, and— god, he’s in. She feels full for the first time since he got here, his knot already half swollen. 

“You can’t know,” he says, then licks her again. She whimpers, bucking under him. “You can’t know how much I want this. How hard it was not to flip you over, just like this— my perfect, fuckable Omega— and taste your perfect scent at the source.” 

How he’s even still talking is a mystery to her. She’s processing his words through the dense cloud of her heat, and wondering if he’ll ever just bite down and make her his. Please, Alpha. 

“God, you’re so—“ he presses kisses to the edge of her gland, his thrusts a little sloppy, a little erratic. “I can’t—“ 

She thinks maybe she screams, when he grazes her gland with his teeth. Her vision whites out, and he doesn’t stop, even when his knot is too swollen to move properly. He just keeps thrusting, and suckling on her gland, and whenever she thinks it might be too much, he shifts her hips a little, and she comes all over again, too content to bother weeding through the Omega hindbrain thoughts to reach her rational mind. 

“Unreal,” Sean rasps. “You are unreal.”

***

As it turns out, once he’s not giving her gland constant attention, the depression comes back full force. 

Beth wakes up alone— no surprise— to the buzzing of her cell phone beside her— sort of surprise, since she distinctly remembers throwing it into her closet awhile ago. Someone— and she doesn’t want to bother figuring out who— obviously got it out for her.

She answers a bit groggily, her voice almost gone from how much she’d ended up using it. “Hello?”

“Beth?” It’s Pam. 

“Yeah.”

“You sound awful.”

“Yeah, well.” She rolls over, and immediately regrets it as a cramp overtakes her lower abdomen. She groans. “I feel awful.” 

“Josh called me. He said you were in heat.” Pause. “Alone.”

“Not exactly.” She sighs, pulling her softest pillow toward her. “Sean came to help.”

“You mean Josh? He told me, but he said he had to leave when—”

“No, Josh left after the second day,” Beth corrects. “Sean’s here now.”

Another pause. “Are you okay?”

Does it matter? She wants to ask, but doesn’t. Pam would always say yes. “I’m fine. I’ve got one hell of a heat hangover, and I think my period came early, but I’m okay.”

“Suppressants can f**k you up for a few cycles,” Pam soothes. “How are you feeling, otherwise? Hungry?”

“Nauseous, mostly.” And the cramping. She’d like to die right now, thank you very much. 

“That’s fair. Is Sean still there?”

Beth can smell food, and can hear him in her kitchen, but it doesn’t soothe her like it had during her previous heats. “Yeah.”

“Will he stay for your nesting?”

“I don’t know.” She can’t decide if she hopes he does or if she hopes he doesn’t. 

“Do you want me to come sit with you?” 

“If he leaves I’ll call you,” Beth promises. “Either way, I’ll keep you posted, okay?”

“Alright, beautiful.” Beth sighs at Pam’s endearment, and wishes— stupidly— that Sean would call her Sweetheart again. “Do you need anything?”

“Not right now,” she lies. Cuddled and coddled, she thinks sadly. Loved. Ridiculous, stupid things to want. All due to some chemicals in her brain. “Thanks, Love.”

“I’m off today if you need me,” Pam says. “And I’m coming to the show the second you’re back.”

“Yay.” She hopes she just sounds tired and not cripplingly depressed. 

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.” 

Beth ends the call and sighs, listening to Sean in the other room.

Here we go again. 

She needs to shower once he leaves, and binge clean everything. His scent is a strange comfort, but it will be better to get rid of it. To get over it. Like an adult. 

The door opens. 

“Hey,” Sean says lightly. “I heard your voice. Everything okay?”

Calm, she tells herself, sitting up. Nothing’s wrong. Don’t worry your Alpha. “Pam called to check in. She didn’t know you were here.” She gestures vaguely at the pile of their clothing on the floor. “Can you toss me my sweatshirt please?” 

He does, looking… less than pleased, once she’s covered up. “Do you want another blanket?” She nods. “Okay. Hang on.”

Perhaps it’s considered taking advantage of him, the way she’s letting him take care of her, even though he probably doesn’t want to be here. Since he’s probably only staying out of some strange Alpha sense of obligation. She can’t make herself care, though, when he comes in with the discarded comforter she’d left on the couch a day ago. When he drapes it around her shoulders, it’s warm, as though he’d put it in the drier. 

She swallows the lump in her throat and burrows into her cocoon. She can cry when he’s gone. 

Sean leaves, and returns a moment later with a plate of eggs with the homemade ranchero sauce from her fridge, some bacon, and potatoes. It smells good, but she just can’t bring herself to wolf it down like she usually does after heat. But with her Alpha watching her from the foot of the bed, she dutifully picks up her fork and starts to eat. 

He keeps watching for a moment, satisfied by providing for her she supposes, and then looks away. “Do you need anything else?”

Stay. Hold me. “I don’t think so. Thank you.” 

“Do you want a shower?” 

“Eventually.” No. I just want you. She refuses to tell him. To let him see how awful she feels, right now. 

He nods, not looking at her, and suddenly, she can’t take it. She grips her fork like a lifeline. 

“Why did you come here, Sean?” We’ll talk after, he’d said. It’s after, now, isn’t it?

“Josh called me,” he tells her. “Your first day in.”

She frowns into her eggs. “I thought I’d dreamt that,” she tells him. “I heard him talking to you while I was sleeping.” 

He nods at the wall again. “I told you I’d see you through your heats. So I came.”

“Two days in,” She says. She doesn’t mean for it to be an accusation, but. Here she is anyway. 

“There was… a complication,” he says. He shifts, visibly uncomfortable, and—

It’s horrific, the feeling she gets. “Were you with…” she doesn’t know how to phrase it. The other Omega, the one he’d smelled like that day, not so long ago. “Someone else?” 

“Not the way you’re thinking,” he insists. At least he’s looking at her now. “I was with my best friend, day I came over.” 

Sorry to interrupt your bro time, she thinks bitterly, setting her plate aside. She can’t even look at it right now, much less eat. “Well, if you need to get back to someone, you can go. I’m done, and my period came early, so there’s really nothing left here for you to do.”

He frowns. “You always nest after.” 

“Yeah, well,” she says, trying not to get worked up, and getting worked up anyway. “I’d really like to shower and do laundry. Maybe vacuum. And then sleep for a day, so that I can go back to work and not feel this hungover.” 

She can sense how she’s upset him, but other than her annoying— and blessedly quiet— Omega voice, she can’t be bothered to care. “Why don’t you want me here, all of the sudden?”

Why do you want to be here? “You made it abundantly clear the last time I saw you that you didn’t want anything beyond s*x from me,” she says, sounding much calmer than her thundering heart and closing throat would suggest. “The s*x is over. You can go back to being a playboy and being detached now.” God, she sounds so bitter. It’s sad, really, that he should get to know how she feels, when he doesn’t deserve her baggage or her stupid, foolish feelings. When she’d meant to keep them under lock and key, so that he wouldn’t have to feel responsible for them. 

“That’s—” he seems truly upset now. Like maybe he’s on her level, finally. “I don’t get you. You were angry that I didn’t want you, and now you’re pushing me away—”

“I wouldn’t want you to feel unnecessarily attached,” Beth bites out coldly. 

He blinks, and then— she’s never seen him angry at her, before. It’s terrifying, really, but she doesn’t feel unsafe. Just… sad. 

He turns away, and it does nothing to dampen the heat of anger rolling off of him. For a minute, she thinks he may actually leave, so that she can get on with her pity party, but he doesn’t. He just sits there, silently, breathing slowly as he stares a hole into her bathroom door. 

It’s unnerving, the waiting. Beth picks at a thread on her duvet, wondering if maybe she should just ask him to leave again. 

“I almost killed my best friend the other night,” Sean says suddenly. Beth swallows, waiting for more, because— well. It’s not like she can really respond to that. “He asked what had happened to you, and I told him—” he doesn’t finish that sentence, and Beth can only wonder how that conversation went. “Then he actually offered to take you off my hands, or something like that—” his scent spikes, possessive and musky and delicious. Beth has to chew on the inside of her cheek to keep from dragging him over to her. “I don’t know what he said, exactly, because the next thing I knew, I had my hand around his throat. I’d pinned him to a wall.”

She can see it. Sean’s massive, and no one, probably not even his best friend, measures up. He could snap a man’s neck like a chicken’s. He could protect her, care for her, mate her—

The thread comes loose from her bedspread with a snap. 

“So I think it’s a little late to debate attachment, necessary or not.” He’s still angry, but there’s something else underneath it, a bitterness that… 

Yeah. 

She wants to have him, wants him to be her alpha and hers alone, but not at the expense of his happiness. Not if he’s going to be miserable, being with her. 

“You could—” get over it is on the top of her tongue, and she almost chokes on the words. “You could probably be… less attached, if we didn’t…” she looks away from him, toward her window, where the sky is a clear, bright blue, unmarred by clouds. 

He’s silent. For a minute, exactly. Then— “What did your doctor say about your suppressants?” 

“What?” It’s so left field she doesn’t process his words. 

“You told me you’d be adjusting your suppressants to keep them from becoming ineffective.” He’s looking at her, now, the clear, pale green of his eyes almost too intense. “So, when will you have your heats? How often?”

“I…” She swallows. This is— weird. To put it mildly. “Two months. Every two months.” 

He nods. “I’ll be here.” At last, he looks away, and she can breathe again. “Until you find someone you want to be with, I’ll be here.” 

She could throw something at him. Maybe he’d blame her heat hormones for it. Maybe she should, since she knows anything long term with him would be disastrous. At a loss, she just nods. “Okay.” It takes monumental effort not to say Alpha after the one word. She has to grit her teeth. 

“Are you…” he looks sad, she realizes, and it sends an ache through her chest. “Will you be nesting today?” Beth nods. “Do you… can I do anything else for you?”

So formal, she reflects sadly. “I honestly don’t want to get up just yet,” she says. Her comforter isn’t interesting anymore, but she can’t seem to look at him fully yet. 

“I can run a bath for you.” 

Thank you, Alpha. 

Beth just nods.