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This was nice.
Trucy had threatened to teach Pess how to open Miles’ briefcase if he refused her request, but still. This was nice. Wright’s hand was stuck in a bowl of microwave popcorn, and the ancient fluorescent lights that made Wright’s kitchen go from pitch black to dim created pleasant background noise for the nonsensical flashing going on in front of him. He had insisted on watching his favorite childhood movie, a coming-of-age-story about a child genius accepted into an Ivy League college at the age of fifteen. Miles drew some blatant parallels to himself, and Wright had trouble denying it.
Wright had his head on his shoulder. His eyes were half-lidded; if he were asleep, there would have been some light whistling, and his lips would be parted. His nose was stuck right over his scent gland, and every now and then he felt Wright swallow.
Trucy had told him Wright was nesting. She knew this because all of the towels were missing from the hall closet. He stopped by a convenience store on the way to the pharmacy, picking up enough towels to last the week, if not a few more in case Wright stole more than his due. Since her Daddy never nested, he was obviously going through one of those rare, “actually kind of seriously incapacitating heats” and “you’ve gotta make sure he doesn’t go out of the house like that. He’s gonna be difficult, but I believe in you!”
Wright took one look at the bottle of suppressants, snorted, and swore up and down that his heat wasn’t that bad.
Which was why he was being scented. Obviously.
Wright had heats that were mild, reduced to annoying aches and chills, and he could go about his daily life without a care in the world. Due to a lack of funds (and refusing Miles’ help to receive them) he had never gone to a physician for a proper diagnosis. What he lacked in severity, he made up for in quantity. He went into heat at least once a month, sometimes twice, rather than it being seasonal like the rest of the population, and at its worst had once suffered from six over the course of two months. They could be as short as a few hours or stretched on from Monday to Friday. Still, his pheromone emittance was weaker, as well as his reception of alpha pheromones. If it weren’t for the fact that he still had faint traces of omega pheromones, he could likely get away with living as a beta.
At least, that was what most people said. Miles had never been able to tell. Perhaps if he stuck his nose on his scenting gland, he would be able to catch it, but he wasn’t exactly keen on reciprocating this act. Wright could do what he liked. Miles…had a reputation to uphold.
Wright suddenly shifted, nosing at his neck in a way that made his cheeks flood, and—alright, maybe it had been long enough. Surely he was well into his way to a pheromone-induced nap.
“Are you alright?” he asked, and Wright answered him by taking a deep, noisy breath, tickling the small hairs on his neck.
He felt him smile. “Yep!”
Well, at least he retained some of his wit. “You don’t think this is inappropriate at all, do you?”
Wright shook his head. “You can’t smell me,” he countered, at last opening his eyes fully. Bright, blue, and full of…love? His pupils were dilated to saucers, is what it was. “You have a, a uh, pheromone…insensitivity? Something like that! Hard t’sense them and all.”
Wright didn’t slur when he was in heat. He was a little more wide-eyed, a little more liberal with his touch, but he didn’t crawl halfway into Miles’ lap and ask to just lie there for a while. And Miles, being an idiot, had obliged him without a second thought. What was the harm in it, really? All he was doing was making himself more tired.
“Indeed,” he said.
“‘Indeed,’” Wright snorted, picking at Miles’ shirt collar. “I’m gonna take…the fattest nap once I’m done. I swear I will. Just—be still a while longer. This is nice.”
Yes. This was nice. It was nice for Wright because the pheromones were calming his heat down, and it was nice for Miles because he got to enjoy the warmth of his face against his bare neck, the pressure of his body leaned fully against him. It was incredibly selfish of him to privately enjoy this as much as he did, but he could hardly help himself. Who would, when the love of their life offered themselves on a silver platter?
Wright leaned back down and closed his eyes again, sighing like doing that much was strenuous, and lifted a shaky hand out from the bowl of popcorn. It wavered around his waist and tumbled on its way to his mouth, but it got there in the end. He offered the popcorn that hadn’t quite made it there. Miles declined.
“Which part is it now?” he asked, mouth full as he sluggishly chewed.
Victor, the teenaged biotechnology major, was in one of his lab classes when he noticed a familiar yellow bus make its way up the hill. “The freshmen from the local High School are visiting, so Victor gets to meet his middle-school friends. It was Clare and Trenton, I recall?”
“Justice for Trenton!” Wright pumped his fist up to the ceiling, though it soon came hurtling down—if not for Miles’ quick reflexes, it would have slammed him straight in the gut. Wright wiggled his hand free and wagged at the TV. “They should remake this movie with him as the love interest. Those kids had way too many heart eye moments.”
Miles rolled his eyes.
“The actors are literally married now!”
That was true, and Wright brought it up anytime this movie came on. Nonetheless, he never saw the passion that Wright loved to insist was so blatantly obvious. “So if I was an actor, any performance I have with an omega would be brimming with romantic tension?”
“You’re married to your job, Edgeworth. Of course you can’t have romantic tension. Nothing will ever capture your attention like a case will,” he replied, grabbing another handful of popcorn. This time he offered them before dropping them on his t-shirt, and Miles made a slow show of accepting them. It had been a while since he had microwave popcorn. They were incredibly salty, sort of like his brewing mood.
“I wouldn’t say that. I’m here, aren’t I? Not working,” he said, tipping Wright’s head up for emphasis. Which was useless, in the end, given that he didn’t open his eyes. “You’re talking clearly now. I guess the worst of it is over?”
“I guess so.” Wright opened his eyes again, but he didn’t move away. Instead, he buried himself further. Breathed in a little deeper. The camera singled Clare out from the other students, and Victor leaned away from his desk for a better look. There was a moment of palpable shyness when she noticed him through the open window, and they coyly waved at one another, Victor’s true expression hidden behind shadow-tinted goggles.
Then Trenton burst through the bus door, almost knocking Clare to the ground in his attempt to catch Victor’s attention, and whooped Victor’s name loud enough that the rest of his class could hear it, the college students snickering as he immediately shut the window.
Well…alright. It definitely wasn’t intended, but it was there. An old analog clock sat next to the TV, happily chiming that it was eleven p.m., well past his bedtime during the working week. At the same time, it felt cruel to interrupt Wright as he fell into slumber, so he reached over (and Wright, whining when he moved away, fell over with him) and dragged a blanket across the both of them, hoping that the extra warmth would coax Wright into sleep. There was a bit of readjustment on both of their parts, but it worked quickly enough. By the time they reached the fabled bleacher scene, he heard a small whistling to his right. Wright was gone. And if he’d heard anything about pheromone-induced sleep, it would probably be for a while.
He peeled the blanket off of him and began to scooch off the couch, one centimeter after the other, when Wright shivered and clutched his hand.
“Wright,” he groaned, exasperated. Did he need a straitjacket to keep him tamped down? Trucy once said he was a light sleeper, but wasn’t an omega supposed to be knocked out by now? “Come on, now. I can’t sleep here on the couch. I know your head’s in another space entirely, but—”
Heat. The roll of Wright’s tongue on his neck. Then an indescribable pain, one that pierced his throat and lanced through his lungs, his heart, set every blood-filled vein alight.
It was struck down by a rush of pleasure, leaving in its wake an electric, tingling buzz, which crept through his fingertips and watered his eyes. His heart stopped beating against the cage of his chest, and his breathing was shaky, but his lungs were full. The most immediate thing he could feel was heat, again, the feeling of a tongue on his neck, and he craned his head away from it. It felt like ice when it pressed against the wound.
“Wright, that hurt,” he said, and it was the understatement of a century. His voice felt a little distant. There were things he should have said, and “that hurt” wasn"t one of them.
Wright deflated, lowering his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. He sounded anything but. His eyes were still wide, off, and he was astonishingly calm. Calm in comparison to what, exactly? What was an appropriate reaction? What had he done? Wright sidled up next to him, ignorant of Miles" mounting confusion. “I thought...I thought it would feel better. I didn’t mean to—Miles. Are you going to stay the night?”
“Yes, just…calm down.” Wright seemed satisfied by that answer, even as he pulled a leg across the other man"s thighs, resting his head just below Miles" chin. The extra contact, while sudden, was easily accepted. It felt right to have him there, despite what he had done. What did he do, exactly?
“Do it for me,” Wright said, looking him in the eyes.
Miles frowned. “Do what?” he asked, and Wright turned his head over, exposing his bonding gland.
“Do it for me,” he repeated, tapping the gentle slope of flesh. It wasn"t necessarily an order. It wasn"t begging, either. It was something that was supposed to happen, and Wright was just guiding him through murky waters so he arrived at the correct conclusion.
So Miles reciprocated. Up close to it, there was a fragrance that he had always associated with Wright, but he only then realized that it reminded him of harvesting sunflower seeds. It had been a long time since they had done something so benign. It was nice. He would have sat there for a while—for as long as Wright had sat in his lap and drank his scent in, even—but there were other things he needed to attend to. Such as the lack of a mark on Wright’s neck.
It came to him, in a rush of clarity, that Wright had bitten his bonding gland, and it was too late to change that because Miles had done the same.
The panic ran its course. He rubbed at the gland when Wright cringed away from his lips, absentmindedly smearing the blood on his trousers. He was uplifted by a kind of subdued elation, one that made his face twist into a stupid smile and kiss Wright until their lips were swollen. Until the analog clock chimed that it was well past midnight. Until Wright murmured something about sleep and slid off of his lap, skin sweat-slick and covered in red roses, and swiped a streak of semen off his chest.