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He took a deep breath, like someone steadying his nerves.
“I’m going to fuck this up,” he said again, with more certainty this time.
A tinge of redness colored his cheeks and the tips of his ears, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t because of the hot coffee.
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
He shook his head in disgust. “I couldn’t even make it one goddamned night without falling right back into the shit that got me in trouble the first time.”
From what I’d seen over the past couple of weeks, Nat wasn’t normally the kind of person who cursed like a sailor. Something had him riled, and riled badly—even if I still didn’t understand what it was.
“Maybe you should start from the beginning?” I suggested. “I promise I never pass judgment on anyone before I’ve had atleasttwo cups of coffee. It’s too much work.”
Nat nodded and grabbed the edge of the countertop with both hands, letting his head fall forward to hang limply for a couple of seconds. When he looked up again, it was to make unblinking eye contact with me.
“I want sex. All the time.” His grip on the counter was white-knuckled. “Mia doesn’t. Or, at least, she didn’t with me. She’s an omega, and sex without alpha pheromones doesn’t do much of anything for her. But our lives were busy, and she didn’t make a priority out of buying synthetics so she would enjoy it.”
He gave a bitter laugh. “But then again, neither did I... because part of me always resented that she needed them.”
“So, it sounds like you had a pretty serious libido mismatch,” I offered, keeping my tone free of judgment, just as I’d promised.
That earned another sharp bark of ugly laughter.
“Yeah. You could say that.” His eyes slipped closed. “So, since neither of us seemed able to address the problem head-on, I demanded an open marriage. And here we are.”
I already knew most of this, though it still didn’t explain what had dragged him down here at five-thirty in the morning.
“Is ‘here’ really such a bad place to be?” I asked.
He looked startled, as though he’d just realized how that might have sounded to the guy who owned the house.
“No! No—that’s not what I...” He trailed off. Tried again. “It’s not that. Last night, Mia offered me everything I could ever want on a silver platter. And the sex... it was...” Nat swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
“Good?” I offered wryly.
“Amazing,” he said. “And then I fell asleep, slept like the dead for a couple of hours, and woke up with my dick hard enough to drill wood.”
Unconsciously, my eyes were drawn to Nat’s checkered pajama bottoms, where I confirmed that he was, in fact, sporting a painful-looking hard-on. I dragged my gaze back up to his face.
“I had the best sex of my life last night,” he said miserably, “but now all I can think about is how soon I can have sex again, and if Mia will let me come inside her.”
The penny dropped. “You’re worried your high libido will drive her away?”
“How long before she realizes that we’re right back where we were, and nothing has changed?” There was a quiver in Nat’s voice, and his eyes were growing suspiciously bright.
“But youaren’twhere you were,” I pointed out. “And last time I checked, several things have changed.”
He scoffed. “Yeah. Sure. She found a pack of alphas who treat her way better than I did.”
Ah.
This, at least, I could fix. And didn’t that realization send a flush of satisfaction through the deepest alpha parts of me?
I shook my head, holding his gaze. “No. Youbothfound a pack of alphas—and an omega—who are deeply flawed. We’re just trying to find our way, like everybody else... but we want both you and Mia to get every single damned thing that you need out of this relationship.”
“You don’t need some beta man-whore who can’t go six hours without worrying how soon he’s going to get his dick wet again!” Nat’s voice dripped with self-disgust.
After several years working with the kids at the Hope Project, I could recognize the voice of internalized parental judgment when I heard it.