Page 55 of Slow Heat

Other things like heat. Submission. Pregnancy. All things an alpha couldn’t ever truly know or understand.

“I read your poems. The ones Pater gave me.”

“I know, we discussed it earlier.”

“Not really. You just found out that I’d read them, but we didn’t talk about them.”

“Do you want to talk about them now?”

“Yes,” Jason said, ecstatic with the opportunity to pose the questions he’d longed to ask when he’d read the poems alone on the roof.

“All right. What would you like to know?”

“Have you truly seen a whale at sea, or was that something you wrote from your imagination?”

Whales had been nearly extinct for so long that sightings were unbelievably rare. Jason didn’t know if he’d ever met someone who’d seen one with their own eyes.

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I could picture it so perfectly with your words that I thought for sure you must have seen it. But then I remembered how impossible it is to describe my favorite microscope slides to Xan. I can’t ever find the words for what I see. So I end up just making him look for himself. So maybe it’s easier to make up words for something you imagine than to describe something you’ve experienced yourself.”

“Xan is your friend from the library?”

Did he hear a hint of jealousy?

“Yes, he’s been my roommate since high school, and we’d planned to room together at university. But I guess not anymore.”

“I see. He wasn’t at your house tonight,” Vale said slowly. “I was asked to bring my closest friends. I’d have liked to meet yours, too.”

“Yes, well.” Jason’s mind tumbled. How to explain what was happening with Xan? He couldn’t tell Vale the truth. “He’s…We…I don’t know. Maybe you’ll meet him soon? I can’t promise, though. It’s complicated.”

“So much about this situation is,” Vale murmured. “To answer your question, I’ve never seen a whale, but I’ve read about them from recovered Old World texts, and when I was a young boy my pater took me to a theater showing a salvaged Old World film of whales in the southern seas.”

“Really?” Jason’s inner scientist perked up. “There were so many animals that went extinct before and after the Great Death. It’s amazing to see old photographs of them. I can’t imagine how compelling a film of so rare an animal might be.”

“I can ask Professor Bitar about it. He’s a friend of mine who presides over the film archives at the university. If there’s a copy in their vaults, he’d know about it.”

“But will he show it to me?” He opened a few more buttons on his shirt, still feeling hot and shivery all at once. Vale’s voice seemed to do that to him, especially with the liquor beating up the alpha quell quite handily. “I’m just a first year, and I don’t have a good reason to ask him about it other than curiosity.”

“Intellectual curiosity should always be rewarded. I can put in a good word for you, of course, and I can’t see why he’d say no. You’d have to make some effort, too.”

“Oh, Iwill,” Jason agreed heartily.

Vale released a soft sound that went straight to Jason’s dick. He squirmed as he grew hard again, and he pressed the receiver to his ear, trying to capture Vale’s every breath.

“Was there anything else you wanted to know about my poems?”

“‘Snowflake burn in heat of night’. That was a reference to alpha quell, wasn’t it?”

“Did it seem like it was?”

“Yes, because the speaker in the poem is really into viscosity and so-called ‘slippery slopes’, but he’s held back from it all by this snowflake burn. Cold burn. That’s how it feels at first, slipping into my veins, chilling me from the inside out. I think Pater just didn’t get the symbolism.”

Vale laughed. Jason gripped the edge of the desk as lust roared in him. He breathed through it, edging open his pants to let his cock pop out to the cooler air of his father’s study.

“Well, I’d like to say you’re reading into things, but, yes, it was a poem featuring lines from a friend’s description of his first experience of alpha quell.”

“So it’s about sex.”