Chapter Text
The email arrived at 2:47 on a Thursday afternoon, which was precisely the kind of mundane, forgettable timestamp that the universe reserved for delivering news it knew was going to rearrange your internal furniture.
Sid was in the kitchen when his laptop chimed on the counter.
He had spent the morning at the rink—light skate, no contact, the new conditioning program his trainer had put together to account for the hormonal fluctuations of the last few weeks—and had come home at one, showered, made himself a sandwich he hadn't really wanted, and then wandered around the house for an hour trying to identify something productive to do and failing. Finally he'd settled on opening his laptop to look at game tape, because game tape was the one thing that could reliably pull his brain out of itself and into the familiar pattern of ice and angles.
He had been about to open the video folder when the email notification slid across the top of the screen with its soft, familiar chime.
From: Diane Pelletier, NHL Omega Welfare Office
Subject: Amendment Proposals — File OWA-17-2026-SC
Sid's hand stopped halfway to the trackpad. His stomach did a small, uncomfortable thing that was not quite nerves and not quite anticipation and that his body had apparently decided was going to be its default response to anything involving Leon Draisaitl's name from now on.
He clicked the email.
Diane's message was characteristically brief and professional. Sidney — Mr. Draisaitl's counterpart signature has been received and three amendment proposals have been submitted for your review. Please find the scanned documents attached. I will be calling you in approximately fifteen minutes to walk through the changes. Please do not sign anything until we have spoken. — Diane.
Sid stared at the attachment icons.
Three amendments. He had been expecting none. The arrangement he'd drafted in Edmonton had been specifically constructed to be accepted without revision—every clause calibrated to make the least possible demand on the alpha involved, every provision designed to anticipate and remove obstacles before they could be raised. Sid had spent four hours in Diane's office making absolutely certain that there was nothing in the paperwork an alpha could look at and object to. Nothing unreasonable. Nothing burdensome. Nothing that could be interpreted as clinginess or neediness or any of the other traits that omegas past their prime were specifically warned against displaying.
And yet. Three amendments.
His phone rang before he could click on the attachments.
He answered without looking. "Hi, Diane."
"Sidney. Do you have a minute?"
"Yes. I just saw the email. I… haven't opened the attachments yet."
"Good. I'd rather walk you through the changes before you read them in full, if that's all right with you. Sometimes context helps."
"Okay."
Sid carried the laptop to the living room and sat down on the corner of the sectional, the one that faced the window and the grey Pittsburgh afternoon outside. He tucked one foot under his thigh. Pressed the phone harder against his ear.
"Go ahead."
"So." Diane's voice was calm, measured, the tone she always used when she was about to deliver information she suspected might land unevenly. "Mr. Draisaitl signed all fifteen pages of the primary arrangement without modification. The countersignature is complete and on file. The arrangement is legally provisional pending your response to his three proposed amendments, which I will now walk you through."
"Okay."
"Amendment one. He would like to strike clause two in its entirety."
Sid frowned. "Clause two."
"The reciprocity waiver. The provision you included stating that he would be free to engage with other omegas during the term of the arrangement."
Sid's frown deepened.
"He wants to... strike it."
"He wants to replace it with standard bilateral exclusivity. Both parties restricted to each other for the twelve-month term."
Sid was quiet for a long moment.
"Why," he said finally.
"He did not offer a detailed explanation. But he was very firm about it. He requested the modification before I had finished reading the clause aloud, and when I asked him to confirm, he reaffirmed without hesitation."
"That's—" Sid stopped. Started again. "Diane, that's not how alphas in these arrangements usually—"
"No," Diane said. "It is not."
Sid pressed his lips together.
"Amendment two," Diane continued gently. "He has asked to modify clause five. The emotional boundaries provision. He is not asking to strike it, but he would like to adjust it so that the prohibition on emotional intimacy is softened to a no expectationrather than a no contact. He emphasized that he is not trying to override your comfort. He said, and I'm quoting from memory here, that he wants the option to initiate limited contact if appropriate, subject to your explicit consent on each occasion, and that if your answer is no, the answer is no, and the boundary stands."
Sid's hand slid up from his lap to the back of his neck. His fingers rested there, feeling his own pulse.
"Amendment three is structurally similar. He has asked that clause three—the contact parameters—be converted from an absolute prohibition on out-of-heat contact into a gated provision where contact is permitted if, and only if, you have given explicit approval in advance. Same principle. The default is no contact. But the option exists, subject entirely to your approval."
Sid said nothing.
Diane waited for a moment, then continued, her voice shifting into something slightly softer.
"I want to be very clear about something, Sidney. I have processed a lot of heat arrangements in my career. I have never seen an alpha request amendments in this direction. The standard trajectory is the opposite—alphas asking for more freedoms, more flexibility, more room to maneuver around provisions that feel restrictive. What Mr. Draisaitl did in my office this morning was the inverse of every precedent I know of. He walked in, reviewed the arrangement you drafted, and immediately asked to restrict himself to you exclusively while preserving every one of the boundaries you had placed on him, with the sole modification that you be granted the power to lower those boundaries if and when you chose to."
Sid swallowed. His throat felt tight.
"Okay."
"Sidney."
"Yes."
"May I say something that is slightly outside my usual professional remit?"
Sid closed his eyes. He knew what was coming. Diane had been his welfare officer for fifteen years, and he had learned to recognize the particular cadence in her voice when she was about to step out of her role as administrator and into her role as something closer to a friend. It did not happen often. Diane was scrupulous about boundaries. But when it did happen, Sid had learned to pay attention.
"Go ahead," he said quietly.
"When you came to Edmonton on Tuesday," Diane said, "you sat in my office for four hours, and during those four hours you used the phrase I don't want to be in the way exactly six times. I counted. I wasn't going to mention it, but I counted, because it struck me as unusual. You also used the phrases I don't want him to feel obligated, I want him to have his freedom, and I'm not asking for anything. You asked me, more than once, whether it was possible to structure an arrangement so that the alpha involved could essentially forget about it in between heats and live his life without any awareness that the arrangement existed. I told you that was not possible. You expressed disappointment."
Sid's eyes were still closed.
"I know what you were doing, Sidney. I have been in this job for a very long time and I have seen a lot of omegas come through my office after the end of a long partnership, and I recognize the shape of what you were doing. You were trying to make yourself as small as possible. You were trying to pre-empt the rejection you believe is coming by rejecting yourself first. You were trying to write an arrangement that would allow Mr. Draisaitl to treat you as a biological obligation rather than a person, because you believed—and I'm not saying you were right—that if he was given any latitude at all, he would eventually come to resent you, and you wanted to build the arrangement in such a way that there would be nothing to resent."
Sid was breathing very carefully now. Slow in, slow out. The laptop screen had gone dim on his lap from inactivity. Outside the window, a cardinal landed on the bare branch of the dogwood in his backyard and cocked its head, watching nothing.
"Diane."
"I know, Sidney. I know. I am not lecturing you. I am telling you this because the amendments he has proposed are his way of answering you. He is not trying to take advantage. He is not trying to convert the arrangement into something you didn't ask for. He is asking—very gently, very carefully—whether you would consider leaving the door open a crack. That is all he is asking."
Sid did not trust himself to speak.
"You do not have to accept the amendments," Diane continued. "The original arrangement will stand if you reject them. You are entirely within your rights to do that, and no one—not Mr. Draisaitl, not this office, not anyone else—will hold it against you. But I wanted you to understand the spirit in which the amendments were proposed before you made that decision. Because I think you deserve to know that at least one alpha in this league looked at the version of you that you presented on paper and said no, actually, I want to know you better than that."
The cardinal flew away from the dogwood branch. Sid watched the empty branch sway in the cold air and felt something perilously close to breaking in his chest.
"I'll look at it," he said finally. His voice came out steadier than he expected. "The amendments. I'll read them and think about it and send it back once I've decided."
"Take as much time as you need. The window is seven days."
"Okay."
"Sidney."
"Yes."
"You are not in the way. Of anything. You have never been in the way. I wanted you to hear that from someone who has no reason to lie to you."
Sid pressed the heel of his free hand hard against his eye socket. "Thank you, Diane."
"Call me if you need to talk before you sign."
"I will."
The line went dead. Sid set the phone down on the couch cushion beside him and sat very still for a long time, staring at nothing, while the dimmed laptop screen flickered back to life from a waking motion he hadn't consciously made.
He read the amendments three times.
The first time, he read them at the pace he would normally use to review a legal document—slowly, deliberately, pausing on each clause to process the implications. His eyes tracked down the columns of text, and his mind attempted to stay analytical, and for the most part it succeeded until he reached the bottom of the last page and saw Leon's signature.
Leon Draisaitl.
The handwriting was nothing Sid had expected. He didn't know what he had expected, exactly—maybe something brisk and impersonal, the kind of signature a professional athlete developed after years of signing autographs, illegible and identical across thousands of repetitions. But this was different. The letters were careful. Slightly slanted to the right. The L had a small loop at the top, the kind that suggested someone had been taught to write cursive by a teacher who cared about penmanship. The double-a in Draisaitl was joined at the top by a single clean line, the way children were taught in German primary schools. The n at the end of Leon curled down below the baseline like an afterthought, as though whoever signed it had been thinking about something else by the time his hand got to the last letter.
Sid stared at the signature for a very long time.
It struck him, belatedly, that this was the first piece of Leon's handwriting he had ever seen. He did not know this man. He had spent three days with him in a hotel room in Toronto. He had smelled him, tasted him, slept against him, and had allowed Leon to do things to him that he had permitted no alpha but Nathan MacKinnon to do in over a decade. And yet he did not know what Leon's handwriting looked like until this afternoon. He did not know if Leon took his coffee with sugar. He did not know his middle name. He did not know the names of Leon's parents or whether Leon had siblings or what town Leon was from in Germany or whether Leon's first language still felt like home on his tongue or whether English had, by now, replaced it as the language his dreams came in.
He did not know anything. And his body did not care.
That was the part that was eating at him. Had been eating at him, quietly and steadily, for the better part of a week. His body did not care that he did not know Leon Draisaitl. His body had decided, somewhere in the fog of that first contact in the service corridor at Scotiabank Arena, that Leon was the alpha his nervous system was going to orient itself around, and his body had not consulted Sid's conscious mind before making the decision, and now Sid's conscious mind was being dragged along in the wake of a biological conclusion he had not authorized and could not un-authorize.
It wasn't supposed to be like this.
He knew—had been taught, clinically, by omega counselors going back to his teenage years—that heat with a compatible alpha could leave residual hormonal traces for days or even weeks afterward. That omegas often experienced what the literature called post-heat affinity responses, mild yearning, a tendency to seek proximity to the alpha they had recently shared a cycle with. It was normal. It was expected. It usually faded within a week or two as hormone levels returned to baseline.
What Sid was experiencing was not that.
Sid had spent heats with Geno once, many years ago, in the early days when they were young and everything about the league was newer and more forgiving. Geno had been kind and careful and had done his best, and the heat had been survivable, and afterward Sid's body had returned to itself within three days with no lingering traces beyond a certain fondness he already felt for Geno as a friend. Sid had spent heats with Nate for years—dozens of cycles, a long and detailed history of shared rooms and shared sheets and a rhythm they had developed together—and even after years of that, even after all the time they'd spent together, Sid's body had never done this.
This was a whole other thing.
Sid's body had been strange since Toronto. Not physically unwell—his numbers at the team doctor's check-in had all come back fine, if slightly elevated on some of the hormonal markers in a way the doctor had described as consistent with a recent successful heat cycle and nothing to worry about—but strange. Attuned. Alert in a way it had not been before. Every morning for the past week, he had woken up reaching across the mattress for something that wasn't there, his hand moving automatically to feel for a body that had been in his bed for exactly three nights and had not been back since. Every night, he had fallen asleep with his face pressed into the pillow on what his body had somehow decided was the alpha's side, as though that pillow had been sanctified by three days of proximity to Leon's scent and could now be used as a placeholder. Three times now, in the middle of the day, he had caught himself touching his own collarbone in the exact spot where Leon had kissed him in the hotel room, absently, without realizing he was doing it, until he looked down and saw his fingertips resting against his skin.
And then there was the heat. The low, constant, simmering heat that had begun sometime around Tuesday evening and had not receded since. Not a full cycle—his actual heat wasn't due for another three weeks, the numbers were clear about that—but something adjacent. A slow-burning warmth underneath his skin that his body interpreted as hungry and refused to resolve no matter what he did. He had been able to function. He had gone to practice. He had given polite interviews. He had eaten meals and watched tape and spoken to his parents on the phone on Wednesday night without letting a single note of the restlessness into his voice.
But in the quiet hours, alone in his house, with no one to perform for—
He had touched himself three times in the past week. Four, if he counted this morning. Which he was going to have to count, because it had happened, and honesty with himself was a discipline he had worked hard to cultivate, and he was not going to start lying to himself now about the frequency with which he was thinking of a German alpha he barely knew.
Sid set the laptop on the coffee table. Stood up. Walked to the window and pressed his forehead against the cool glass and stared out at the backyard.
Prior to Toronto, his body had been in a completely different condition. A bad one, honestly, though he hadn't fully understood how bad until the contrast of the last week made it impossible to ignore.
In the weeks following Nate's engagement announcement—the magazine spread, the carefully lit photo of Nate with his arm around Charlotte at some vineyard in Nova Scotia, the quote about building a family that had gone viral in sports media within an hour—Sid's body had been in a slow, steady state of revolt. His scent had begun unmasking within days, the alpha-bonded musk that had layered over his natural pheromones for years dissolving like a waterline receding to reveal everything that had been hidden beneath. He had woken up every morning with his pulse slightly too fast, his sheets damp at the small of his back, a restless weight sitting on his sternum that made full breaths feel like work. His appetite had slipped. His sleep had fractured into short, jagged intervals.
And underneath all of it, humming in his bones like a low-grade fever, had been the part of his body that had spent years calibrated to Nathan MacKinnon's presence and could not understand why that presence had been removed. His omega had kept searching for him. Looking around rooms for a scent that wasn't there. Turning its head at the sound of footsteps that didn't belong to the right person. Waking up disoriented and alert because the bed was empty and the body beside him that was supposed to anchor him was somewhere in Colorado, sleeping beside a woman whose scent he was probably already learning.
It had been, clinically speaking, a withdrawal. The omega counselor Sid had spoken to briefly in January had used that word—withdrawal—and had explained in careful, compassionate language that his body was going to take time to adjust, that the process was unpleasant but survivable, that within eight to twelve weeks his baseline would stabilize and he would begin feeling more like himself.
Sid had nodded through the appointment and gone home and not made a follow-up visit, because the thought of spending eight to twelve weeks feeling like the frayed end of a rope had been more than he could contemplate dealing with one scheduled hour at a time.
And then Toronto had happened. And Leon had happened. And Sid's body had—
Reset was the only word for it.
It was as though his entire nervous system had been running on a broken version of an operating system for months, cycling error messages, consuming too much memory, slow to respond to simple commands, and then someone had reached behind the machine, pulled the power cord, and plugged it back in. The loading screen had resolved. The error messages had stopped. Every system had come back online, clean and functional, but configured now for a different user than the one it had been calibrated to before.
The searching had stopped. His omega was no longer looking for Nate. Sid could feel the absence of that specific ache like a tooth that had been pulled—the tongue still checking the empty socket by reflex, expecting pain, finding nothing. He hadn't realized how much of his background processing had been dedicated to that search until it was gone.
But the relief had lasted maybe a day. And then the new thing had started.
The new thing was Leon. Or rather, the new thing was the absence of Leon, which his body was now tracking with the same persistent, low-level vigilance it had previously dedicated to tracking Nate—except more acute. Sharper. A specific and directional kind of wanting that his body had not generated in years. His omega had not cared this much about Nate's physical proximity even at the height of their arrangement, had not reached for him in sleep this consistently, had not left him restless at his own kitchen counter at three in the afternoon for no identifiable reason except that there was a man in Edmonton whose scent Sid could still catch on his own skin if he held his wrist close enough to his nose.
It was embarrassing.
That was the part Sid could not get past. It was embarrassing. He was thirty-seven years old. He was an omega well past the statistical peak of his reproductive years, a man whose cycles had been slowing for the past eighteen months and would continue to slow until they eventually tapered into the long, gradual quiet of omega post-cycling. He had no business feeling this way about a twenty-nine-year-old alpha in the prime of his career, a man built for the hormonal urgencies of his own generation, a man who could have his pick of any unbonded omega in professional sports and who had no logical reason to anchor himself to someone a full eight years older than him.
An omega past his prime, pining for an alpha in his prime. It was a plot from a bad novel. The kind of thing that would have made Sid wince if he'd encountered it in someone else's life—not out of judgment, but out of secondhand mortification on behalf of the omega involved.
And yet his body kept doing what it kept doing, and his mind kept dragging along behind it, and here he was, standing at his own window in the middle of a Thursday afternoon, staring at his backyard without seeing it, with Leon's signature on a piece of paper on his coffee table, and a low, warm, directional wanting threading itself through every system he had.
He turned away from the window.
Walked back to the coffee table.
Picked up the laptop again and scrolled to the bottom of the amendment document and read Diane's summary one more time.
Amendment 1: Strike clause 2 (reciprocity waiver). Replace with bilateral exclusivity.
Amendment 2: Modify clause 5 (emotional boundaries) from prohibition to no-expectation standard.
Amendment 3: Modify clause 3 (contact parameters) from absolute prohibition to gated provision subject to Omega's explicit prior approval.
And underneath, in Diane's tidy administrative footer: Mr. Draisaitl has indicated that he is open to further negotiation on any of these provisions and will accept Omega's counter-proposals without objection. He has also asked that I convey his appreciation for the careful drafting of the original arrangement and his understanding that the modifications he has proposed are subject entirely to Omega's discretion.
Sid read that last sentence twice.
his appreciation for the careful drafting of the original arrangement
He could feel the warmth starting. The specific, traitorous warmth that his body had been producing on and off for the past week, flaring up at odd moments and then subsiding into the background hum. It was flaring now. Hard. A pulse of heat through his lower abdomen that made him shift where he sat, the muscles in his thighs tensing involuntarily.
He closed the laptop. Set it aside. Pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
A small, embarrassed sound slipped out of his throat before he could catch it. Not quite a whimper. Not quite a sigh. Something in between—a soft, involuntary noise that his body made when it was trying to communicate a need that his conscious mind had not yet authorized it to communicate.
Don't, he told himself firmly. Not right now. Get through the rest of the afternoon. Finish the paperwork. Send it back to Diane. Then you can—
His hand had already moved to the waistband of his sweatpants. He hadn't decided to move it. It had just gone.
He was aware, with a sort of detached horror, that he was already hard. Not fully—not the urgent, aching hardness of a heat wave—but thickening, his cock pressing against the soft cotton of his boxers with the kind of half-interested heaviness that his body had apparently decided was now its baseline state whenever Leon Draisaitl crossed his mind. He was also aware, with a different and more humiliating quality of horror, that the boxers were wet. Not soaked through. But damp at the front, damp between his thighs where slick had started seeping again, a slow and indifferent leak that his body had been producing on and off for days and had not bothered to warn him about this time.
"Fuck," he whispered to the empty living room.
But the living room, predictably, did not respond, and his body continued producing slick at its slow steady rate, and his cock continued thickening against the damp cotton, and the warm directional wanting that had been humming underneath his skin all afternoon was now coalescing into something he was going to have to deal with before he could do anything else.
He gave up.
It was the fifth time in seven days and there was no point fighting it anymore—the longer he tried to white-knuckle his way past the wanting, the worse it got. He knew this from the three previous attempts. His body would simply escalate until he gave it what it wanted, and the giving was less embarrassing when it happened in the privacy of his own bedroom rather than when it ambushed him in a grocery store parking lot or, worse, in the dressing room after practice.
He picked the laptop up and carried it with him down the hall. Some distant and responsible part of him wanted to have the amendment paperwork close by so that he could sign and send it immediately afterward, as though finishing the task would somehow recontextualize what he was about to do as productivity rather than as the latest in a series of increasingly frequent solo incidents featuring Leon Draisaitl as the unacknowledged centerpiece.
His bedroom was dim. The curtains were half drawn. The bed was made, because he had made it that morning—a habit from his billet-family days, one of the small disciplines that made his life feel organized even when nothing else did—and the pillows were arranged neatly at the headboard, two of them fluffed, the third one flat because he liked to keep one flat for his back when he was watching tape.
Sid set the laptop on the dresser. Peeled the damp boxers off and dropped them in the laundry hamper, already embarrassed at the thought of the housekeeper finding them there on Friday. Pulled off his t-shirt for good measure and tossed it over the back of the chair. Climbed into the bed naked and sank into the soft mattress with a long, shuddering exhale.
The sheets were cool against his feverish skin. The pillow under his head smelled like his own shampoo and the faint remnant of laundry detergent. He rolled onto his back, adjusted the pillow so that it cradled his neck, and let his knees fall apart.
His cock was fully hard now, curving against his stomach, the tip already beaded with precome. His thighs were slick on the inside, a steady warmth seeping down toward the sheets, and his hole was twitching in that specific empty rhythm that meant his body had already committed to what was about to happen.
Sid's one hand clutched at the sheets beside his head, fingers curling into the cotton. His other hand trailed down—slowly, reluctantly, because some part of him was still trying to pretend he could stop this if he really wanted to—across his stomach, past his cock, between his thighs.
His fingers found his hole, wet and twitching and waiting.
He closed his eyes.
And Leon was there immediately. Not a conscious summoning—Sid had not permitted himself to conjure the image, had been trying all afternoon not to—but the moment his eyes closed, the moment his fingers made contact with his own slick heat, his memory opened like a door on a room he had been standing outside of all week, and Leon walked through it without waiting for an invitation.
Leon's voice, low and steady in his ear. I got you.
Leon's hands on his hips, broad and warm, fingers pressing hard enough to leave marks that had faded by Tuesday and that Sid had mourned irrationally when they disappeared.
Leon's mouth at the hollow of his throat, breath hot against his pulse, whispering things that Sid's conscious mind had half-forgotten but that his body had apparently transcribed word for word into some deeper layer of memory that was playing them back now with perfect fidelity.
Stay still for me.
Sid's first finger slid inside himself easily. He was so wet there was no resistance, no burn, just the smooth and immediate welcome of his own slick drawing him in, and the soft involuntary sound that fell out of his mouth surprised him with how ragged it was. He had not meant to make any noise. There was no one to hear him. Making noise alone in his own bedroom was embarrassing in a way that was entirely self-directed and that he had been working on unlearning for years—it's fine, no one can hear you, you are allowed to be loud in your own house—but knowing intellectually that he was allowed and actually permitting himself to make noise were two different things.
The finger wasn't enough. He added a second immediately, because his body was beyond the pretenses of a slow build-up, and the second finger made him gasp—a sharper, higher sound, the pitch of it unfamiliar in his own ears. He curled them. Searched.
Found the spot on the first try, because his body remembered where it was now, because three days of Leon's fingers and Leon's cock mapping that exact place with obsessive attention had carved a neural pathway that could be followed blind, in the dark, by any hand that knew how to look.
"Hnnh—"
His hips bucked up off the mattress. Not much. A small, involuntary jerk, but enough that he felt the slide of his own slick coating his inner thighs. He pressed his fingers harder and worked them in a slow, grinding circle against that spot, and the pleasure that rolled through him was specific and unsatisfying in equal measure—his body recognizing the stimulation and responding to it, but also clearly registering that the stimulation was being provided by the wrong source, that this was a poor facsimile of what it actually wanted.
It wanted Leon. It was going to keep wanting Leon. No amount of his own fingers was going to fool it into forgetting.
But fingers were what he had. So fingers were what he used.
He thought about Leon's voice. The specific low register it had dropped into when Sid had been in his lap in the Toronto hotel room, the one that had vibrated in Sid's chest through skin contact as much as through his ears. The way Leon had said his name—Sid, with that soft German trace at the edges, the vowel slightly rounder than an English speaker would have pronounced it, the d gentler. The way Leon had kissed the tears off his face one eye at a time, slow and patient, like the tears were important and needed to be acknowledged before they could be allowed to dry.
So good for me, Leon had murmured against his ear. Over and over, at intervals, whenever Sid had done something well—taken his cock, held still, begged the right way, come when he was told to come—and the phrase had landed in Sid every single time like a blow to a soft and undefended place.
Sid's fingers worked faster. His other hand had released the sheets and was now gripping his own hair, fingers tangled at the crown, tugging lightly in a way that his body recognized as a ghost of Leon's hand doing the same thing on the second night in the hotel room. He could almost feel it. Almost. The phantom pressure against his scalp was so specific that his body was responding as though Leon's hand were actually there, and a low, needy whine was building in the back of his throat, and he couldn't stop it, and he didn't particularly try.
"Ah—ah, ah—"
He was close already. It was humiliating how close he was. He had been hard for maybe three minutes and his body was already building toward the peak, treating the whole encounter as though time were an emergency, as though he needed to be finished and cleaned up before someone caught him.
He thought about Leon's weight on top of him. The specific solidity of it. The way Leon had covered him completely and had held him down with nothing more than the ordinary mass of his body, and the way Sid's own body had gone boneless and grateful under that weight because it had been so long—so long—since anyone had covered him like that, since anyone had been there above him with that specific combination of tenderness and authority, and his body had soaked up the sensation like dry soil soaking up the first rain after a drought.
Mine, Leon had said. More than once. Low and possessive, right against Sid's ear. All mine.
Sid came.
It hit him harder than it had any right to. His back arched off the mattress, his fingers driving deep, his own cock pulsing untouched against his stomach, warmth spilling across his skin in several thick pulses. His mouth was open. Small broken sounds were coming out of it that he had not authorized and could not stop—uh, uh, uh—rhythmic with the contractions of his body, and then a longer, thinner, more pathetic sound at the tail end that was nothing more than the word please, whispered to an empty room, directed at a man who was twenty-five hundred miles away and had no idea.
He lay there panting for a long moment afterward. His fingers were still inside himself, and his body was still clenching around them in slow, aftershock pulses, and his thighs were trembling with the particular exhaustion that orgasms brought on when you had been trying to ignore the need for hours before finally giving in.
Eventually he pulled his hand free. Looked at the slick coating his fingers. Grimaced at the ceiling.
"Idiot," he said to himself, quietly but firmly. "Idiot."
He knew it was useless. He knew that the reprimand was entirely performative—that in a few hours, or perhaps tomorrow morning, or at some unspecified future moment he could not predict, he would find himself thinking about Leon again, and his body would respond again, and he would be back here, or somewhere like here, doing this again. Knowing that did not make him feel better about it. But it did shift something in his internal posture, moving him from shocked and appalled to resigned and tired, which was at least a more manageable emotional register.
He peeled himself out of the bed. Padded into the bathroom. Took a shower that he kept short and functional—he was not going to make it a whole thing, he was not going to stand under the hot water and have a second round of self-pity, he was going to wash and get out and finish the paperwork like an adult—and dried himself off with the specific brisk efficiency of a man who was trying to out-pace his own feelings.