Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Can I ask you some questions,” says Athena, “about. You know.”

She pairs her words with an exaggerated glance down toward Simon’s lap and an eyebrow waggle, perfectly shameless in her implication as she seems to be in everything. She is, in fact, presently perched on top of his desk without a scrap of self-consciousness, all her old childish disregard for propriety only amplified by adulthood. As if she’s never worried the way he has—as if she hasn’t even begun to consider the thoughts that he’s partitioned off into dark and unapproachable corners of his brain.

And yet: he’s never been able to say no to that brilliant, unfaltering smile. Not, of course, when it was turned in his direction in Metis’s bloodstained laboratory; certainly not now. “If you must,” he says, turning his attention firmly toward his laptop, sparing himself from the brightness of her gaze.

“Aww, you’re pouting,” she says. Her tone indicates she’s likely stuck out her impossibly pink lip herself, at least twice as much a pout as anything in Simon’s expression. “Am I doing a microaggression?”

“It’s fine,” he snips. “You’re far from the first beta to inquire after my—physiology.”

Athena hums, as if she’s debating explaining microaggression to him (he did, in fact, complete his HR training upon his reinstatement at the Prosecutor’s Office, nigh-unusable as that awful site may have been), though all she says is: “Oh, good. I didn’t want to ask Apollo. Awk-ward.”

Apollo Justice, yes: the other alpha Athena sees regularly, who never bothers to put on any scent-blockers, whose pheromones therefore linger on Athena’s jacket nearly constantly. “Hah! For the best, I should think.”

“You’re awful,” says Athena, but without any bite. “Do you rut pretty often, do you think? Like, monthly?”

“Christ alive, woman, you’d kill me. Annually, I should think.” Some small tension in his shoulders releases; fielding such questions is hardly uncomfortable or particularly personal. “Though when I was twenty—”

“Yeah?” she says. Supernaturally keen ears or otherwise, he can hear those sparkling teeth, that look in her eye. “C’mon, I’m not a kid.”

He would beg to differ; only a child would beg for the dirty details of a sex life so distant that it may well have been someone else’s. He frowns. “My partner’s heat—spurred on my hormones, I reckon. I’m no doctor.”

Athena pauses. “Your omega girlfriend,” she says, and he nods. Once, sharply. “You think it could happen with someone else?”

“The Internet indicates it’s not uncommon.”

Some rustling, creaking noise as she shifts. His desk is going to collapse one of these days. “But with a beta?”

Simon grits his teeth together. His email, he’d been looking at his email. He deletes the top five unread messages without glancing at the subject lines and opens the sixth, which turns out to be meaningless spam. Starts a new draft, subject line Your blasted guitars, addressed to Prosecutor Gavin. “I don’t,” he says. “I couldn’t tell you.”

“Mm,” says Athena. “Do you think you’re hornier than n—than other people?”

Fuck, that gets him. He whips his head up to look at her, and finds her grinning back down at him. Widget displays a serene smiley-face, as though this is a reasonable conversation to be having and Simon’s not been suddenly plunged into a bizarre mirror universe. She winks.

And he still doesn’t say no. Doesn’t say get the hell out of my office and allow me to sink into the pits of self-loathing in peace. Does sputter, a good bit, before he forces out, “I couldn’t say.”

“Do you cum a lot?” She cocks her head to the side, her eyes glittering. Like she’s playing with a new, fascinating toy. “I heard alphas cum buckets.”

It’s funny: when his dates have asked him these questions before, they’d wanted him to press them into walls and growl at them like a porn star and call them things like good girl. Something strange and distinct is happening to him now. He may well be melting into a puddle of goo in front of Athena, and bizarrely, she seems to be enjoying it.

He manages, “More or less, yes.”

She exhales, her lip catching against her teeth. Something settles on his thighs—he glances down to find her boots primly perched in his lap, ankles crossed. “Pretty interesting stuff,” she says. “Do you, you know, get all possessive? When you’re dating?”

Simon simply cannot do this. He can’t survive this, put plainly, not with his dignity intact. He recalls the smile in the laboratory, that girl he’d known; whichever girl is interrogating him now is a stranger in comparison. Vaguely, desperately, he says, “I suppose it would depend on the. Individual.”

“Me, how about,” she says. “Or, you know. A beta.”

Simon scrambles for purchase: “They—we’d—I’d scent them the same as I’d—scent an omega. So long as they didn’t raise protest.”

“Ooh, progressive. I wouldn’t.”

“You—”

“I like your scent. I bet it smells different to you and your fancy nose, but I like it.”

Quite as much as Justice-dono’s? No. He can’t say that; can’t think it. I would be happiest to scent you so heavy any passing bloke would know I was yours. “You need to leave,” he says.

“Boo. You’re kicking me out?” She taps her shoe against his leg. “I had more.”

“You’ve pestered me quite enough. I have—” He looks, again, at his email. Guitars, yes. “I am a busy man, Athena Cykes. I think it’s best you take your leave.”

She swings her feet off his lap and hops off his desk, her mood seemingly unaffected by his sudden shift. Then she leans down and kisses him on the forehead, lips wet with saliva. “I’ll see you at movie night, yeah?” she says.

“You,” he says. Can’t finish his sentence: what is she? What has she done?

“Me,” she agrees, and Widget blows a kiss. She smooths down her skirt and practically skips away, offering Taka a wave goodbye before she slips out into the hallway.

He drops his head into his hands. The pits, indeed.

He expects Athena, in her typically mercurial fashion, to drop the matter entirely by Sunday movie night. Indeed, when she picks Simon up from his flat in her secondhand yolk-yellow Bug, all she says is, “I hope you’re psyched for hedgehogs,” which speaks promisingly to the proportion of conversation regarding his prick.

“Hedgehogs,” he repeats, an eyebrow raised.

“Sonic 3,” she says. “You missed it when it came out. It’s great, you’ll have a blast. Is the seat too far forward?”

He’d missed the second film, too, and hadn’t bothered to watch the first, though he suspects pointing this out might not be wise. Instead he grumbles, “A minuscule adjustment won’t save my poor joints from your tin can of an automobile,” though he does fiddle with the positioning enough to earn himself an inch of leg room.

“For sure, man,” says Athena, her eyes crinkling in suppressed mirth. “Trucy couldn’t make it, so. Just you and me and Ema and Apollo tonight.”

“How intimate,” Simon mutters dryly, paying no mind to his words till he says them. Too late now to take them back, he supposes.

She flashes him a grin, Widget mimicking her expression, and winks. A shiver runs all the way from his skull to the base of his spine.

Justice and Skye’s lodgings reek of alpha more than Simon’s dormitory in university had; he’s certain the thick scent of pheromones has doubled, at least, since Athena had last dragged him along to one of these social events. (“You’re my plus-one,” she’d said, with an impish smirk, and he’d sternly chastised himself for spending the rest of the day rolling that phrase around in his head.)

In fact, as Ema Skye often has the good sense to sport blockers, the space smells particularly of Justice. That same metallic tang that clings so frequently to Athena’s clothes permeates the apartment, nearly sickening in its oppressiveness, worming its way into Simon’s Jacobson’s organ and taking up root. He finds himself hovering more closely by Athena’s side than he might otherwise, matching each of her steps like a loyal dog; he tells himself this sudden outburst of dependency has nothing to do with Justice, or with Athena’s—interrogation, and nearly believes himself.

Justice offers Simon wine and tea and, quote, Klavier’s La Croix, and he accepts the herbal swill simply to prove himself capable of civil conduct. “Cool,” says Justice, offering an infuriatingly casual thumbs-up. “Go ahead and start without me.”

The sitting room is equally as saturated with pheromones, almost painfully so. Simon’s certain it hadn’t occupied this much of his focus when he’d most recently been Athena’s plus-one, during a rather distracting screening of Pride and Prejudice—perhaps Trucy and Gavin’s omega scents had layered over it. Perhaps he’d been too caught up with Colin Firth.

Perhaps he’s simply reached a point of no return.

“Sit with me,” says Athena, patting the cushion beside her. “C’mon, I don’t bite.”

“I would like nothing more,” he says, and she rolls her eyes. Their knees knock together when he sits, a closeness more intimate and indulgent than her desk-sitting, and that fancy nose of his detects her lovely citrus shampoo. His fingers curl around the chair’s arm.

The film begins—Simon is temporarily preoccupied by tracking the plot of a children’s movie, and attempting to recall if he’s played even a second of a Sonic game in his life—and after a mere handful of minutes, Athena swings her legs onto his lap. She raises her eyebrows, illuminated by the television’s dim light, and mouths, Okay?

Hm! Fine, yes, acceptable; he dips his chin in a harsh little nod.

Athena seems to understand this as an invitation, presumptuous girl that she is. She shuffles herself closer, settling her head on his shoulder, looping one of her arms through his. She is a sudden, sweet assault on Simon’s senses, inserting herself into his space in precisely the way she’d inserted himself into his business, into his workday. Into his prison sentence.

“You’re warm,” she murmurs. Her hair brushes against Simon’s knuckles, as though even her ponytail demands to be touched and attended to.

“Ah,” says Simon. He has spontaneously developed the queer certainty that if he moves a single muscle, something beautiful and fragile will snap; that a single shift will bring his indulgences into cold unforgiving focus. “I’m happy to provide.”

She squeezes his arm. “Are alphas normally so cosy?” she asks, her voice dropped down to a whisper. “Or are you special?”

She hasn’t forgotten at all, then, only waited patiently to spring on him. Bucky had been wrong to call her a chickadee; Simon recognizes, with a birder’s eye, the keen demeanour of a predator. “I should think—it’s individual.”

“I like it.”

Simon opens his mouth to respond, and is summarily interrupted by the clunk of a mug on the end-table. “Justice-dono,” he acknowledges.

“Yeah,” says Justice, “no worries.”

Simon reaches out, tracing his fingertip along the rim of the mug, glad of his own blocker patch. He feels like a teenager caught fooling around under the bleachers, a rush of juvenile shame, as though Justice’s walked in while his hand’s up Athena’s skirt.

Bloody hell. He thinks hurriedly, instead, of the awful things Taka had done to his breakfast in the morning.

Athena’s eyes track Justice’s trajectory across the room, and then she leans in till her lips brush the shell of Simon’s ear. (Snap out of it, Blackquill. Recall Taka’s feathers matted down with blood—all those horrible squishy bits—) “So: are you, like, pretty big?”

“What?”

“You know.” She waggles her eyebrows. On the television, one of the strangely animated hedgehogs is speaking, which Simon can’t say sets any mood especially well; he can’t decide if he appreciates the intrusion. Across the room, Skye and Justice giggle to each other like schoolgirls. “It’s what people say. Klavier said that Apollo’s huge even without the knot.”

The man in question is showing Skye something on his mobile telephone. Fascinating. “Is—that what you speak about in German?”

“Sure,” says Athena, shrugging. “Why not?”

Why not, indeed.

The hedgehogs are interrupted; Skye’s paused the film. The experience is a rather overwhelmingly loud and bright and difficult-to-follow affair, and he can’t say he’s disappointed. “Sorry. Um, we’ll be right back. I need to grab—you know. Do you need anything?”

Simon can’t say he does know, though the scent hanging in the air gives him an impression. He shakes his head; Athena’s shoulder nudges against his side. “We shall fend for ourselves,” he says.

Justice and Skye are gone for a scant handful of seconds before Athena says, “Merde, they’re all over each other. I guess two Jim Carreys is a real turn-on.”

He shrugs, vaguely. He’s been incapable of following the film’s capricious plot beats, though he’d been watching Skye and Justice touch each other unsubtly from the corner of his eye for several minutes. “I suppose.”

“Do you think it’s an alpha thing? No, no, you don’t have to tell me, microaggression o’clock.”

“You may ask me anything you like, Athena,” he says. It is all he can manage without uttering something far worse; he regrets it anyway, the carte blanche, but then again he has always been hers to probe and command.

“Oh, good,” says Athena, with a concerning load of glee in her half-hushed voice. “Can I feel you?”

He exhales, long and deep and slow: to hell with Taka’s deconstructed mouse. He is truly, wholly incapable of saying no to her. He’s never earnestly considered it. “If you so desire.”

Athena makes a happy humming noise behind her teeth, a little mm! of joy, and when she plops herself on Simon’s lap Widget is lit up in cheerful springtime green. Her weight is a comfort, pressing him down into the couch, an animal trapping its charmed and foolish prey. “I really, really do,” she murmurs. “Desire.”

She doesn’t kiss him, robbing him of that small mercy; instead obliges him to stare his shame straight in the lovely freckled face. She offers him the old laboratory smile. Then—with all the surety in the world—she grabs his half-hard cock through his trousers with her little warm hand and gives him a wholly ungentle squeeze.

The sound that escapes Simon’s throat is something near Ngh. No one’s touched him since the clink; he’s simply found himself unwilling to seek out another’s company, uninterested in even the thought of anonymous hands and mouths. He’d fooled himself that he hadn’t known why. Had told himself the blue eyes and strong thighs featuring prominently in his guiltiest fantasies were meaningless and impersonal.

He supposes that particular lie is, as the poets say, dead in the water.

Athena’s eyes are wide, sclerae bright and glinting, the tip of her tongue poking out between her teeth. “Hah,” she breathes. She gives him another exploratory squeeze. “Um, hello.”

“Ah,” manages Simon. “Allow me to—”

“You sit still,” she says, which is a blessing, given that he’s not entirely certain what he’d been offering. Her eyebrows pinch together, and on her collarbone, Widget displays a thoughtful expression. “Wow, and bigger with the knot.”

He can’t stop himself from preening; he feels somewhat like a dog that’s been pat on the head for a job well-done, though he’s not done any job at all. He’s all flushed up, blood humming, humiliatingly keen from the barest touch. “Indeed. Yes. Ye gods, Athena, you’ll drive me to madness—”

“Aww. Good,” she says. She darts forward and leaves a kiss an inch underneath the corner of his mouth, oddly off-centre. Then she licks across his jawbone like an excitable small dog, leaving a snail-trail of saliva over his skin. If she weren’t a beta she’d be lapping up his scent; surely she can detect it anyway, considering his glands seem to be working overtime despite the patches he’s slapped over them.

Something crashes to the floor in the kitchen, and Simon’s head yanks around so fast that it hurts, his heartbeat thudding in his chest. He hears Athena laugh.

“Fine! It’s fine!” calls Skye. “Uh, just a minute!”

“D’ya think they’re having fun?” says Athena, that note of mirth still lingering in her voice. Her fingers play at the hem of his shirt, nearly skimming across the skin of his lower abdomen. She drops to a murmur: “Wanna leave them to it?”

“I was under the impression you’ve been looking forward,” says Simon, “to the… hedgehogs.”

She shrugs. “I’ve been looking forward to lots of stuff,” she says. Her knuckles do bump against his belly, now, grazing against soft flesh. “Vámanos.”

She’s irresistible, that’s the problem, psychologically and physiologically impossible to resist. “I’ll tell them you had a family emergency,” she says, as he slips his surcoat on and she zips up her boots. “Aura had a really dramatic break-up. We had to rush to the detention centre.”

“Hah! I’m afraid it would be far from her first.” They step out onto the street. A single pigeon, out past its bedtime, gives them a suspicious look; Simon returns it.

“First from, um. Prison.”

“You’d be surprised.” This earns him another laugh, a proper one. The sound of it bubbles through him like champagne. “After you.”

Again, he folds himself into the seat, anticipating the soreness in his limbs tomorrow morning. He suspects the damn machine has it out for him. She puts on music he doesn't recognize, orders of magnitude louder than she’d have tolerated as a child, and taps her finger against the steering wheel to the beat.

“I bet you smell so good right now,” she says, absentmindedly. “I think if I had your nose I'd crash the car.”

“Please do not,” says Simon.

She takes her hands off the steering wheel for a single, nerve-wracking second, and winks at him. She does, he thinks, want him dead. “You’re funny,” she says.

“Hmph!” He does ease his grip on the ceiling handle, but only by an iota. “You terrify me, you foolhardy woman.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

The song ends. Simon doesn’t recognize the next, either: he has seven years’ worth of popular music to catch up on, he supposes, and Athena’s tastes tend toward the erratic and bizarre.

“In any case,” he says, “I fear your pheromones would undo me entirely.”

Athena lets out a long exhale, as if she’s been holding her breath for a very long time, and says, “Fuck.” And then, also, “Actually, you know what? Fuck this.”

They end up in the empty, darkened parking lot of a business park, a turn which Athena makes so aggressively that Simon’s knuckles go white ‘round the handle again, and then Athena’s fumbling with her seat buckle, and then she’s leaning over the centre console and she’s kissing him.

She kisses in much the same fashion she goes about anything else—one part unrestrained vigour, one part wholly unearned confidence—and manages to collide her teeth directly into Simon’s. He finds himself desperate for her touch regardless, whatever grazes or caresses she deigns to allow him.

“You said,” she breathes, “you’d scent me.”

He remembers her interrogation in his office only distantly, as if some other alpha had sat in his chair and fielded her questions, and he recalls this through a haze. He wants to. He is suddenly incapable of imagining what else he could possibly want more.

He drags his sleeve up and knocks his wrist into Athena’s jawbone, equally and messily overenthusiastic—manages half of an apology before she’s kissing him again, licking into his mouth the way she’d licked across his face some scant half-hour earlier. He ends up scenting the collar of her shirt and several loose strands of hair in his mad attempts to swipe over the tendons of her neck, though he’s rather distracted by her teeth closing over his bottom lip.

She holds his face with both hands when she pulls away, as if there’s any fleeting possibility he might try to turn away. “Do I smell like you?” she asks.

“Somewhat,” says Simon. “Yes. It’s evident that I’m—”

“Mine?” she interrupts. “Très bien.” She kisses him on the nose, lips slick with saliva, and then she says: “Back seat. Get.”

It’s all he can do to repress a yes ma’am, or perhaps swear himself into her service. He allows himself a stretch in the parking lot to fend off the ache in his joints, a fruitless quest, and then slips into the back seat. Athena is half-perched on the centre console, glove-box gaped open, and when he shuts the door she’s upon him.

“Do you know how long I’ve thought about this,” she says, between kisses. She shoves him down as supine as he can get, back crushed unpleasantly against the door.

“I suspect I’d rather not consider it.”

This laugh is a lovely bark, distinctly unbeta. “You probably wouldn’t,” she admits, which stirs something in his chest, and she goes about loosening his tie and unbuttoning his collar. She works her fingernails underneath his blocker patch and rips it off, discarding it on the floor, the closed space filling with the sharp scent of Simon’s own arousal.

He grips her waist, fingers digging into fat and muscle, as she dips down to lap at his neck. She can’t, surely, taste his pheromones, but the spot she’s picked is clustered with nerve endings, and the sound she draws out of him is nearly a rumble.

“You’re purring,” she teases. She’s flushed sinfully pink, a tone only outdone by Widget’s own fuchsia, and those gorgeous lips are shiny with saliva.

He rolls his eyes and she wriggles atop him; he can’t quite make out if it’s meant to be encouragement or punishment. She’ll be the death of him. “Athena.”

“I know,” she says, with barely-suppressed delight. She sits back, propping her foot up against the centre console, and dips her hand underneath the hem of her skirt, sliding it up her thighs. Simon could die—Simon could be executed summarily by the state, and he would go happily, after gazing upon the freckled strip of skin above her stockings; the soft bulge of her clit and balls in the sky-blue fabric of her knickers; the teasing splay of her legs. He has never wanted a single person as badly as he wants Athena in this moment, crammed in her tiny car, shoulders aching and cock straining in his pants.

She wiggles out of her panties and tosses them in the front. “Ta-da,” she says.

“You are the single most beautiful sight I have ever laid eyes upon,” says Simon, fervently. “To touch you would be the greatest honour of my life.”

“Hold your horses, stud.” Athena blows him a kiss. “I’m gonna take care of this, oui? And then you can touch as much as your honourable little heart desires.”

She produces a bottle of lubricant with a flourish—that must be what she’d taken from the glove-box, though he can’t imagine where she’s been keeping it in the meantime. She slicks up her fingers with an impatient sort of assuredness; he pictures her doing the same in the privacy of her own bedroom, writhing under her own touch, and his hips roll, unbidden, into the weight of her thighs.

Simon thinks she’s going to tell him off for it, but she doesn’t. Her eyes go dinner-plate-huge and she bites her lip and she says, “Yeah, fuck, I know,” and she pushes a finger into her blush-pink hole.

He’s admired her fingers in the past, on occasion, and had lain awake consumed with guilt for the pleasure. He has opportunity now to marvel at their sure and graceful movement, dipping in and pulling out of her—and the tiny movements of her legs as her muscles tense and release, and the quiet trembling of her breaths slipping free from her lips.

“You’re adorable,” she says. “I’ve never heard your heart go so fast.”

“Ah,” says Simon.

“Mm-hmm.” She pushes another finger into herself, antsy impatience visibly thrumming through her movements, the tension in her hands, the knot between her brows. “Ah. I hear it speed up when you look at my ass, too,” she adds. “And how you mutter at yourself. I really don’t think you’re any sort of cur, you know.”

He’d thought his blocker patch and her complete inability to scent his own pheromones’ betrayal had shielded him; he’d not considered her noticing his littler audible signals, had not begun to imagine those keen ears turned on him. “I fear—you’re so young—”

“I’m a big girl now, buddy,” she says. She must hit something pleasant inside herself, because her voice wobbles on that final syllable and her heel slips over the corner of the console. He grasps her more tightly, his heart somersaulting over itself in some mess of worry and desire. “How about I get you inside me before I completely lose it?”

Simon’s voice is perfectly normal and not a bit growly when he says, “God—please—”

“Okie dokie, you big bad alpha.” She undoes his trousers and drags them half-down his thighs, pulling his cock free, grinning down at him with a certain implacable appetite. “Oh, big is right. Mein Gott, I just want to lick you up.”

He strains into her hand, the sudden indulgence of touch an assault to his senses; he gulps an inhale in a last-ditch attempt to steady himself and decidedly, spectacularly fails. “Hmm!” he manages.

Athena’s giggle is electric, a sensation with which he’s become intimately familiar, though from her lips he only finds himself heart-poundingly enraptured. She squirts another dollop of lubricant on her palm and pumps the length of him, drawing another rumbly moan from his lips, and she shivers at that like she can feel it.

She holds him with one hand and braces herself against the seat with the other, guiding him into her, and a hiss of breath escapes from her teeth like the release of a pressure valve. “You felt big,” she says shakily, the whites of her eyes nearly-unsettlingly gigantic, “before, but god damn.”

“If I injure you—”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says. Her teeth catch against her lip, an expression which appears disconcertingly akin to pain, and she squeaks as she sinks down on the rest of him. “Hah. Wowza.”

Simon’s fingertips dig into her thighs, pressing into soft freckled skin, and arches into the warmth of her body. The responding hitch in her throat is nearly a moan and nearly a giggle.

She pushes herself up and slides down again, agonizingly slowly, gaze fixed unfaltering on Simon’s face. He thinks he’s glaring; he can’t quite untwist his features into anything else. “No, seriously—mmm—I tried my fingers, and I got this huge toy on my last paycheck, and it wasn’t enough. You’re so thick—and you’re so warm—and—”

Athena cuts herself off with a delighted, shivery sound, and begins riding him in earnest. Her movements are a little jerky, her rhythm erratic, clearly wholly absorbed in finding her own pleasure. Using him the way she must’ve used her new dildo, he considers, and a moan sticks in his throat at the thought.

He presses up into her, that irresistibly good tightness. She scrabbles her fingers over one of his hands, grasping but not holding, and says: “Good, that’s good. You’re so good.”

“I am yours,” he swears to her, “body and soul.”

“Oh, I know,” she says, offering him a pretty little smirk, “and you fill me right up, you absolutely perfect alpha. You good boy.”

Simon had certainly been partial to praise, before, but not quite like this: it’s honey-sweet, white-hot, pooling in his abdomen. He fucks into her, meeting her every movement, growling deep in his throat like an alpha in a pornographic film. She laughs at that, too, humiliatingly. Wonderfully.

Athena doesn’t have pheromones, not that Simon can sense, but scent pours off her regardless. The thick smell of sex and her sweat floods his nose, clicking something into place in his hindbrain—he should think about that, tease it apart, but he’s too preoccupied with drinking her in, overwhelming his sensory receptors with pure heady bliss. He wants to sink his teeth into her. He wants to swear fealty to her.

“Ngh, pretty much right there. I’m nearly—”

It requires all his learned self-control to keep himself from finishing at merely the suggestion of Athena’s orgasm, though the possibility of earning himself another bout of sweet words fuels him. He is going to be her very, very good boy.

Her bangs and her breasts, under the wrinkled fabric of her shirt, and her clit bounce as she doubles her pace, her head dangerously close to hitting the ceiling. She goes quiet as she cums, biting her lip so hard it must bleed, and Widget displays only a glowing red heart.

Her breaths heave and her hips rock little circles. “Good,” she says, finally. “Très bien. Ha. Come on, your turn.”

Simon barely needs more, only some friction and the grip of her body, before he’s spilling inside of her and whining for her like a dog. I heard alphas cum buckets, Athena had said, and he’s indeed been told that he produces a metric fuck-ton of semen, in exact terms. She seems happy with it, regardless, fluttering her fingers over her lower belly and making incredulous sorts of noises.

“You’re my favourite,” she says to him, fondly—heart eyes from Widget—

—and that nice thing in his animal brain snaps without warning. The only warning his body allows him is a hot surge of need, the old hold-protect-keep, and his cock gets tight, and Athena goes:

“Holy fucking shit,” the words rushing from her all at once.

It feels wildly good, knotting, and it takes him an entire second and a half to come back around. “Athena. Athena.”

“I thought you were massive before,” she says, and his sudden lurch of concern is eased, faintly, by her evident delight. “Oh my God.”

Simon’s not popped a knot outside of his ruts since he was nineteen; she’d done something to him. He tries to sit up, though the car door against his back and the swell of his cock inside Athena hinders his efforts. His head presses against the cold window glass. “I’m horribly sorry,” he says. “Forgive me—it shouldn’t be long—”

“Are you kidding? This is the complete experience.” She wriggles. “You and me are gonna have some quality bonding time in the parking lot.”

“Hgh,” he says. His heartbeat slows, perhaps because the damn thing doesn’t understand the gravity of the matter, or perhaps because it seems soothed simply by proximity to Athena.

She rearranges herself to rest atop him, head against his chest, and sighs like she’s never been happier in her life. “So,” she says, “let’s talk mating bites.”