Page 6 of Obsession
Everett's weight is warm and heavy on my back. He presses his mouth to the spot behind my ear and breathes there for a while, and I lie face down on the ruined sheets and try to remember what I was doing here.
Revenge. I was here for revenge. I was going to take this alpha apart and walk away with the satisfaction of knowing I broke his control.
He's still inside me. Knot swollen, cock twitching, arms bracketing my shoulders. I'm full, wrecked, and my body is so content the revenge story won't stick. It slides off like water. Underneath is something I don't want to look at: I've never felt this good, and the person making me feel it doesn't even know my name.
I close my eyes, press my face into the sheets, and wait for the knot to go down. I try not to think about how badly I'm going to want it again when it does.
Everett
The knot takes twenty-three minutes to go down. I know because I count.
It's a habit from work. When you're waiting for a jury to come back, you count. When you're holding a silence after a question that landed, you count. It keeps you grounded, keeps you from filling the space with something stupid. So I count, and I breathe, and I stay inside him while his body slowly releases its grip on mine, and I pay attention to what happens when the heat-fog starts to clear.
What happens is interesting.
Most omegas, after knotting, go soft. Pliant. They melt into whoever's holding them, scent turning sweet and sleepy, mumbling things they won't remember. I like that part—the quiet window where biology strips everything down and the person underneath is just there, unguarded and warm.
This omega doesn't do that. He goes quiet when the knot starts to shrink, which is normal, but instead of softening into me, he pulls himself together. I feel it in his body—the tension coming back in his shoulders, his breathing shifting from raggedto controlled. By the time I slip out, he's already propped on his elbows, spine straight like someone who learned to hold himself upright even when he's dead tired.
Minutes ago, he was crying into the sheets while I knotted him. Now he's putting himself back together, fast, like a soldier after an ambush. That speed tells me more about him than anything else tonight.
"There's water on the side table," I say. I reach over and grab one of the bottles and hold it out.
He takes it and drinks without looking at me, and I watch his throat work and the way he holds the bottle — fingers steady, grip controlled. He's already running his own debrief in his head. I can tell.
"You came back fast," I say.
He glances at me over the bottle. "Came back from what?"
"Most omegas stay under longer after a knotting like that. You're already thinking again."
A pause. Then, carefully: "I don't like not being able to think."
"Yeah, I got that." I settle back against the headboard and watch him, not bothering to hide it. He sits on the edge of the bed, back mostly to me. His body is beautiful in the low light—lean, flushed, slick shining on his thighs, bruises already blooming on his hips where I held him. But the way he sits is all wrong for what just happened. He looks like he's at a conference table, not like he just got fucked into the mattress.
"What do you do?" I ask. "Outside of here."
His head turns slightly. "That's not really a Knot Club question."
"I'm not asking for your business card. I'm curious."
"Why?"
Because you're performing. Because you were calculating through half of what just happened and I want to know what kind of person can do that in peak heat. Because you chose mewith a precision that doesn't match anything else about how omegas behave on this floor and I've been trying to figure out why since you looked at me from the gallery railing.
"Because you interest me," I say, which is true enough.
He goes quiet, drinking the water in small sips. I can smell him thinking. With omegas, it's real—their scent shifts when they're calculating, different from when they're relaxed. His scent is tangled right now. Part of him wants to shut this down, part of him doesn't, and I don't think he knows which side is winning.
"I'm a lawyer," he says, and then his mouth closes like he didn't mean to say that.
I almost laugh. A lawyer. Of course he is. That explains the posture, the composure, the way he argued with me while I had my hand on his cock. The man litigates as foreplay. It also explains the strategy I've been picking up under everything he does, that sense I'm being managed by someone who knows exactly how to handle people.
"What kind?" I ask.
"The kind that doesn't usually end up at anonymous sex clubs." He sets the water bottle down and I can see him deciding to change the subject. "What about you?"
"Same, actually."
