Page 79 of That Defining Moment

Lysander watched the meter, nudged the gain down two notches, and made a note of the setting in the margin of his notebook. “That’s fine. If you hear yourself echoing, tell me. Don’t touch anything, just tell me.”

“You’re very stern like this.” Dane grinned. “I like it.”

Lysander opened his notebook and pressed record.

“So.” He’d rehearsed the opening in the shower, and once out loud in the empty booth. “I want to start at the beginning. Before the channel even got started. Tell me how we met.”

“You know how we met.”

“The listeners don’t.”

Dane laughed. “Right. Okay. So I’m driving out to Barking to see a mate about a business thing, and I’ve got the Range Rover at the time. The white one. Absolutely obnoxious car. Twenty-two-inch rims, tinted windows, the lot.” He shook his head fondly at the memory. “And I park it on this estate, and by the time I come back out there’s a whole gang of kids around it. Proper little committee. One of them’s lying on the ground looking at the underside, one’s got his face against the driver’s window with his hands cupped round his eyes.”

“That was Mikka,” Lysander said. “The window one.”

“And there’s this one kid standing a bit back from the rest. Not touching the car. Just watching it, with his arms crossed, like he’s decided the whole thing is beneath him but he can’t quite make himself walk away.” Dane pointed at him. “That was you.”

“I was eighteen. I wasn’t a kid.”

“You were all elbows. You had this jacket on that was two sizes too big and you were doing your absolute best to look like the Range Rover meant nothing to you, and failing, because your eyes kept going back to it.” He leaned into the mic now, properly, without touching it. “And I got about ten feet from the car when the wind changed.”

Lysander’s pen stilled on the page. He knew what came next.

“I’d never smelled a male omega before,” Dane said. “I’d heard about them the way I heard about — I don’t know, albino tigers. You know they exist somewhere. You never expect one to be standing on a kerb in Barking.” His voice had dropped and slowed. “The other kids were nothing, just background noise. There was only you, as far as I could see. Gawky, gangly, and so, so beautiful but without even realising it. You smelled like syrup, Sander. Like the ripest fruit on the tree.” He sat back. “Eighteen years old, and you genuinely didn’t know what a prize you were.”

Lysander kept his face neutral while his skin crawled. Prize. Dane had been twenty-nine. He’d been looking at a teenager on a housing estate like a car he wanted to buy, and eight years later he was telling the story with a fond half-smile, as though it reflected well on both of them.

“So you came over,” Lysander said, steering them forward. “And you asked me if I was hungry.”

“Did I?” Dane’s brow creased in a performance of trying to remember. “Yeah. That sounds about right.”

“You did.” Lysander didn’t need to perform anything. Every detail of that evening was filed away in his brain. “You asked me if I was hungry, and I said —”

“‘I could eat.’” Dane’s grin widened. “With that little shrug you used to do. Like you were doing me a favour by letting me feed you.”

“You took me to Zuma,” Lysander said.

“Zuma!” Dane slapped the desk. “Forgot about that. Knightsbridge. Christ, that was a good night.”

It had been incomprehensible to someone who lived on pot noodles and Easy Mac. Lysander had walked into a restaurant where the starters cost more than Colin earned in an entire shift, wearing trainers held together with superglue. The maître d’ had looked at him with a lifted brow, and then Dane had said something quiet to the man’s ear, and the expression had rearranged itself. They’d been seated at a corner booth with a candle and a wine list that might as well have been written in Mandarin as far as Lysander was concerned.

Dane ordered for both of them. Champagne first, Lysander’s first glass ever, the bubbles stinging the inside of his nose, then lobster, which arrived with a pair of silver crackers that Lysander had no idea how to use. Dane had taken the claw from his hands, cracked it open in three clean movements, and slid the white meat onto Lysander’s plate without a word.

“I’d never had champagne before,” Lysander said into the mic. “I’d never had lobster. I’d never been inside a restaurant where they put the napkin on your lap for you. And you knew that.”

“‘Course I knew that.” Dane shrugged. “That was half the fun, wasn’t it? Watching you try everything for the first time. You made this face when you tasted the champagne; your whole nose scrunched up, like a rabbit.”

He also remembered what came after the restaurant: the Range Rover gliding through Barking with the seats heated and the stereo playing something Lysander had pretended to recognise, Dane’s hand resting on his thigh. Dane had parked in the dark corner of the estate, beneath the broken streetlight where the hedgerow from the neighbouring gardens screened the car from the nearest windows, and kissed him before the engine had finished ticking down.

It was his first kiss with an alpha, and it tasted of champagne and the miso glaze from the black cod. Then Dane had pulled back, taken Lysander’s jaw in one hand, and pushed two fingers past his lips.

“Get them nice and wet for me, babe.”

Lysander had sucked on them because Dane’s voice hadn’t left room for a question, and then those fingers had gone between his legs, slick with nothing but Lysander’s own spit, and pushed inside him. Two fingers, no preamble, while Dane’s other hand pressed flat against Lysander’s stomach to hold him still. Lysander had gripped the door handle above his head and come so hard his vision went white, his thighs clamped around Dane’s wrist.

“You drove me home,” Lysander said. “And you fingered me in the front seat of the Range Rover, on the estate, the night I met you.”

Dane’s laugh was warm and nostalgic. “You were gagging for it. I barely touched you and you went off like a firework.”