“No trick, really. Just time and patience for them. Obviously, alpha and omega bondmates will never understand what betas deal with, but even fellow betas are…”
The way Tarius trailed off his statement intrigued Branson. He had some sense of Tarius’s meaning, but he wanted to hear it. “Even fellow betas are…what?”
Tarius looked at his glass, the table, the ceiling, all over the place. “A little too obsessed with having sex, marrying and adopting kids. Seems like it doesn’t matter your gender, there is this societal obsession with fucking that transcends all else, and it’s just weird to me. Like our identity is tied to where we stick our dick or not.”
Branson shoved back memories of his own disastrous attempts at dating and a few guys’ inability to back off when asked. “I get that. It’s so much more difficult when we’re beta,you know? When we date, or don’t date. We don’t have the mating bond to tell us who our true match is, and sometimes we pick wrong.”
For alphas and omegas, once an omega went through his first heat, his scent changed and it became easier to identify a potential bond with an alpha. Bondmates were preferable because, as it had always been explained to Branson and his beta friends, bondmates were created by the goddess herself, two souls who were meant to be together. Unbonded alpha/omega pairings didn’t have that soul-deep love and need to protect each other, and it could lead to volatile relationships.
His own omegin’s first mate hadn’t been his bondmate, and Dad survived three years of sheer hell before and after Branson was born. Branson had never asked about the specifics, and more than once he’d been tempted to access the court transcripts of Dad’s murder trial from twenty-two years ago, but he never did. Dad still carried the shadows of those years in his eyes. And the marks on his skin.
Betas, on the other hand, didn’t have the same developed sense of smell as alphas and omegas. No bondmates, no enticing scents, no pull to mate. They relied on old-fashioned attraction to another guy…which was kind of the problem for Branson. And attraction led to a whole host of different relationships, from soul-deep like Gaven’s beta parents, to volatile and downright abusive, like Branson suspected of one of his coworkers.
“Dating and marriage can be a crap shoot sometimes, for sure,” Tarius said after a brief silence. “But it also works out, like with Aven and Yosef. They’ve been in-synch since their first date. Same with Demir and his husbands.”
Branson nodded, even though he didn’t understand how someone could love two people at the same time, much less a mated alpha/omega pair. Not his business, because Brandt and Oliver made Tarius’s other beta brother Demir happy, andthey’d all been legally married for one year. “How do you deal, though? Being the oldest single person in your family?”
“I don’t have a secret to that, Branson. I just love my brothers, support their relationships as best as I can, and I live my life.” Tarius chuckled. “Such as it is, since I moved back in with my dad and Liam.”
Branson couldn’t imagine being almost forty and still living at home. Then again, Tarius’s sire was sixty-one, which was up there for an alpha, and sometimes his much-younger mate Liam needed a little extra help. If his parents ever needed that sort of extra support when they were Isa Higgs’s age, Branson would drop everything to help them. They were his greatest champions, after all, and even though Ronin Cross wasn’t his biological sire, he’d been Branson’s parent from four months old.
“For a long while, I figured I was just a late bloomer,” Tarius continued, his thoughts on a vastly different track than Branson’s. “Then I worried I was holding back because of an incident at university. But one of the first cases I worked on with your father helped me figure out that wasn’t it at all.” His eyebrows rose and dropped once, as if surprised he’d said what he said out loud.
Curious now, Branson leaned in closer. “What was it then?”
Tarius chewed on his bottom lip for several seconds, then took a long sip from his drink. “Have you ever heard of the term asexual?”
“Sure, in biology and science classes. It’s how single-cell organisms multiple through…it’s an f-word.” He chuckled. “Different f-word, um…fission?”
Tarius smiled. “Yes, that’s the scientific definition. I mean in terms of sexuality and attraction.”
Branson shrugged, not sure what Tarius was getting at. While it wasn’t completely unheard of for betas to be sexually attracted to alphas or omegas, the vast majority of betas onlydated and married fellow betas. Betas also couldn’t reproduce and relied on adoption to start families, so he wasn’t sure what asexual reproduction had to do with anything.
“I don’t get it,” Branson said.
“It means I don’t feel sexual attraction to anyone. Not betas, alphas or omegas. The few times I did go on a date or two, I enjoyed the companionship and the emotional connections, but not the pressure to have sex. I never felt the desire to sleep with someone the way Aven or my friends talked about it. So, after a while, I quit dating altogether. My roommates back then used to tease me like crazy, but I didn’t care. A few years ago, I found an online beta chat forum and realized there are more guys out there like me. Not as many as I’d like in Sansbury, but it’s still a pretty new forum.”
Branson’s grip on his beer bottle tightened as he listened to what sounded almost exactly like Branson’s own dating experiences. The interest in companionship and connections, but not so much in having sex. Being bullied in secondary school for his lack of interest, when everyone seemed to be hooking up with everyone else. Branson had gotten so frustrated with himself that he’d given in and slept with the guy he’d been dating. It was fine, but he hadn’t understood what all the fuss was about.
He still didn’t. And maybe there was a reason for it, beyond the “frigid” and “uptight” insults that had been hurled at him for years.
“Branson?” Tarius tapped his wrist again. “Hey, are you okay?”
“Yeah, sorry.” He glanced around but this was still a private conversation, no one lingering nearby or obviously eavesdropping. Tarius had been incredibly open and honest about something very personal. Branson decided to trust him. “It’s just that your story sounds a lot like mine.”
“Yeah?” Tarius’s gentle smile reassured Branson into opening up more to someone he’d known his whole life, but with whom he’d never had such a personal conversation before.
He’d finally found someone who got it. Who had a name for how he felt. “Yes. What you said about wanting the emotional stuff but not sex. Not feeling the drive to do it with another guy. I never knew there was a word for it.”
“According to what I’ve been reading, it’s fairly uncommon and a somewhat new identity among betas. If our client hadn’t mentioned it, it might have taken me many more years before I stumbled over it. Single betas are just single betas, assumed by choice, so no one ever bothered to do studies or ask questions, until a paper was published in Rainier Province ten years ago.”
Figures it was there. Rainier Province was on the opposite coast and the most progressive province in the Northern Territory. They were the first province to allow legal marriage between poly couples, which paved the way for a territory-wide acceptance of poly marriages.
“If you want,” Tarius said, “I can give you the name of the chat forum. You can read about it for yourself. Decide if it’s a label that fits you.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
Tarius pulled a business card and tiny pen out of his wallet. He wrote down the website name, as well as a phone number. “My mobile. In case you want to chat more about this after you investigate the forum.”
