“You stood me up, that’s what up. Did you forget we were getting lunch today?”
Dylan winced. With everything that had happened that morning, he’d completely forgotten that he was supposed to meet Annie for lunch.
“Sorry. I had kind of a crazy morning and I forgot.” Dylan walked back to his desk and grabbed his phone, Annie following him into the apartment. He glanced at the screen, and sure enough, he had several missed calls and messages from Annie, along with a message from Ryker telling him to call or text if he needed anything at all. He turned back toward Annie. “My phone was on silent.”
Annie rolled her eyes. “Yes, I figured. So what’s going on that was so crazy?” She took a seat on his bed and scooted back, leaning against the wall. “Is it werewolf related?”
A sharp laugh burst out of Dylan’s mouth. He put his phone down and wondered whether or not he should explain to Annie that he was a werewolf come addict.
“That’s a yes,” Annie said, looking concerned. “Did they… end things?”
Dylan sighed, walking over to the bed and taking a seat next to her. He decided to tell her a modified version of the truth.
“Kind of the opposite.”
“Opposite how?” Annie sounded confused.
“Opposite as in we’re stuck with each other – or at least I am with them.” Dylan fiddled with his hands, turning to Annie and finding her watching him with a worried expression. “It’s all werewolf mumbo jumbo, but basically I get sick if I’m away from them for too long.”
Annie’s eyebrows scrunched together. “What do you mean, you get sick?”
She sounded outraged.
“I don’t know.” Dylan bit his lip and shrugged. “I just feel bad, and then if I don’t see them, it gets worse. That’s what was wrong with me last night, and this morning I felt so bad I called August.”
“Because you knew not seeing him – them, I mean – was the reason you felt sick?”
Annie sounded skeptical and Dylan chuckled.
“No, because he’s a doctor. He was on his way home from the preserve and told me to meet him at his clinic.”
“And then when you saw him you felt better?”
Dylan nodded, not mentioning that the feeling better had only happened after he’d guzzled both Ryker and August’s cocks with the desperation of a crack addict.
“There’s no way to fix it,” he said, before Annie could ask. “At least not that August, Ryker or Steve have heard of.”
Annie closed her mouth, confirming that she’d been about to ask just that. She bit her lip and looked out over Dylan’s tiny apartment.
“How do August and Ryker feel about this?” she asked, giving him a careful look. “I mean, how did they seem when they told you what was going on?”
Dylan bit his lip and didn’t answer right away. That was a question that he’d been avoiding. On the one hand, he didn’t think that August and Ryker were upset about being tied to him specifically, but they hadn’t seemed happy about it, either.
Then again, it would have been pretty shitty of them to get visibly excited at having trapped Dylan into becoming addicted to their come.
“I don’t know,” he said, voice small.
Annie nudged their shoulders together, silently comforting him.
“They like me,” he said, swallowing. “At least I think they do.”
“They do,” Annie said, stating it as a fact. “They wouldn’t have magically bonded you to them unless they were seriously into you – even if it happened on a subconscious level.”
August and Ryker had presented becoming an omega as something that happened randomly, and Dylan hadn’t thought to question that.
“You don’t think it was random?”
Annie snorted. “Random? Fuck no.”
