I leaned over the edge of the tub. Slowly.
My wet hair falling across my shoulder, the strands dripping onto his chest, my face appearing in his peripheral vision at the angle required to see the side of his face—the jaw locked, the eyes fixed on the far wall, the expressioncarrying the rigid, contained,I-just-said-more-than-I-meant-tocomposure of a man whose disclosure had outpaced his defenses and who was now sitting in the aftermath waiting for the reaction he feared.
“Wait…”
The word was quiet. Careful. The vocal equivalent of a hand reaching for a surface to test whether it was stable before putting weight on it.
“What?”
CHAPTER 26
Me Too, Olive
~KAEL~
“The hardest play isn’t the one you execute under pressure.It’s the one where you finally stop protecting the wrong goal.”
Fuck…do I tell her?
I sighed to try and defer the inevitable.
The exhale traveled through my body like a pressure valve being released—long, controlled, carrying the accumulated tension of five years of silence and four days of pharmaceutical warfare and a four-in-the-morning conversation that had stripped more layers from my composure than any opponent had managed in fifteen years of competitive hockey.
I let my head rest against the marble edge of the tub. Let my shoulders settle into the position her arm was creating around my neck—the hold that had started as an interrogation tactic and had transitioned, somewhere between the headlock and the question, into a proximity that neither of us was acknowledging as the comfort it actually was.
Even with her trying tokill mefive minutes ago, havingher close like this was doing contradictory, simultaneous, impossible things to my system.
Her bare skin pressed against the upper portion of my back where I leaned against the tub’s edge—warm, wet, carrying the elevated body temperature of a post-heat Omega whose biology was still running the residual thermal output of a cycle that had completed but not fully discharged. Her scent filled the steam-thick air from behind me—sweet, complex, the heat-amplified signature that had been tormenting me through ventilation ducts for four days now arriving at the intimate, unfiltered concentration of direct proximity, and the effect was both devastating and paradoxicallycalming. The Alpha circuitry that had been operating in threat-detection-and-frustration mode since the party was receiving, for the first time in ninety-six hours, the signal it had been designed to receive:compatible Omega, present, close, safe. And the relief of that signal was dissolving tension I hadn’t realized was structural.
Having her close is driving me wild while simultaneously removing years of built-in strain from muscles I didn’t know were clenched.
How do you explain that to someone? That a woman’s presence can both escalate and resolve you simultaneously? That the wanting and the settling coexist in the same breath?
You don’t explain it. You sit with it. And apparently, you tell her the truth, because the tissue in your nostril and the blood on your upper lip have eliminated evasion as a viable strategy.
“Remember when we were together,” I began, and my voice had dropped to the low, unperforming, four-walls-and-darkness register that only emerged in conditions of genuine vulnerability—conditions I hadn’t voluntarily created in years but that the bathroom and the steam and thearm around my neck had produced without my authorization. “We were pretty active. Sexually.”
She needed a second. I could feel the pause in the subtle shift of her weight against my back—the slight, cognitive-processing adjustment of a body whose mind was reviewing an archive it hadn’t been asked to access in a while. Then she shrugged. The motion traveling from her shoulders through the contact point of our bodies and into my awareness with the casual, understated energy of a woman for whom frequent sex during a relationship was a baseline fact rather than a notable observation.
“Yeah.” Her voice was close. Behind my ear. Warm. Carrying the specific, matter-of-fact cadence of a woman who considered sexual frequency among competitive athletes approximately as remarkable as ice being cold. “Athletes are pretty horny and fuck a lot, sure.”
I rolled my eyes. The gesture was automatic, defensive—a reflex triggered by the reductive framing of a dynamic I’d been trying to introduce with clinical precision and that she’d just summarized with the dismissive brevity of a woman whose relationship with sex was significantly healthier than mine.
But I continued.
Because the tissue was in my nostril and the blood was drying on my lip and the woman whose opinion mattered more than my pride was pressed against my back in a bathtub, and the window for disclosure—the specific, rare, atmospheric condition where vulnerability was possible and evasion was exhausted—was open. If I closed it now, it might not open again for another five years, and the cost of that delay had already been calculated in intercepted letters andhospital rooms and the sound of my own failed climaxes echoing off shower tiles at three in the morning.
“I realized I had a condition,” I said. Each word placed with the deliberate, architectural care of a man building a sentence load-bearing enough to support the truth it was carrying. “Hyperstimulation. The medical term for an Alpha whose testosterone production significantly exceeds the standard range. Which was…manageable. Because I had you in my orbit, and we were sexually active with enough regularity that the biological demand was being met. The system was in balance. The output matched the input. The engine ran at high RPM, but the fuel supply was consistent, so the performance was sustainable.”
Clinical. Safe. The medical language functioning as a buffer between the raw truth and the vulnerable man delivering it.
“After the incident,” I continued, and the wordincidentwas a sanitization I chose because the alternative—after I failed you, after I believed the lie, after I ghosted the woman I loved because I was too proud to verify that my letters had arrived—would have destabilized the sentence before it reached its conclusion, “and we stopped talking, the health issues started. The withdrawal. Not the dramatic, visible kind—the insidious kind. The gradual, incremental degradation of cognitive function and emotional regulation that happened when an Alpha whose biology required a consistent Omega presence was operating without one.”
I swallowed. The bathroom was quiet around us. Steam drifting. The faucet’s persistent drip marking time.
“Anger outbursts. Times where I couldn’t think—couldn’tprocess, couldn’t hold a strategy in my head long enough to execute it, which for a captain is the equivalent of a pilot forgetting how to read instruments mid-flight. It wasaffecting my performance. The coaching staff noticed before I did—the delayed reactions, the missed reads, the plays I’d normally anticipate developing in front of me like a diagram dissolving into static instead.”
“Coach told me to get checked. The sports medicine team ran the panels. Testosterone double the standard range. Hormonal destabilization consistent with prolonged Omega deprivation in a hyperstimulated Alpha.” I let the diagnosis sit in the steam. “Translation: my brain was short-circuiting because I needed an Omega in my orbit and I needed to fuck regularly, and I had neither. So the system that was designed to operate at high capacity with consistent fuel was running on empty and producing error messages that manifested as aggression, cognitive impairment, and the specific, designation-level feral state that the blockers were designed to prevent.”
