"What?" His voice is controlled.
"Your hand."
"What about it?"
"Please remove it. My dignity is on life support, and that's not helping."
A pause. He doesn't remove it. His chin tips down, and I can feel him looking at the top of my head with an expression I can't see but can somehow sense anyway.
"You're reacting to my scent," he says.
"Yes. Thank you for the diagnosis. Very helpful. Very useful," I grit out, but it comes out more breathy than anything.
"Your biology is reading me as-"
"Do not finish that sentence out loud." He finishes it anyway, quieter.
"-as your alpha."
"My biology," I say, with great dignity, "is an idiot."
Something moves in his voice. Not a laugh. The ghost of a sound that could become one if it were somewhere else, in different circumstances, with less structural collapse occurring in the immediate environment.
"Is it," he says.
Low and rough at the edge. The kind of voice that arrives through the chest rather than the ears. My stomach executes a full rotation.
"This is bad," I mutter, to no one, to everyone, to the part of myself that keeps making observations I don't request.
"Focus," he says, sharp, and the sharpness works. It cuts through the fog and lands on something clear.
"I'm focused."
"On surviving. That's the current objective."
"Right." I nod once. "Surviving. Yes. Absolutely." I take a breath. "Surviving."
My omega instincts file a formal objection and continue their session without me. Because now that I'm this close, now that his scent has saturated the immediate atmosphere and I've stopped pretending to process it at a normal rate… I can smell something else underneath the surface of it. Something that wasn't there before, or that was there, and I was too distant to catch.
Something that answers the question of whether this particular physiological disaster is one-directional. It isn't. Alpha arousal has its own distinct signature.
I know this because the lab ran trials. I have complicated feelings about the mechanism by which I learned it, but I know it, and I'm not misreading what's in the air between us right now.
"You're kidding," I say.
His posture shifts. Barely.
"What?"
"Your body is doing it too," I look up at him,
The silence that follows has a specific quality. The quality of something that has been named and can't be unnamed. I point at the air between us, a small gesture.
"Mutual catastrophic pheromone situation. Both parties are involved."
"That's not-"
"It absolutely fucking is." I watch his face. Something in it has gone very controlled, which is itself information.
