“He’s mad about you, you know.”
“I know, love.”
Stephen pressed his forehead to Colin’s temple and held it there. Colin lifted his hand from the sheet, and got it onto the back of Stephen’s neck.
He thought about Ryland in the car park, and the moment when he was fourteen, and a social worker had asked, very gently, whether he might be thinking about adoption. He’d told her to fuck right off in a Midlands cadence so polite that she hadn’t been entirely sure that he was being rude.
Twenty-six years on, and Stephen had brought his alpha David Ryland into their fold, and Colin couldn’t think of a better addition to their family.
“Tell him thank you, love,” Colin said. His eyes were closing whether he wanted them to or not. “Tell him I said thank you, and that I want him to come round for his tea on Sunday.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“And tell him I love him. Almost as much as I do you. Maybe more, actually, if he’s got me my hobnobs.”
Stephen made a noise into the pillow beside Colin’s head. “Of coursehe got you your hobnobs.”
By the next morning, Colin felt like the inside of a tin that had been scraped out with a teaspoon and left on the draining board.
The heat had fully broken that day. He knew because he’d woken up cold. The suite at St Mary’s kept its rooms at a careful twenty-two degrees, and he hadn’t felt anything other than tropical for nearly a week now. Now the cotton of the hospital gown was sticking to his back where his sweat had dried, and his hair was flat to his skull.
He sat propped against the pillows and watched the fluorescent strip above the door. Somewhere down the corridor a trolley wheel squeaked. The knock came soft against the doorframe.
“Mr Huxley.” Dr Gu let herself in without waiting, as she’d done every morning since he’d been admitted, a tablet tucked under one arm. She was a small Chinese woman in her late forties. She pulled the chair to the side of the bed and sat without any wasted motion. “How are we doing this morning?”
“All right.”
“Mm.” She tapped something on her tablet, then set it on her knee. “Your bloods came back. We need to have a proper chat, if you’re up to it.”
“Go on, then.”
“You’ve gone into andropause, Mr Huxley.” She said it without preamble, the way you’d tell someone the bus was running late. Bit of a let-down, being told you’d come into your change of life like this. Shouldn’t there besomeacknowledgement of a milestone passed? A celebratory cupcake, maybe. “You’re a touch younger than I’d expect to see it, but the markers are unambiguous. The hormonal scaffolding that’s been holding your cycle steady has started to come apart, and that’s why this heat ambushed you the way it did.”
Colin nodded, once.
“The other thing the bloods are telling me is that you’ve been running heats unserviced for averylong time. That on its own isn’t dangerous. Plenty of omegas manage them soloand come to no harm. But the cumulative load on the body adds up, and combined with the hormonal shift, it makes the next few years rougher than they’d otherwise be. The cycles will get more erratic before they taper off. You may go six weeks between heats, you may go three. The intensity is going to be unpredictable. The onset speed —” she gestured at the bed, the room, the entire situation. “As you’ve discovered, that can collapse from a fortnight’s warning down to a few hours.”
“Right.”
“I have to ask you something, and I’d like you to think about it before you answer.” She caught his eyes in her unwavering gaze. “Is there an alpha in your life that you’d feel comfortable working you through your heats? A partner, a long-standing friend, anyone you trust to be careful with you. It would change what we can offer you, in terms of management.”
“No.”
“You can take a while to think about it.”
That was when Colin understood how bad it was. Dr Gu had his notes. She knew about what happened to him in the stairwell, and that he couldn’t manage a vibrator without his omega therapist talking him through the breathing exercises first. And she was sitting in front of him asking about an alpha anyway.
“I don’t need to think about it.”
“All right.” Her face didn’t change. She made a small note on the tablet. “Then we’ll be looking at a pharmacological management route. There’s a combination of suppressants we can trial. None of them is going to give you the regularity you had in your thirties. What they will do is take the edge off the worst of the surges and give you a bit more warning before the next one lands. We’ll start you on the first protocol today and review at six weeks.”
“All right.”
“The other thing I want you to do, and this is the bit I can’t write a prescription for, is pay closer attention to your body. The signs were there on Sunday night, Mr Huxley. The restlessness, the warmth, the slick. You read them as a problem with the heating in your flat, and I understand why. Your calendar said you had four weeks. But your body’s no longer at the point where it can be held to that calendar’s pacing, and the only early-warning system you’ve got is what you can feel. So, if you notice any change in temperature, any cramping outside the usual window, any restlessness you can’t account for, you ring the clinic. I’d rather see you for nothing six times than have you arrive by ambulance again.”
“Understood,” Colin said.
“Good.” She stood, tucked the tablet back under her arm, and squeezed his shoulder once through the gown. “I’ll be back in a few hours with the first dose, and we’ll talk you through what to expect. Try and eat something. The kitchen does a passable trifle.”
