“Nothing much.” Olin stood up. “I was telling your husband about the omega student who keeps sleeping in my class.”
“Ha! I have him in one of my sections too.”
“Then we’ll have to trade methods for waking him up, because I literally dropped a book on his desk today and that didn’t do the trick.” Olin said good-naturedly. “Before that, Assa was explaining about how you adopted Ryde privately.”
Assa shook his head subtly at Wes.
“That Lux was a piece of work,” Olin added. “To expose your marriage like that. What a dick.”
“Yeah.” Wes’s tone held a hint of roughness. “One of the first things I did as assistant dean was put him on the list of professors who are never allowed to guest lecture.”
“Petty.” Olin grinned approvingly.
After the alpha left, Assa and Wes walked out in the other direction. “How did you get on the topic of Ryde’s adoption?” Wes asked.
“Olin was wondering why we didn’t try for a second, so I explained about the agencies in Warburton refusing to work with us. Naturally, that made him curious how we ended up with Ryde. Don’t worry. I didn’t give him any specifics.”
Wes slung an arm around Assa’s shoulders and kissed him on the side of the head. “I know you wouldn’t do that. And it’s not like we did anything wrong.”
Assa bit his lip. That was the rationale he and Wes had been using for eight years. The agency was reputable, in business for decades. The paperwork was all in order.
“He wasbrand new,” Assa whispered.
Wes halted mid-stride. “We can’t be certain of that.”
“Can’t we?”
“No.”
It was something they never discussed. When they took Ryde home on May 1, they received his original birth certificate. It said he was born on March 30. But that was impossible. The tiny, red, wrinkly baby in their arms was clearly a newborn, no more than a few days old.
At the time, overwhelmed, they hadn’t pushed for answers. A few months later they tried to approach the agency about it—and discovered it had gone out of business. The representative had retired and moved out of the province. Searching online for the names on the certificate turned up zero results. Ryde’s birth parents had no digital footprint anywhere they could find.
Wes and Assa talked about hiring a private investigator but decided it wasn’t worth the risk to put eyes on their situation. They had legal adoption paperwork facilitated by a reputable agency. And yet, though they rarely spoke about it these days, Assa maintained the vague sense that they were missing a vital piece of information about their son.
They remained quiet during the ride home. The silence eased the tension from their earlier conversation to where Assa had mostly put it from his mind by the time they arrived.
“There it is!” Wes said, grabbing his phone from the kitchen counter. “It’s been like living in a primitive wilderness all day.”
Assa ran a palm over Wes’s ass. “Mm.Primitive wilderness. Hot. I’m getting a mental image of you dressed as a caveman, carrying a club.”
“Oh, really?” Wes boxed him in against the stovetop, leaning down to kiss his collarbone.
Assa savored Wes’s touch for a few seconds before gently pushing him away. “To be continued,” he said, turning around to grab a large pot. “Ryde is getting dropped off soon. I’m making extra pasta since he’s always hungrier after swimming.”
“That’s weird,” Wes said.
“Hmm?”
“I have a bunch of texts from an unknown number. There’s like ten of them.”
“Spam?”
“Probably. But it’s very specific.” Wes furrowed his brow. “There’s a few from this morning asking me to text back, saying we need to meet. Then there are some saying he’ll look me up on campus.”
“Okay, that’s a little creepy.”
“The last one was almost an hour ago.”
