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“He’s off with some of the boys or something.” Olive shrugged.
They settled on the couch, Olive tilting his head inquisitively. He had obviously just gone through his heat, the scent still lingering on his glowing skin. “Good break?” Ishir teased.
Olive flushed. “I mean, I kinda wish we could go somewhere warm…but this wasn’t too bad.”
Ishir chuckled. “Yeah, I bet.”
“You?”
Ishir sobered. “Yeah, it was…” he trailed off, suddenly feeling like every bone in his body was coated in lead. He sighed. “I think I fucked up.”
Olive’s eyes widened. “Why? What happened?”
“I…I spent Zee’s rut with him.”
Comprehension dawned on Olive’s face, free of surprise. “Ah. And you don’t normally do that together?”
“No,” Ishir scoffed. “He’s straight or whatever. Or, I mean, I guess he’s bi, technically, but I literally don’t know if he’d admit that out loud.”
Olive winced. “Oh. So how did that happen? The rut, I mean. Was it a spur-of-the-moment thing?”
“Not really. He asked me like a week earlier, and I said yes.”
“What, like, out of the blue?”
“I mean…we’ve been messing around a little,” Ishir admitted.
“Okay, dude. Start from the beginning.”
Ishir did. He didn’t reveal everything—didn’t exactly want to explain his whole reward system—but he revealed enough.
He told Olive about how it’d begun as a sort of wingman thing, how they’d go to bars together and Zee would point someone out for Ishir to fuck. How it escalated to Zee telling himhow, and then phone sex, and then sex-sex.
“So, it wasn’t out of the blue, I guess,” Ishir admitted. “But it’s like…I don’t know if he’s experimenting with someone safe? If this is just him being a possessive asshole until he finds someone else to be with?”
“You haven’t talked about it?”
Ishir shook his head, disgusted with himself. “Not really. Vaguely, a little. I’ll be like, what the fuck? And he’ll be like, it is what it is.”
“It is what it is?”
“That’s the gist of it. To just accept it for what it is right now, you know? I know he doesn’t want to define it. Maybe he’s scared that if we put words to it, it’ll confirm that he’s bi. Or maybe he doesn’t wanna mess up our friendship…”
“Seems like things are pretty messed up anyway, Zam.”
Ishir let out a gust of breath. “Yeah. I…I wanted to be able to just have this, you know? What does it matter if it doesn’t last?”
Olive took a few beats to respond. “Because you’re in love with him.”
The word hit Ishir where he was already bruised. His shoulders hunched, trying to protect his middle. “Yeah,” he rasped hoarsely.
“Since when have you felt like that? Is it recent?”
Ishir made a sound that could have been a laugh in another life. “Since we were kids. Since I figured out I liked Alphas.”
“Shit, Zammy.”
“Yeah.”
