Chapter Text
Nat’s new neighbour moves in on a Tuesday.
The first thing she notices is the scent. Fresh and woodsy like pine needles, something almost spicy about it. She walks out of the elevator and before she even realises what she’s doing, she’s breathing in deeply, her brain sparking up hot and electric with the word alpha.
The second thing she notices is that something about the scent is vaguely familiar. She has to pause for a second or two outside her door, trying to place it. It definitely doesn’t belong to any of her neighbours; Ben is a beta, and he spends ninety percent of his time at his boyfriend’s place anyway, and Jackie’s scent is almost entirely muted since she’s been mated to Shauna since the dawn of time itself. Nat’s most regular visitor is Van and she’s an omega, and it’s not secondhand alpha whiff from Taissa either, so Nat has no idea where she recognises it from.
The third thing she notices is the muffled voices coming from behind the door of Apartment 4C.
Apartment 4C has been empty for almost three months, after Melissa moved out. Nat didn’t really know her that well, the extent of their interactions mostly limited to nodded hellos in the hallway and idle how are yous in the elevator, but she seemed nice, and she was quiet, which Nat always appreciates in a neighbour after several years of paper thin walls back in Wiskayok. Her upstairs neighbour in her previous apartment had always felt like the best time to rearrange his furniture was at three in the morning. While blasting The One That Got Away by Katy Perry. On repeat.
Music starts playing faintly from inside Apartment 4C, something bubbly and poppy and upbeat that makes Nat roll her eyes automatically — although at least it’s not Katy Perry — and Nat finally goes inside her own apartment. As long as this new neighbour isn’t this loud all the time and they don’t end up being one of those alphas, which is unfortunately highly likely given Nat’s experience with the majority of bonehead alphas she’s met, Nat doesn't really care what they’re like.
Nat likes her apartment. It’s the same one she’s lived in for two years, ever since she got her shit together, got clean and mostly-sober, and got the fuck out of New Jersey and moved up to Boston. It’s small, but in a cosy way rather than a claustrophobic cramped way, with exposed brick walls and big sunny windows that warm the hardwood floors. A massive upgrade from her previous shoebox back in Wiskayok.
It’s in a nice quiet neighbourhood, the garage she works at with two of her closest friends is only a few train stops away or a thirty minute walk if she’s feeling ambitious, and most importantly, the rent isn’t extortionate. Nat likes her life as it is and she doesn’t want that ruined by some asshole alpha moving in next door and fucking up her peace and quiet.
/
A week or so passes without Nat ever actually managing to catch a glimpse of her mysterious new neighbour. She’s fairly sure the alpha is a woman, judging from the muffled voices she’s heard, and there was the sound of furniture being moved and assembled and things being hammered into walls for a good portion of Saturday afternoon, but she’s never actually seen her.
Until Monday morning, when Nat is yawning her way through locking her door as she’s about to leave for work, and she looks up at the noise of keys jingling in her neighbour’s door. She then freezes when, of all the people in all the world that could possibly have moved in next door, the door of Apartment 4C opens to reveal Lottie Matthews.
Nat blinks, blinks again, and briefly contemplates pinching herself to make sure she’s not dreaming or hallucinating, but no, that is definitely Charlotte Isobel Matthews. Nat would recognise her anywhere. Her hair is a little shorter than Nat remembers, her bangs fully grown out, and Nat catches a flash of a tattoo on her left wrist as she shuts the door behind her, but it’s her.
“Lottie?” Nat blurts out.
Lottie turns around from her door, eyes widening and lips parting in surprise when she sees Nat.
“Natalie? Hi. What are you doing here?” Lottie’s confused gaze shifts from Nat to the door behind her, the little 4D embossed into the wood, and then back to Nat. “You live here?”
“Yeah,” Nat nods her head. “I moved here about two years ago. Wiskayok was getting, well. You know.”
“Terrible?” Lottie prompts, and Nat huffs out a little laugh.
“Certainly wasn’t getting any better.”
“Wow,” Lottie says, smiling hesitantly like she isn’t sure whether or not Nat is hating this entire interaction. Nat isn’t entirely sure herself. “It’s been a while.”
It has been a while. Nat hasn’t seen or heard from Lottie since they broke up almost three years ago. Or rather, since they had gone for an awkward, slightly stilted lunch a few weeks after the breakup, and Lottie gave Nat a box of things that she had left lying around Lottie’s apartment, books and clothes and other miscellaneous items, and Nat had returned all the hoodies and tshirts that she had stolen from Lottie over the course of the previous two years.
Lottie had said, “We can try to stay friends though, right?” and Nat had nodded and said, “Yeah, I’d like that.” and ignored the way the mating bite on her neck underneath her scarf had given a weak pulse in protest.
They hadn’t met up after that, but they still followed each other on Instagram, and when Lottie had posted a series of pictures from a party celebrating her getting into grad school at Stanford, Nat had messaged her to offer congratulations. Lottie had replied with an offer to meet up for coffee before she left, but they never did, and then Lottie had moved away, and Nat had moved on.
There’s a long moment of slightly awkward silence where neither of them move and they just stare at each other, before Lottie jerks her thumb towards the elevator. “Are you on your way out?”
“Yeah,” Nat says, following Lottie down the hall. “Going to work. Um. You?”
Lottie motions at the black duffel bag over her shoulder. “Going to the gym.”
Nat blinks. “It’s eight in the fucking morning,” she says, unthinkingly, before her brain catches up to her mouth and she realises that it’s been three fucking years since she’s seen Lottie, and making fun of her for her bizarre early bird tendencies now might come across as being an asshole rather than light hearted teasing.
Thankfully, Lottie just laughs, and the elevator doors slide open before Nat can say anything else stupid.
They make idle small talk in the elevator, Lottie asking a few questions about the garage and in return telling Nat about moving from California back to the east coast. It’s only slightly awkward, in that way conversing with an ex always is, and Nat is not above admitting that she’s slightly distracted by Lottie’s...everything.
Okay, so Nat might be a bit blindsided by the sudden appearance of her ex-girlfriend in her apartment building’s hallway, but she’s not actually blind. Lottie’s always been kind of hard to look away from, and three years hasn’t changed that. It’s impossible not to notice.
She’s wearing black sweatpants that cling to her ass and a light pink Nike hoodie, and Nat has to swallow a few times in an attempt to combat her abruptly very dry throat. She also smells good. Nat takes a deep breath before it even consciously registers that she’s doing it, her lungs immediately filling with Lottie’s heavy warm alpha scent, making her head spin a little. Fuck. She had forgotten how good Lottie always smelled.
Outside on the street, Lottie’s scent is lost amongst everyone else’s, and Nat can think a bit clearer. There’s another awkward pause where it seems like they’re going to be walking the same direction, before Lottie angles to start walking the opposite way from Nat.
“So,” Lottie says, with another one of those little smiles that caught and reeled Nat in five years ago. “I guess I’ll see you around.”
“Yeah, see you around, Lottie,” Nat says. She stays rooted to the spot for a few long moments, watching Lottie’s back as she turns and walks away.
/
A month passes, and then two, and nothing actually changes.
Nat bumps into Lottie every so often, in the mail room or in the elevator and twice at the 7-Eleven a block away from their apartment building while Nat is buying beer and Lottie is buying a thirty-six pack of Dr Pepper, and Lottie has been friendly enough and said hi whenever they do run into each other, but it’s never been for any extended length of time.
It’s still a little weird thinking about it. Lottie Matthews, her ex-girlfriend, someone who Nat once pictured a whole future with, someone Nat hasn’t seen in years, lives next door to her now. Like, there’s only a single wall, thankfully both scentproof and soundproof, separating Nat’s apartment from Lottie’s. Weird.
Van had laughed hysterically for a solid five minutes when Nat told her the whole story, and then made Nat repeat the entire thing when Taissa came home an hour later, and laughed for another five minutes, because she’s a dick and also Nat’s best friend. Taissa, because she’s an angel and far too good for Van, had at least politely asked if Nat was doing okay. Which she is. She thinks.
Thankfully, Travis and Kevyn can both be counted on to be completely disinterested and not make it a huge deal. Nat told them the short version of the story when Travis had asked what the fuck was wrong with her after she spent most of their post-work drinks at their favourite shitty dive bar zoned out thinking about Lottie’s mile long legs in her stupidly tiny track shorts in the elevator that morning. Like, it’s almost fucking November. Who wears shorts that tiny in late fall Massachusetts?
Kevyn had asked if it was a bad break up, and Nat had said no because that was the truth, and Travis had asked if Lottie was hot, and Nat had said yes because that was also the truth, and they had both just chorused nice in unison and then gone back to arguing about the baseball game playing on the bar television like either of them follow a single sport outside of Kevyn’s kid’s U10’s soccer team.
The three of them are, as usual, in that very same bar on a Friday evening after they’ve closed up the garage for the day, and Nat is, as usual, half-listening to Travis and Kevyn bickering like an old married couple while she sips at her beer, when she catches sight of Lottie through the crowd.
She’s with a small group of people that Nat doesn’t recognise, and she’s wearing a sinfully cropped black top and short pink pleated skirt that definitely has some kind of compression underwear situation going on underneath, and what the fuck is she even doing here? Like, Nat knows why she’s here, in this dimly lit cheap bar where the tables are always sticky and the wobbly sign outside the door advertises that the house wine is Jack Daniels, but this is so far from Lottie’s scene it’s in another zip code entirely.
She watches like a weirdo as Lottie and one of the people she’s with go up to the bar and order drinks, and when Lottie turns abruptly and catches sight of her, Nat can’t quite look away fast enough. Lottie, thank God, doesn’t seem creeped out by Nat’s serial killer staring, and just waves cheerfully at her.
Nat waves back, and Travis and Kevyn immediately swivel round to look at Lottie with all the subtlety of a fire alarm.
“Dude,” Kevyn says. “Who’s that?”
“That’s, uh. That’s Lottie.”
Travis and Kevyn stare blankly at her. “Who?”
“My neighbour.”
More silence.
Nat rolls her eyes. “My ex.”
“Oh,” Travis says. “Oh. She is hot.”
“Yeah,” Kevyn says. “Well done, dude.”
“Thanks,” Nat says, because what the fuck else is she supposed to say to that?
The rest of the evening passes slowly. Nat stays in her corner booth with Travis and Kevyn, and Lottie and her friends stay on the other side of the bar next to the pool tables. Nat doesn’t make any effort to go and say hello to Lottie, and neither does Lottie, because why would they? Despite their history, they’re not friends. At best, they’re just acquaintances.
But Nat can feel Lottie watching her through the crowd. Every time she glances in Lottie’s direction, Lottie looks away, pretends like she’s in conversation with one of her friends rather than sneaking glances across a crowded bar at her ex-girlfriend.
It’s...strange. Nat isn’t entirely sure how to feel about this.
It only gets stranger when Nat goes up to the bar later in the evening and once she has her drink, instead of going back to the booth, she spends a couple extra minutes chatting to the bartender.
Mari has been a flirty and touchy person ever since Nat first met her almost a year ago, and the fact they’ve hooked up a handful of times since then hasn’t exactly put a dampener on that. They both have to lean over the bar to hear each other properly over the noise of the music, and their idle conversation about how Nat’s day was and how Mari’s night is going is riddled with the usual amount of smirks and innuendos and fleeting touches.
Nat turns away from the bar to go back to the booth when Mari gets called over by a couple of girls who are loudly trying to convince the rest of their friends that tequila shots are a great idea, and almost stumbles over her own feet when she sees the way Lottie is looking at her through the crowd.
Lottie doesn’t even try to hide it this time; she meets Nat’s stare, holds it for several long seconds, and only then turns back to her friends. It’s a look that Nat recognises; the same narrowed eyes and pinched frown whenever an alpha came too close to Nat, whenever someone tried to get a little too friendly with her.
What the fuck. What the fuck.
Lottie was never one of those obnoxiously jealous and controlling alphas who try to police who their omega talks to or hangs out with, but she could get possessive, especially when Nat was talking to someone that Lottie knew she had been with in the past. Hickeys, a lot of scenting, not-so-casually suggesting that Nat wear something of Lottie’s so she smells like her. Marking her territory. Nat, to her slight embarrassment because it was such a dumb alpha thing for Lottie to do, always found it incredibly hot.
Lottie has absolutely zero right to be jealous. They broke up, and they’re not even really friends, so Nat can talk to whoever she wants to, can flirt with whoever she wants. Nat and Mari are very much not a thing, just no-strings-attached fun whenever there’s a break in between Mari’s seemingly endless rotation of boyfriends and girlfriends, although Lottie doesn’t know that and Nat’s fairly sure Mari is in the crushing grip of a straight girl situationship right now anyway, but if she wanted to hook up with Mari, or anyone else for that matter, she is perfectly within her right to do that.
And yet. Nat sees that territorial look on Lottie’s face, and her body just— reacts. Like muscle memory. Three years is a long time, but it isn’t quite long enough for her to forget about how Lottie would growl mine while she was knot-deep in Nat and wouldn’t let Nat come until she parroted it back to her obediently. Yeah, yours, Lottie, all yours, I promise, yours, please just let me—
Nat drains almost half her beer in one long sip. She cannot get turned on in the middle of this bar. First of all, the mortification of someone being able to smell her would probably kill her on the spot. Secondly, this is a mixed designation bar: there’s alphas everywhere. Travis is an omega and Kevyn is a beta, so neither of them are likely to pick up on her scent if she starts getting all flustered over her ex-girlfriend like a badly written cliché straight out of a trashy romance novel, but an alpha would be able to smell her easily enough, and not all of them are evolved enough to accept that a nice scent doesn’t necessarily mean an omega is interested. Third, Lottie is still here, which is reason enough for Nat to get the hell out of here.
She finishes her drink, fakes a yawn, says goodbye to Travis and Kevyn, and goes outside to wait for an Uber. The cold air cools down her flushed face, but unfortunately, every driver in the entire damn city seems to be busy. She’s been outside for almost ten minutes, the Uber app still claiming they’re searching for a driver, and she’s considering just forking over a few extra dollars for priority pick up, when the door opens behind her and Lottie appears.
“Oh, hi,” Lottie says, sounding a little surprised, like Nat couldn’t feel Lottie watching her as she left. “What are you doing out here? It’s freezing.”
“Going home. Trying to, at least. Can’t get a taxi.”
Lottie holds up her phone. “You want to just share mine? He’ll be here in two minutes.”
Nat considers it for a second. On the one hand, she’ll get home quicker, and it’s cold enough she’s starting to get goosebumps even under the thick fabric of her jacket. But on the other, it means being cooped up in the back seat of a car for twenty minutes with Lottie, who is kind of the reason she went running out of the bar with her tail between her legs in the first place.
Jesus Christ, why is she even considering saying no? She’s not a fucking teenager anymore. She can handle twenty minutes in an enclosed space with a nice-smelling alpha.
“Uh, yeah, if that’s okay with you,” Nat says, exiting Uber and pocketing her phone. “Thanks.”
“Yes, it’s okay with me,” Lottie says, amused. “We’re literally going to the same place, remember?”
Like Nat could ever forget.
Lottie’s taxi arrives, and they both slide into the backseat, and it’s quiet as the driver pulls away from the sidewalk and starts driving. Lottie is looking at something on her phone, and for a moment Nat thinks this taxi ride will be easy.
And then Lottie opens her mouth.
“Who were those two guys you were with?” Nat glances sideways at her, and Lottie gives her an innocent smile. “I’m just making polite conversation, Nat.”
“Kevyn and Travis. We work together.”
A pause, and then, voice casual, Lottie says: “Are you seeing either of them?”
Nat snorts. Polite conversation. Sure.
“No,” she says. “Kevyn has a long term girlfriend and a seven year old. Travis is in some messy on-again off-again thing with two alphas that you couldn’t pay me to get involved in.” Lottie isn’t exactly subtle about what she’s angling at, so before Lottie can actually ask her outright, Nat adds on, “I’m not seeing anyone.”
There’s the slightest spike in Lottie’s scent, that Nat only notices because of their close proximity. She shifts slightly in her seat, trying not to breathe too deeply. Fuck, Lottie’s stupid scent was always so damn alluring.
“What about the bartender? You two seemed close.”
“I said I wasn’t seeing anyone, Lottie. Mari is just a friend.” Nat chooses not to let Lottie know about just how friendly she is with Mari. She isn’t entirely sure what the outcome of confirming Lottie’s clear suspicions would be; if it would kill this strange little fixation Lottie seems to have on Nat tonight or if it would lead to something that got them kicked out of the taxi and banned from Uber for public indecency.
“Okay,” Lottie says, and Nat only just manages to resist rolling her eyes at how pleased Lottie sounds. “I’m not either, by the way.”
“Huh?”
“Seeing anyone,” Lottie says, even though Nat didn’t ask.
“Thanks for sharing.”
They lapse into a slightly tense silence for the rest of the ride, and the second Nat is out of the car outside their building she’s taking in a few deep breaths of the cold night air to try and flush Lottie’s scent out of her lungs. Not that it makes much difference when it comes right back when the elevator doors slide closed behind them and Nat is, once again, surrounded by that thick alpha scent.
Lottie’s probably not even aware she’s even doing it. It’s always been strong and Lottie’s always been kind of bad at controlling it; something to do with the military grade suppressants she was on as a teenager fucking with her pheromone production. Although it never, as Nat’s brain helpfully decides to remind her at that exact moment, messed with Lottie’s ability to knot.
Has the elevator always been this fucking small? Or slow? Has four floors ever seemed so far away?
“Jesus, would it kill you to use scent blockers?” Nat doesn’t even mean for it to slip out. But she’s a little loose and hazy from the alcohol and from Lottie, so she can’t fully be blamed when it does.
Lottie laughs, stepping out of the elevator when the doors open and glancing back at Nat over her shoulder. “You’re one to talk.”
Nat almost trips over her own feet following Lottie out of the elevator. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lottie pauses outside her door, and her eyes drag up and down Nat’s body in a slow, very obvious once-over that makes Nat’s body feel warm all over, liquid heat slipping under her skin to simmer quietly. She forgets, sometimes, that Lottie knows what she looks like naked. Knows what she looks like bent over, on her knees, taking a knot. And now Lottie is looking at her like this, like she can see right through Nat, and Nat remembers all over again.
“Right,” Lottie says, her mouth curling into a faint smirk. “Sure you don’t.”
Lottie disappears into her own apartment without waiting for a response, the door swinging shut behind her and leaving Nat frozen like an idiot in the middle of the hallway. Nat blinks, staring at Lottie’s closed door and wondering what the fuck just happened.
Jesus Christ. She needs to go to bed, go to sleep, and then this whole weird evening will be over and she can stop thinking about it.
That’s what she should do. After she’s gone inside and gone through the motions of getting ready for bed almost on autopilot, she should be asleep. She’s supposed to be getting lunch with Van tomorrow and then she has vague plans to get dinner with Travis and his brother. She should be asleep.
She definitely should not be thinking about Lottie. About the way Lottie was watching her, about Lottie’s stupid addictive scent saturating the air between them in the taxi, about Lottie’s snarky little you’re one to talk.
What the fuck did that even mean, anyway. Like, okay, Nat doesn’t use scent blockers either because they’re fucking expensive, but her scent isn’t that strong. Is it?
Nat groans into the dark of her bedroom. She’s being stupid. Lottie’s probably fast asleep by now. There’s no way Nat’s scent is making Lottie as loopy as Lottie’s scent is making Nat. There’s no way that Lottie is lying in her own bed just next door, trying to ignore a boner the way Nat is desperately trying to ignore how slick she is between her thighs. And there’s definitely no way that Lottie is touching herself thinking about Nat, eyes closed and lips parted and breath hitching, long fingers wrapped around her dick and slowly stroking up and down while she thinks about hauling Nat into the bar bathroom and making her forget Mari even exists.
Fuck, don’t think about her dick, you idiot, Nat tries to tell herself. Unfortunately, that’s a lot easier said than done.
It would be easier to not think about Lottie’s dick if she wasn’t already intimately acquainted with it. If she didn’t remember what it looked like, what it tasted like, what it felt inside her, stretching her open in preparation for her knot.
Not that Nat has a lot of experience in the department of being around an ex, but this has got to be one of the worst parts about it.
Yeah, you remember all the bullshit like their favourite colour (purple) and the childhood plushie they’ve held onto for years (a slightly ratty red panda) and how they take their coffee (she doesn’t, she only drinks tea), but you also remember what they like.
Like, Lottie always liked teasing Nat until she was losing her mind, and then talking Nat through it, and then kissing Nat while she was gasping for air and making her breathless all over again. Liked having her hair pulled when she was eating Nat out. Really liked Nat being on top. Really, really liked when Nat got all whiny about being knotted, claiming it wouldn’t fit just so Lottie would get that wild look in her eye and fuck her harder until it did fit.
Groaning, Nat rolls over and shoves her face into her pillow to try and push all thoughts of Lottie’s stupid big dick out of her brain. It doesn’t work. In fact, it immediately makes things ten times worse, because now she’s lying on her stomach and all she can think about is how easily Lottie could come up behind her, pull her boxers down and push into her. Slow, shallow thrusts until Nat is wet and loose enough to really take her, before Lottie would pull her up onto her knees to fuck her properly, ass in the air and face still pressed into the pillow to muffle herself while she gets split open on Lottie’s huge alpha knot.
She manages to hold out for another minute or two before she thinks fuck this, rolls onto her back, and slides her hand into her boxers.
She’s wet already, damp and sticky slick smeared across her inner thighs. In a slightly pathetic last ditch effort, she tries to keep it clinical to begin with, not really thinking of anything (or anyone) in particular other than how good her fingers feel sliding against her clit. Just so she can get off, tell her body to shut the fuck up, and go to sleep.
Inevitably, that only lasts so long, and eventually the faceless alpha on top of her and making her feel good morphs into Lottie.
She shoves her free hand under her shirt, cupping and squeezing and pinching at her nipple, pretending it’s Lottie’s hand instead. She pretends it’s Lottie’s hand between her thighs as well, circling over her clit teasingly while she kisses Nat’s neck, bites a territorial little bruise into her pale skin, murmurs you feel so good, you’re so wet for me, good girl into Nat’s ear.
She thinks about the way Lottie looked at her in the bar, thinks about what could have happened if Lottie had given into her obvious jealousy. She wouldn’t have waited until they were alone, she would have pulled Nat into the bathroom right then and there. Shoved her up against the door of a cubicle and fucked her there, panting into Nat’s ear and her hands digging into Nat’s hips hard enough to bruise. She would have shoved her fingers into Nat’s mouth to keep her quiet, finished inside Nat once Nat had shaken her way through her own orgasm, and then pulled Nat’s underwear back up for her to keep everything from dripping out and down her thighs.
Nat moans into the quiet dark of her bedroom, spreading her legs further apart and pressing her fingers inside herself. Arousal pools hot and tight in her stomach, and she’s already so close, she can’t think about anything other than Lottie’s dick inside her, big and thick and stretching her open so perfectly—
She comes quick and hard, clenching around her fingers as it rushes through her. Nat whimpers until the last of the aftershocks have faded, and then she starfishes bonelessly across her bed, panting up at the ceiling. Fuck. Jesus Christ, fuck.
Nat feels a little embarrassed over how easy she apparently still is for Lottie, and a little guilty for thinking about her in the first place, but whatever. Nat’s body clearly wasn’t backing down, and Lottie is both hot and familiar. Lottie’s also eerily perceptive sometimes but she’s not actually a mind-reader. She’s not going to bump into Nat in the elevator tomorrow and know that Nat got herself off thinking about her less than twelve hours prior. She’s never going to know about this little lapse in judgement. It’s fine.
It still takes Nat the better part of an hour before she finally falls asleep.
/
It’s somewhat of a relief that she doesn’t see Lottie for a few days afterwards.
Apparently three seconds of eyefucking across a bar and one pheromone-riddled taxi ride is enough to send her hormones right off the fucking rails and make her forget that Lottie is her literal fucking ex-girlfriend and not a potential romantic, or even sexual, prospect. She needs to get herself under control. She goes to work, she hangs out with Van and Taissa, she goes for drinks with Travis and Kevyn and the three of them dress up to take Kevyn’s kid and his friends trick-or-treating on Halloween, and she does not think about Lottie at all.
Mostly. She tries her best, at least.
Each time she walks past Lottie’s door and something flickers in her chest, she takes that feeling and shoves it back down as deep as she can.
Almost a full week after the whole bar-taxi-masturbation incident, Nat finishes work on Thursday and declines Travis’ offer of going for dinner; she’s spent almost every waking minute the past week with someone else in a slightly pathetic attempt to stay away from her apartment building in case she runs into Lottie, and it’s starting to get on her nerves. Her solid plans for the evening consist of ordering her body weight in tacos from her favourite Mexican place and eating it in front of a Real Housewives of Wiskayok marathon without another human being trying to talk to her.
There’s a cool breeze in the air, but it’s surprisingly warm for early November and she’s been half-assedly trying to keep up with the whole being healthy thing since she moved away from Jersey, so she decides to walk home.
This turns out to be a colossal mistake: by the time she’s halfway home, the breeze has turned into actual gusts of wind, dark clouds have drifted in from nowhere and the sky has opened up, rain pouring down from the heavens.
She doesn’t have an umbrella, didn’t even think to take one considering there was no rain forecasted for the next three days, but her coat does at least have a hood. Not that it does much to stop her getting drenched, the rain quickly soaking through her clothes and into her bones.
It then manages to get even worse: she gets to her front door and spends almost five minutes rummaging around in her bag and her pockets until she realises she forgot her keys. She has to resist the urge to start screaming obscenities in the middle of a residential neighbourhood like a toddler throwing a tantrum. She remembers it pretty clearly now; she had been running late that morning, rushing around her apartment to collect her stuff together and in her haste she had just left her keys on the kitchen counter, right next to her coffee flask. Which she had also forgotten. Her morning had somehow still been better than her afternoon is currently going.
Huddling under the awning of the front door, Nat fishes her phone out of her pocket, miraculously still with fifty percent battery. She calls Van, the owner of her spare key, who inevitably does not pick up. She texts PICK UP YOUR DAMN PHONE I FORGOT MY KEYS IM LOCKED OUT in all caps with a couple of crying emojis added on for good measure, and when Van still hasn’t opened the message after five minutes, she stuffs her phone back in her pocket with a huff, and considers her options.
She tries ringing Jackie and Shauna’s buzzer to see if she can wait inside their apartment until Van decides to take pity on her and come by with her keys. No answer. She texts Taissa asking if she’s with Van. Also no answer. She’s pretty sure Shauna works somewhere close by, but she has no idea what the name of her company is or what street it’s on. Travis and Kevyn both went home after the garage closed, but Kevyn lives on the other side of the city, and Nat doesn’t particularly want to risk drowning and/or hypothermia by walking an hour to Travis’ place.
Her phone buzzes, Van finally choosing to reply.
Van 😚
i’m at work, i can’t leave for another two hours or so, sorry dude
i’ll come by soon as i finish
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Nat grumbles under her breath, opening the Uber app and almost shedding a tear when it tells her it’ll be seventy dollars to where Travis lives.
Her clothes are soaked, and she’s starting to shiver. Her teeth are chattering. Fuck this. Fuck everything.
“Nat?”
In some miraculous showing of divine providence, Lottie’s voice sounds over the noise of the rain and the traffic. Nat turns around and Lottie is coming up the steps to their building, dressed for the weather in a thick parka with a fluffy hood, a green Whole Foods bag over her shoulder.
“Oh my God, you’re soaked,” Lottie says as she ducks under the awning, pulling her hood down and staring at Nat. “Why are you standing out here in the rain?”
“I’m not doing this for fun,” Nat snaps. She feels a little bad for about a second, but Lottie doesn’t seem too offended by her tone. “I locked myself out. LIke an idiot. I forgot my keys. My friend has my spare ones, but she can’t get out of work for another two hours.”
“You’re not an idiot,” Lottie says. “You just forgot your keys. It happens.”
Abruptly, Nat feels embarrassment rushing in, creeping hot and flushed up her neck and across her face. Lottie’s always been so perfectly put-together, and Nat feels like a drowned rat. Probably looks like one too. She’s an idiot who can’t even remember to pick up keys on her way out the door and now she’s locked herself out like a child. Nat opens her mouth to snap something unnecessarily rude at Lottie in defense, but Lottie beats her to it.
“Come on, you can wait at my place until your friend comes,” Lottie says, taking her own keys out of her pocket and opening the front door with the electronic fob. She pauses when Nat doesn’t immediately follow her inside. “Unless you and your stubborn pride would rather freeze to death out here.”
Nat only just manages to stop herself from rolling her eyes, even though she had just been about to swallow that stubborn pride and ask Lottie if she can come inside to warm up. “Yeah, okay,” she says. “Thanks.”
Lottie’s apartment is fairly similar to Nat’s: the front door opens into a small hallway with three doors branching off. Two of them are closed, presumably the ones leading to the bathroom and Lottie’s bedroom, and Nat follows Lottie through the third one into the open plan living room and kitchen, separated by a kitchen island with two diner-style bar stools tucked underneath.
The whole place is very Lottie. Lots of plants and candles on the windowsills and coffee table, various knick-knacks and ornaments on the bookcase in the corner and the wall mounted shelves above the television, eclectic art on the walls. There’s a soft pink plaid blanket thrown across on the sofa, next to a round novelty cushion shaped like a bee.
It also smells like Lottie.
Which, like, of course it does. Of course it does, Nat tries to rationalise with herself, you knew that when you agreed to come here. Lottie lives here. This is her home, where she shouldn’t have to worry about blasting alpha pheromones everywhere.
“Wait here,” Lottie says, like Nat is going anywhere, and then disappears into the hall. She comes back after a minute with a bright pink towel, a pair of black sweats and a faded red Stanford hoodie.
“Sorry, they’re probably gonna both be a bit big on you,” Lottie says, mouth twitching in amusement.
“Anything’s better than this,” Nat grumbles. “Thanks.”
Lottie nods, almost kind of awkwardly, and it’s kind of a nice reminder that it isn’t just Nat who is feeling very aware of how strange this whole situation is.
“The bathroom’s the door on the left,” Lottie says, waving a hand towards the hallway. “Uh, feel free to take a shower too, to warm yourself up.”
Nat locks herself in the bathroom, switches the shower on and regards the clothes with slight trepidation while she waits for the water to heat up. They’re clean, but they still smell like Lottie. A heady mix of her pheromones, her laundry detergent, her perfume.
Which is... a problem. Because despite Nat’s brain knowing that she’s over Lottie, her stupid body is still horribly attracted to Lottie, and she can already feel her stupid traitorous body starting to react to Lottie’s familiar alpha scent, warming up despite how cold she is.
“Jesus Christ,” Nat mutters to her own reflection in the mirror. “Get a fucking grip.”
She strips off her wet clothes and hangs them up over the radiator, ties her hair back into a messy ponytail to try and keep it somewhat dry, and then hops into the shower and steps under the hot spray of water. She just stands there for a long moment, staring at the white tile of Lottie’s bathroom and letting the water slowly warm her back up. She gives herself a quick scrub with Lottie’s bougie looking black cherry scented body wash and does her best not to think about how this is just another way she’s going to smell like Lottie.
Once she’s dried off with the obscenely fluffy towel Lottie gave her, Nat tugs the sweatpants up her legs and the hoodie over her head. She then briefly considers just putting her wet clothes back on, running out of the building, changing her name and moving to another country entirely.
The fabric is soft and Lottie’s warm alpha scent surrounds her entirely, like she’s being wrapped up in a tight hug. How the hell is Nat supposed to act like a normal human being under these circumstances? She already feels a little flushed, a little glassy-eyed, and while she’s fairly sure she’s capable of making it through the next couple of hours without actually throwing herself at Lottie like a desperate ex, she’s less sure about doing it without soaking through her underwear and onto Lottie’s sweatpants.
“Get it together,” she tells her reflection again. She’s a grown woman who just happens to be an omega, not a pathetic whiny embarrassment of an omega who is a slave to her baser instincts. She can control herself around an alpha. An admittedly very hot, very hung alpha that she’s had sex with hundreds of times, but still. She can do it.
Nat exits the bathroom, comes back into the living room, and immediately decides she may have spoken too soon. Lottie has gotten changed too while Nat was in the shower, and now she’s in a loose white sleeveless tshirt and soft grey sweatpants, a combination that makes Nat’s brain go completely blank.
The sweatpants are pretty snug on Lottie’s lean frame, and everybody knows grey sweatpants are like, specifically designed to not hide a bulge very well. Every alpha on the damn planet looks good on them. Especially Lottie. Nat can’t actually see anything in the brief second she allows her gaze to linger on Lottie’s crotch, but that doesn’t exactly help when Nat can remember exactly what Lottie has hiding under there.
“Oh, hi, welcome back,” Lottie says, seemingly unaware of the frenzy of lust she’s provoking in Nat. “Feeling better?”
“Yeah,” Nat manages to get out without her voice cracking. The fact she can actually form words while she’s staring at Lottie’s bare arms is kind of a miracle. “Thanks.”
“I heated up some leftovers,” Lottie continues, pointing towards the coffee table in front of the sofa. “If you’re hungry. I was going to do it anyway, I just made extra.”
Nat blinks, looking away from Lottie standing awkwardly in the kitchen to the table, where two bowls of steaming noodles sit, a plate of rice crackers in between them.
Abruptly, she’s hit with the strangest feeling of fond nostalgia.
Nat has done a lot of dumb shit in her life, and therefore has no shortage of regrets, but it isn’t often that she thinks of her break up with Lottie as one of them. But now, with a supercut of all the evenings they spent exactly like this — curled up together on the sofa with food and a bottle of wine and a movie — playing through her mind and the slowly dawning realisation that her life hasn’t been quite as bright ever since Lottie left, Nat really does regret letting Lottie go so easily.
“Do you want anything to drink?” Lottie says, completely oblivious to Nat’s spiralling. Her back is to Nat as she rummages around in the fridge. “I have water, orange juice, wine but only Chardonnay so I’m guessing that’ll be a hard no, beer, Dr Pepper—”
“Dr Pepper, please,” Nat says, despite how much she’s itching for a beer right now. Alcohol is probably not going to help the precarious situation she’s currently found herself in. “Wow,” she continues, forcing herself to fight through the emotional turmoil and sitting down on the sofa. “I can’t believe the Lottie Matthews is willingly sharing her Chinese food with me. I must’ve looked pretty pathetic if you feel this sorry for me.”
Lottie rolls her eyes as she hands Nat a can of Dr Pepper and sits down next to Nat on the sofa. “I can still kick you back out into the rain, you know.”
It’s always a bit weird when something from before comes up. An abrupt reminder that this isn’t just a random stranger. This is Lottie. Lottie, who Nat already knows loves Chinese food, and who knows that Nat hates Chardonnay. A whole shared history that neither of them have forgotten.
Lottie switches the television on to some documentary about Scandinavian wildlife and they lapse into an easy silence as they both dig into their food.
The food is a nice distraction from Lottie, but once Nat has finished eating, the herd of reindeer in the depths of Finland on the screen isn’t quite compelling enough to stop Nat from sneaking sidelong glances at Lottie. Her legs are tucked up underneath herself, one elbow on the arm of the sofa propping her chin up, and her other hand is resting on her thigh.
Involuntarily, Nat’s stupid horny omega brain conjures up a vision (memory) of those big hands all over her body, squeezing her chest, digging into her waist, keeping her thighs spread open and pushed down. Her whole body flushes warm and tingly, and Nat shifts awkwardly where she’s sitting.
So, the thing is, normally Nat doesn’t really give much thought to her omega designation. With scent blockers and heat suppressants or regulators, being an alpha or omega, or even beta, really isn’t as huge a deal as trashy alpha/omega romcoms or erotica novels like to make it seem.
Yeah, she goes into heat at the beginning of every December, March, June and September like clockwork, but it’s just part of her biology, just something she has to suffer through for three or four days at a time. She knows when it’s coming and when to take time off work to get through it, but that’s it.
But sometimes, when an alpha’s scent wraps around her like this and her body decides to go absolutely fucking haywire over it, she kind of fucking hates it.
At the very least, it’s not as bad as when she’s in heat. She hates how pathetic and whiny she gets when she’s in the grip of it. Hates being so desperate, so needy, so willing to do and say anything just so an alpha will put their knot in her.
Nat takes a very long drink of her Dr Pepper in a weak attempt to not think about Lottie’s fucking knot.
It’s fine. Nat can get through this. She kicked a nasty cocaine habit, so she sure as shit can handle dinner with her ex-girlfriend.
Against all odds, Nat does indeed successfully make it through the next few hours without throwing herself at Lottie. She’s actually gotten quite into the documentary once they got to the episode about baby Arctic foxes, but eventually Van calls Nat to say she’s almost there and can Nat let her into the building.
Nat cannot think of anything more terrifying than her best friend and her ex-girlfriend interacting, so she thanks Lottie for letting her wait, collects her still damp clothes, and makes a hasty exit. She actively does not offer to introduce Lottie to Van, and makes sure Lottie’s door is firmly shut behind her before Van comes out of the elevator.
“Wow,” Van says, nose wrinkling as she gets closer to Nat. “Dude, you kinda stink.”
“Don’t even start,” Nat grumbles, snatching the keys out of Van’s outstretched hand.
“Is that her hoodie? Did she fucking scent you or something?”
“I said don’t.”
Later, once Van has left after she invited herself in to watch a movie and drink most of Nat’s beer while Nat somehow successfully dodged every suspicious curious question about Lottie, after Nat has changed out of Lottie’s alpha-scented clothes and into her own pyjamas, after she’s gotten ready for bed and tucked herself under the blankets and switched out the light—
After all of that, alone in her bed and with Lottie’s scent still sticking to her skin as she steadily soaks through her boxers, Nat loses the fight with herself even quicker than last time and gives in to the heat coiling tightly in her stomach.
She thinks about sliding off Lottie’s sofa onto her knees, crawling between Lottie’s spread legs, pulling those blasted fucking sweatpants down enough to get her dick out and taking it into her mouth. She thinks about Lottie hauling her up onto her lap and pushing the hoodie far enough up Nat’s chest that she can lean forward and get her mouth on Nat’s nipples. She thinks about getting them both naked so she can feel Lottie’s warm skin against her own, lining herself up and sinking down onto Lottie’s thick cock, slowly rolling her hips and riding her while Lottie’s hands paw possessively at her body.
It’s over embarrassingly quickly. Her breath catches on Lottie’s name as she trembles through an orgasm that sneaks up on her out of nowhere, like being pushed off a cliff. A sudden, quick, free-fall.
Nat closes her eyes and groans.
It’s normal, she tries to rationalise to herself, to be mildly hung up on Lottie in that nostalgic kind of way. Lottie wasn’t her first girlfriend or her first time, but she was her first alpha and the first person she spent a heat with. The first, and so far only, person that Nat has ever been mated to. Of course she’d have a little soft spot for Lottie, even after so long.
It’s not like she’s spent the last three years pining away, wondering where Lottie is in the world and comparing everyone to her. Nat has dated other people, slept with other people, let another two alphas she dated help her through heats. She’s barely even thought about Lottie.
But now, with Lottie’s scent still lingering on her skin and Lottie herself back in Nat’s life, Nat is slightly caught off guard by how much she still wants Lottie.
The worst part about this whole fiasco isn’t even the attraction. It would be fine if she just wanted to fuck Lottie. That, she could handle. No, the worst part is that despite her best efforts, Nat can feel that part of her that first fell in love with Lottie so many years ago starting to wake up again, slowly stirring from hibernation and taking root inside her chest.