The air in the apartment was heavy with the smell of dampened heat, but it didn’t stir Jun nearly as much as the sight of the omega who peered timidly at him through the narrowly opened front door. He was a petite Black man—barely more than five feet if Jun had to guess—and uncommonly pretty, with ringlets of curls that fell over his brow and formed a dark halo around his face. Freckles stippled his nose and cheeks, sable speckles on brown skin. He wore a soft-looking t-shirt and plaid pajama pants that pooled on top of his bare feet—they were too long for him.
“Miles?” Jun asked to be polite, even though he was already sure he’d come to the right place.
The omega nodded, eyes flicking up to meet Jun’s before shyly dropping again.
“I’m Jun. Can I come in?”
The door shut, which wasn’t the warm reception Jun had been anticipating. He blinked in surprise and reached into his pocket to fish out his phone—maybe hehadcome to the wrong place—but then there came the scrape of a door chain unlocking and the door opened again, fully this time.
“Do you want something to drink?” the omega—Miles—asked shyly as he gestured for Jun to step inside. “I can get you some water, or… um… well really, I just have water, but there might be one of those single-serve electrolyte powder samples in the junk drawer if you wanted something with flavor. I think I got it in the mail a couple months ago and it wasn’t like I could just throw it out, so I’m sure it’s gotta be in there. I know I didn’t drink it. I?—”
He cut himself off abruptly as Jun entered the apartment.
They stood close now, too close for strangers. Too close even for friends.
“I don’t need anything to drink,” Jun told him softly. “All I want is you.”
It looked like Miles was a few degrees away from melting into a puddle on the floor. He mumbled something indecipherable, his head lowered to such an extent that his chin was nearly tucked against his chest, and made a vague gesture that might have been an attempt to invite Jun deeper into the apartment.
It was way too cute.
What was an omega this shy doing on Grindr?
Infatuated, Jun looked him up and down, biting back a grin. He knew better than to make assumptions, but at this point, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Miles was a virgin. He certainly wasn’t the type of guy who usually put himself outthere on apps like these. Jun wasn’t an expert at hookups by any means, but he’d been around the block a few times, and he had never met anyone quite like this—not on his home turf, and not anywhere he’d gone on tour. Miles wasdifferent,and maybe it was the scent of his heat messing with Jun’s head, but his sweet shyness was doing it for him.
“Do you want to show me around?” Jun asked, not because he was eager to rush Miles into bed, but because he figured if he didn’t take initiative for them, Miles would spend the rest of the night staring at his feet. “I’d love to see your place.”
“Um, yeah. Sure.” Miles darted around him to lock the door, then hurried down the short hallway to stand in the open space beyond. “The bathroom is on your right,” he said, waving toward the darkened room to Jun’s right, its door ajar. “The door on your left is a closet, and this is the kitchen slash living room slash bedroom. The kitchen part is here”—he gestured to the right side of the room—“the living room part is here”—he gestured to the left—“and my bedroom is down from the living room, on the other side of the wall to your left. That’s, um, that’s everything. It’s just a studio apartment. I don’t even have a balcony or a patio. Just windows. But when the bakery across the street throws out its old bread, sometimes the pigeons will come up and perch on the sill to eat, so that’s kind of neat, I guess…”
Jun wanted him carnally.
“Do you like birdwatching?” he asked as he followed Miles into the room. It was tiny. The kitchen was actually a kitchenette, its one square of counter space partially occupied by a coffee maker and its fridge so compact, it looked like it would be a struggle to fit a carton of ice cream in the freezer. The living room wasn’t much better. There was a loveseat—not even a couch—and a cube organizer pushed up against the wall onwhich sat an ancient TV. The screen was black, but the glare from the overhead light revealed a crack that ran down its left side. The cubes of the storage unit beneath were stuffed full of books, which led Jun to believe the television had been out of commission for a while.
“Birdwatching?” Miles blinked, then widened his eyes as the light bulb went on. “Oh, you mean because of the pigeons. No, I’m not really into birdwatching in general. There’s just something about seeing a pigeon eat a stale croissant up close, you know? It’s funny. They’re cute.”
“When do you usually see them?”
“Crazy early in the morning, usually around five. That’s when the employees at the bakery go through yesterday’s unsold goods and throw away what they can’t sell.”
“Maybe I’ll get to see them, then.”
“You wanna stay the night?”
“Yeah.” Jun smiled. “I think I do.”
The slightest bit of flirting seemed to make Miles’s brain shut down. He slid both hands nervously into his back pockets and lowered his gaze again, but this time, Jun caught sight of what he was trying to hide by staring at the floor—he was smiling. He liked being flirted with, even when it made him embarrassed.
“I guess… maybe we should go to bed, then,” Miles mumbled, glancing up just slightly as if to gauge Jun’s reaction.
It wasn’t a difficult assessment.
Jun enthusiastically agreed.
It was only a few steps to Miles’s bedroom nook, in which there was a double bed piled high with soft throw blankets and pillows. Miles hurried in before Jun had a chance to enter and snapped shut a laptop that had been partially concealed behind the mountain of comfortable things, then slid it under the bed. It was just as well. The last thing Jun wanted was to be reminded of all the work he was putting off to be here.
“I put on clean sheets this morning,” Miles told him as he shoved the laptop out of sight, seemingly to fill the silence. “I did spend a lot of time cuddled up in bed watching stuff on my computer after I put the clean sheets on, but I showered before I did it, so it’s not like they’rereallydirty. They’ll probably just smell like my heat. I’m on suppressants, but I don’t think they take the smell entirely away, right?”
They didn’t, but that wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that whatever suppressant Miles was using was doing a terrible job. It worked enough that Jun could tell he was onsomething,but the smell of his heat was still so potent, Jun had been hard since he’d opened the door.
