Page 54 of That Defining Moment

“I was eighteen,” Lysander said to the microphone. “Mid-heat, and it was three in the morning. Back then, I was sharing an eight-by-ten bedroom with my twin brother in a council flat in Barking, and if you’ve never had two male omegas cycling in the same room with just a plasterboard wall between them and the rest of the flat, then consider yourself lucky.”

He paused. The waveform on the centre monitor held steady, a green line barely rippling.

“So I called an older alpha I’d been seeing, because he had space, privacy and central heating that actually worked. He said I could ride out my heat with him, and all I had to do was let him film it.”

Lysander’s fingers found the edge of the desk and gripped.

“The terms he gave me were simple. We’d make one video, just the one, and in exchange I could move out of Barking and come live with him. I was eighteen and in heat in a room I couldn’t lock the door of, so of course I said yes and I gave it a go.”

He rubbed the back of his neck and kept speaking.

“We got pretty far along. I got naked, he had his hands on me, and then I decided that I didn’t want to be filmed after all. I know that doesn’t fit the TheoTheO story. But that first time, I’m on the video saying ‘please don’t record this,’ and everyone who watched it assumed I was just acting.” He let out a breath that the microphone caught as a soft rush of static. “I wasn’t acting. But one video became two, became a whole OnlyFans channel, and by that point I’d been living in his flat for six months with nowhere else to go. He kept asking for more, and I kept saying yes, because what’s one more video when you’ve already done the first one?”

He swallowed and stared at the screen.

“And the thing I told myself the whole time is that it’s just video online. Just content. It doesn’t really touch anything real. Except the first video was uploaded, and it didn’t stay a small thing; it metastasised. It got screenshotted and reposted and clipped and captioned and sent to my brother’s uni mates. And then my brother gets cornered in an alley by an obsessed fan who’s watched me get knotted on camera for years and now wants a chance at the real thing…”

Lysander stopped talking, and the waveform flattened. He took a moment to compose himself, then he reached over and hit the playback button.

His own voice came through the studio monitors, and the sound of it made his whole body recoil. It was nasal and thin, with a wheedling upward inflection at the end of sentences that made every statement sound like it was asking for permission, something he’d picked up in Australia from Hamish and Cassian.

“Fucking hell,” Lysander said. “I sound like that?”

The second time was worse, because now he was listening for the inflection and finding it everywhere. Inside his head, he was assured, dry and sharp-edged. On the playback, he stumbled over words and sounded uncertain of his own story.

He recorded it again. Then again. Then six more times, adjusting his posture, his distance from the microphone, the angle of his chin, because surely the problem was mechanical. If he gave his voice box more room, he would sound better.

By the ninth take, he’d stopped flinching at the playback. His voice was still higher and thinner than he would have liked it to be, but at least the story underneath it had started to settle into a shape that felt coherent. When he listened back to the final take, he could at least hear the steadiness in his own voice, even if it wasn’t entirely polished.

He saved the file, labelled it test 09, and closed the software.

His ankle throbbed when he stood, the joint stiff from two hours of immobility, and he took the basement stairs one at a time, gripping the banister. He should check on his father, whose headache had been particularly bad that morning.

Diwa was sitting on the edge of the bed when Lysander made it up to the master bedroom. Colin was propped against him, his head resting in the crook of Diwa’s shoulder. His face was crumpled and blotchy as his hands gripped the front of Diwa’s shirt with a white-knuckled desperation that Lysander had never seen from him.

“Daddy?”

“The headache’s come back,” Diwa said. “He’s been struggling with it for the last hour.”

“It’s not just a headache.” Colin’s words came out thick, each one misaligned with the one before it, as though his mouth and his brain were running on a delay. “It’s… the light’s doing something. When I look at the window, there’s…” He blinked, and his gaze drifted past Lysander towards the curtains. “There’s bits. Flickery bits. Like when you look at the sun and then look away, except I haven’t looked at the sun, so I don’t know why they’re…”

He trailed off. His brow creased, and his fingers tightened on Diwa’s shirt.

“I had a thought,” Colin said. “Just now. I was going to say it and it’s gone.” He turned his face into Diwa’s neck. “Things keep going.”

Diwa’s free hand came up and cupped the side of Colin’s head, his fingers sliding into Colin’s hair.

“You’re all right,” Diwa murmured, his mouth close to Colin’s ear. “I’m right here.”

“Can you get Diwa for me?” Colin said.

Lysander’s breath stopped.

Colin was looking at Diwa. His head was resting against Diwa’s collarbone, and he had the alpha’s arm around his shoulders. “Can you —” Frustration and confusion pulled at Colin’s features. “I need Diwa. He’ll know what to do about the flickery bits.”

The colour left Diwa’s face at once.

Colin opened his mouth to say something more, but he stopped mid-syllable. His jaw clamped shut. His whole body stiffened against Diwa, every muscle locking at once, his back arching so that his head pressed hard into Diwa’s shoulder and his hands pulled the fabric of Diwa’s shirt taut across his chest.