Page 80 of That Defining Moment

“I was eighteen, Dane. I’d have gone off if someone had looked at me sternly.”

“Fair point.” Dane tilted back in his chair, arms folded behind his head. “That was a good night, though. You have to admit that.”

Lysander didn’t admit anything. He turned the page in his notebook and moved to the next question, because the point of this recording wasn’t to let Dane curate a highlight reel.

“The first video,” Lysander said. “Tell me how that came about.”

Dane’s posture shifted, his arms coming down from behind his head. “That was your idea, wasn’t it?”

“No, Dane. It wasn’t.”

“I remember it being a mutual decision.”

“Then your memory’s shit,” Lysander said evenly, because this was the moment that mattered, and if he lost his composure Dane would use it to reframe the entire conversation. “I was on the cusp of my heat. I needed somewhere to ride it out that wasn’t a council flat with walls so thin my dad and my twin brother could hear everything. You had a flat in Knightsbridge with underfloor heating and a lock on the bedroom door. I rang you and asked if I could come over.”

“Right. And I said yes.”

“You said yes. And then you said we should film it. You giving me my first knotting.”

Dane’s tongue ran across his lower lip. “It was just — look, it was a business opportunity, Sander. Male omega in heat? That’s the holy grail of content. Every alpha on the internet would have paid through the nose for that, and they did.”

“And when I said I wasn’t sure, you said…”

“I don’t remember exactly what I said.”

“‘I won’t even put your face in the video, Sander.’” Lysander held Dane’s gaze. “That’s what you said. You said people are only really interested in your male omega bits. They want to see the slick, and what your hole looks like.”

The studio was silent except for the low hum of the hard drives and the faint crackle from Baz’s headphone jack.

“Yeah,” Dane said. “I probably did say that.”

“The video went up while I was still in heat,” Lysander said. “You titled it ‘MY FIRST KNOTTING’ in capital letters, with three exclamation marks. You used a thumbnail of my arse with your come running out of it. I didn’t find out until four days later, when my heat broke and I checked my mobile.”

“It was already at two million views by then,” Dane said.

“It was.”

“And you didn’t ask me to take it down.”

“No.” Lysander held his gaze. “I didn’t. Because by the time I saw it, the money had already hit the account, and you’d transferred half of it into my name, and I’d never seen that many zeroes outside of a maths textbook before.”

“See, that’s the thing.” Dane leaned forward, his elbows on the desk, his hands clasped. “You always had a choice, Sander. I never forced you to do anything. You were there voluntarily for every video we made together. You could have walked at any point.”

“Could I?”

“Yeah. You could.”

Lysander turned to a fresh page in his notebook. He didn’t need it, the questions were seared into his brain by now, but the act of turning the page gave him something to do with his hands that wasn’t punching Dane in his fucking Skarsgårdian face.

“Walk me through how the content changed the longer we stayed together.”

“It’s a business, Sander. You know this better than anyone. The audience wants variety. You give them the same thing over and over, they get bored. Subscriber numbers drop. So you evolve.”

“You introduced toys within the first month.”

“Yeah.”

“And then another alpha. In the second month.”