Page 83 of That Defining Moment

Lysander went slack beneath him. The grinding stopped, his muscles softening around the knot, and his breath came out in a long, unsteady exhale.

“I sent you the audio file,” Lysander said, his lips moving against Hamish’s hair. “From today’s recording. It’s in your inbox.”

Hamish lifted his head just enough to see Lysander’s face. His omega’s eyes were closed, his lashes dark against the flushed skin beneath them.

“Will you listen to it?” Lysander asked. “And tell me what you think.”

“Of course I will,” Hamish said.

Lysander’s fingers started moving through his hair again. Hamish set his mouth to the bruise on his neck and closed his eyes.

✦ ✧ ✦

Lysander was asleep before Diwa had finished clearing the plates.

One minute he’d been sitting upright at the dining table with a fork in his hand and his knee pressed against Hamish’s beneath it, and the next his head had dropped onto Hamish’s shoulder with the sudden, total surrender of someone whose body had simply overruled the rest of him. Hamish had got him upstairs, steered him out of his jeans and into the bed, and Lysander had curled onto his side and gone under without so much as pulling the duvet up.

Hamish stood in the doorway, watching the shallow rise of his omega’s ribs, then eased the door shut and went downstairs.

The living room was lit by the television and not much else. Cassian had claimed the far end of the sofa with his legs folded beneath him, Tala propped upright against his chest, her head tucked under his chin. A panel show was on, one with comedians behind desks, where every punchline arrived at the expense of a very British celebrity Hamish had never heard of, and Cassian was laughing at it with the breathless, full-bodied commitment he gave to everything that delighted him.

He couldn’t possibly have understood half of the references. Two of the panellists had just spent forty-five seconds on a joke about a Love Island contestant’s accent, and he was laughing so hard that Tala’s head wobbled against his collarbone.

“She started it,” Cassian said, catching Hamish’s eye as he lowered himself onto the empty end of the sofa. He nodded down at Tala, whose mouth was open in a gummy, wet approximation of hilarity, her fists batting the air beside Cassian’s jaw. “She laughed first, and then I had to laugh because she was laughing, and now we can’t stop.”

Tala shrieked in apparent confirmation, and Cassian dissolved again, his nose scrunching, his free hand coming up to cradle the back of her head while his shoulders shook.

Hamish settled into the cushions, pulled his over-ear headphones from the side pocket of his bag, and fitted them into place. The room dropped away, replaced by the insulated quiet of noise cancellation.

He opened his inbox on his mobile, found Lysander’s email, and tapped the audio file.

Dane’s laugh came through the headphones with a warmth that made Hamish’s molars press together. He listened to the man describe pulling up to a Barking estate in a white Range Rover and spotting a skinny eighteen-year-old with his arms crossed, pretending not to care. Hamish could see all of it, and had to close his eyes against the image of this man circling his omega like something he intended to buy.

He listened on.

Then Lysander asked for an apology, and Dane said no. Hamish could tell from the man’s voice that he’d genuinely never considered the possibility that he’d done anything wrong.

Hamish pulled his glasses off with one hand and pressed his thumb and forefinger into the corners of his eyes. The lenses caught the television’s light as he set them on his knee, and his vision blurred the room into soft, indistinct shape.

The recording played on, but Hamish wasn’t hearing the questions anymore. He was hearing the pauses between them, those silences where he could feel the effort it had taken his omega to sit in that room with the alpha who’d used him.

A tear slid from beneath his lashes and tracked down to his jaw. He wiped it with the heel of his hand in a quick, rough pass.

Cassian’s weight shifted on the sofa. A shoulder pressed into his arm, followed by the solid warmth of Cassian’s side settling against him. Tala was still on Cassian’s chest, her breathing gone slow and even. Cassian’s free hand landed on Hamish’s forearm and stroked.

Hamish looked over. Cassian’s mouth was moving, shaping two words with exaggerated care so that Hamish could read them through the blur of his tears.

Good alpha, Cassian mouthed at him, over and over.

Hamish put his glasses back on, and kept listening.

He rewound the file to the beginning and started again.

This time, he switched off the part of his brain that knew Lysander’s body, and the warm sprawl of him asleep on Hamish’s chest. He turned off the part of him that wanted to reach through the recording and pull Dane’s tongue out of his mouth by the root.

He’d been evaluating recorded content for fifteen years, and so had developed a solid rubric for media.

The first criterion was always timeliness. Did this story need to exist now, today, in the current landscape, or was it content for content’s sake? Lysander’s piece cleared that bar without effort. The conversation about creator exploitation, about the machinery that chewed up young people and monetised their worst moments, was everywhere at the moment. But almost none of it came from the ones who’d been the product. Lysander’s recording inverted that, and the inversion alone was enough to make an audience lean in.