Two: Pheromones

*Warning: this story is mature, so while this chapter doesn’t have anything really explicit in it, there is mature language and references to things of a sexual nature. That’s why it’s labelled.

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He was at the door. Knock, knock. Oh no, Damon thought. It’s starting.

He could see Jun’s shape through the frosted glass at the front door. Why did this feel so much like a horror movie setup? Why was Damon’s heart pounding so fast?

Damon silently backed away from the entryway, into the living room. Perhaps if he was quiet enough, Jun would think he wasn’t home.

Of course, the world would never be so kind to Damon. As he backed away, keeping his eyes locked on the door – he of course managed to stumble straight into the coffee table by the entrance to the living room with a loud thud. The pens and decorative vase on the table crashed to the floor. Damon winced with each impact. Well. There goes any chance he had of pretending he didn’t exist. The knocking paused briefly and then renewed, louder.

“Damon?” came the confused whisper. “Are you home?”

Damon sighed. There was no avoiding it. At least it was still the pre-heat phase, and not full heat, or else he would lock himself in his bedroom regardless of how much Jun knocked.

When he opened the door, Jun was still pretty confused. “What took so long?” he asked, an innocent tilt to his head. Damon grimaced.

“Nothing. Just knocked some stuff over. What’s up?” Damon asked casually. Then – he smelled it. It was faint. The preheat season had only just begun after all, but still…

It was a warm scent. A little spicy, a little sweet. It was pure Jun. Damon suddenly spluttered, cheeks heating, and held his breath.

Not good. Damon had expected Jun’s pheromones to affect him a little bit, but this… oh boy. There was a sudden moisture down below that hadn’t been there before and Damon suddenly hated his omega body. This was just the preheat for Pete’s sake! How was he going to handle the full heat at this rate?

Jun noticed him backing up and came forward, confused. “Damon? You look pale, are you alrigh-”

He stopped suddenly, at the threshold of the door. Damon watched as his pupils rapidly expanded and his nostrils flared, chest beginning to rise and fall twice as fast as before. He swallowed, and Damon found himself entranced by the movement of his Adam’s apple. He was so muddled from that scent, that he almost didn’t realize what had happened.

Just as he could smell Jun, Jun could smell him. Damon wouldn’t go into heat like he did, of course, but anyone could become aroused, and any werewolf in the vicinity could smell that arousal.

Opening the door was a mistake. Damon’s arousal could end up stimulating Jun’s heat – which would then result in a frenzy of sorts, and if Damon were any more out of his mind, he might just let Jun take him.

But he still had some control.

“I think you should go,” he said, taking a solid step back. Distance. They needed distance.

His words seemed to break Jun out of his trance. A hint of a flush could be seen at the tops of his cheekbones. He nodded.

“Yeah. I should. Um, see you – later,” he murmured, blinking rapidly. He turned and ambled away from the front of Damon’s house, walking like he was a little tipsy. Damon watched as he almost slammed into someone walking by on the sidewalk and stumbled around them, apologizing with the sweetest dumbfounded expression.

Once he was gone, some of the heat dissipated and Damon could think clearly. He leaned his head against the doorframe, breathing in deep lung-fulls of clear, crisp air. This Season was going to be torture.

It wasn’t that Damon hadn’t thought about accepting Jun’s courtship. Jun was sweet and silly, and despite Damon not having any clue why, he was sincere in his feelings towards Damon. Damon was leery of accepting, however, for a couple reasons.

For one, Jun’s unwillingness to explain why he was bothering to court Damon in the first place was too odd. Damon had never been able to trust easily, so that unwillingness was a definite strike against him.

He might not admit this to anyone, out of fear of sounding crazy, but there was something very…disturbing? Almost, about the whole thing that kept Damon from making a decision. He didn’t believe in love at first sight, or whatever other explanations people had for it. There was something more to all this that was perplexing at best, and unsettling at worst.

Second, Damon didn’t really want a mate, not right now. Sure, for the future, maybe, but he was only twenty-six, he was just starting in his career, and he was not about to get pregnant before he had managed to live his life a little bit more. Werewolves, because of their particular constitutions, could really only rely on condoms as contraceptives, and an alpha in heat was absolutely not going to remember or want to wear one, even if they didn’t particularly want to have children either.

See, with the transfer of heats onto alphas, so too were a lot of the breeding instincts more particular to omegas. The wolf inside of most alphas was extremely against anything that prevented them fucking babies into the nearest person with a womb, and in the throes of heat hormones, it definitely would not listen to their human side’s protests. Omegas were also rather easily affected by alpha pheromones as well, and might not necessarily think about it either. That meant that there was a lot more pregnancy than usual in most packs, but even more so in Ganymede pack.

So for Damon, giving into Jun, especially during the Season, was a bad idea. That didn’t mean he was going to reject Jun entirely, however. The boy was cute, sweet, and hot. There was no better combination.

Although, Damon had to admit that, given how much competition there was for Jun, he wouldn’t be too torn up to have to give him up either.

Yes. Unfortunately, Damon wasn’t the only wolf in the pack that had realized Jun’s worth. And his competition wasn’t to be underestimated.

Damon had even received a death threat, and several visitors to his house demanding that he reject Jun the moment the courtship claim was over. One of them was even – and Damon wasn’t sure how true this was, given that it was a rumor from Mark, who was notoriously unreliable – Jun’s previous girlfriend who followed him over from his last pack.

That was another thing that concerned Damon, by the way. Why he left his old pack. He came from a pack a few cities away, the Venus pack – which was rumored to be quite friendly and accepting.

However, Jun had chosen to enter a pack that would put a curse on him the moment he joined. Damon had asked Jun about this matter a week into their courtship claim.

“Jun,” he’d begun. “You came from Venus pack, right? To the south?”

Jun had been preparing Damon a home-cooked meal for their second date, another way of demonstrating his skills as a potential mate. Damon had already watched him almost pull a hot tray from the oven without oven mitts and nearly cut his finger open while chopping vegetables. The boy was a disaster. A walking anxiety attack. The food had been good though.

“Yes,” Jun had said. “My family still lives there. I visit occasionally.”

Now Damon had the perfect opening. “Oh? Is that so? Then why did you choose to join Ganymede pack? Was there something you didn’t like there?”

Jun stilled, his back to Damon as he finished setting up the rice cooker, so Damon couldn’t see his face. “No,” he’d said, voice subdued. Cautious. “Venus pack is excellent.”

“Then why come all the way up here?”

Then Jun did it again. The silence thing where he just stopped talking until Damon changed the subject. No matter how Damon poked and prodded at him, even on the verge of getting angry, he kept his mouth shut.

That was when Damon realized that Jun – couldn’t lie. Whether it was out of a choice or something else, whenever Jun felt that there was something he wanted to keep from Damon, rather than lie about it, he simply wouldn’t talk. Damon couldn’t figure out if it was more endearing or infuriating.

After Jun left, Damon stayed at the front door for a moment, lost in thought. He had to go back inside, though, and clean up the annoying amounts of slick that had dripped down his thighs. Damon would also never tell anyone this – because he didn’t really have any omega friends who would know what he was talking about – but Damon, ahem. Over produced. Meaning even slight arousal resulted in an annoying deluge of slick. His doctor said it was some genetic condition that he couldn’t pronounce. It was harmless but quite tricky to deal with when doing laundry.

Damon idly wondered what Jun’s reaction would be if he told him about it. Would he blush? Stutter? Damon smiled at the thought – and then snapped out of it immediately when something glass smashed to bits against the doorframe, right by his head.

Damon flinched away. What the hell? There were clear shards all over his porch and he looked around for who had tried to fucking kill him with a mason jar. He spotted the culprit, not bothering to hide themselves, ten feet away.

Oh god. Not her.