Chapter Text
“Are you ready for me, Omega?”
Ben’s hands are everywhere—on her breasts, her cunt—and Rey is so lost to sensation, so torn between desire and self-loathing that she barely even hears his question. The slick that’s been dripping from her ever since she first caught hint of his scent tonight is already coating her inner thighs and she can’t focus on what he’s saying. All Rey can think about right now is how desperately she wants Ben Solo to bend her over this bathroom counter and fuck her already.
And how much she hates him for it.
When she doesn’t answer his question, Ben’s grip on her waist tightens almost to the point of pain. He slides his hand out from between her legs, and she moans in protest like a fucking animal. Like she’s in heat.
His voice deepens as he bends to whisper directly into her ear. “I asked you a question, Omega.”
His words carry a veiled threat and a hint of promise, caressing her ear like a lover’s embrace. Rey blinks hard, trying to think through the haze of alpha pheromones and lust and anger clouding her brain. It’s difficult. But if she doesn’t answer him, he won’t fuck her. And god , she wants him to fuck her. She would do anything, anything , if he would only thrust his cock into her empty, aching cunt right this second and end this misery.
“I’m… I’m ready for you,” she gasps, even as she thinks: I hate you .
He hums appreciatively and rewards her by slipping his large hand inside her panties again. She starts bucking against him involuntarily, uncontrollably. She feels powerless to stop what is happening. Like her body is no longer hers to control.
“Good girl,” he murmurs. “But call me Alpha . Then I’ll give you what you need.”
He slides his fingers forward and finds her swollen little clit. He starts to move against it in slow, methodical little circles. She nearly passes out from the intense, toe-curling pleasure of it and makes an absolutely inhuman sound deep in the back of her throat.
She’s on the cusp of coming already. She is so close. He only needs to keep this up a few moments longer, and—
“ Alpha ,” she whimpers through clenched teeth.
He chuckles against her ear. “Good,” he says again. “That’s a good omega.”
He grips the waistband of her lacy black panties and tears them off her body with a single rough tug.
The minute Rey steps into the hotel ballroom and sees the ~ Chandrila High: Class of 2009 ~ banner hanging on the back wall she realizes, with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, that coming here tonight was a huge mistake.
The room is decorated like their class reunion committee had thousands of dollars to burn for the occasion—which she suspects is probably true. The women standing by the sign-in table are wearing designer clothes that look like they cost as much as Rey’s monthly rent payment. Within minutes, the past ten years of Rey’s life—which, for the most part, have been happy, successful years—melt away from her like they never happened.
One look at these people, and Rey is right back in the middle of the waking nightmare that was her high school experience.
She should have known this would happen. What was she thinking, coming here? What on god’s green earth possessed her to email Kaydel Connix, Chandrila High Class of ‘09 class president, and tell her that yes , she would be delighted to come to their ten year reunion?
Maybe she wanted to prove to the people who were assholes to her growing up—the kids who made fun of her for having to take the bus every day; the kids that snickered about her Salvation Army clothes, who mocked her for having to miss so much school because of her shitty suppressants and her too-frequent heats—that she’s actually made something of herself. That their cruel words no longer hold any power over her.
Or maybe she just had a temporary bout of insanity when she got Kaydel’s pretty invitation.
Either way, as Rey makes her way further into the room and sees more of the people who used to make her life a living hell, she realizes that coming here really had been a terrible idea.
But then, leaving now, before she even talks to anyone, would be admitting defeat in a way Rey knows she’ll only hate herself for later. It took over an hour to drive here. She can’t face getting back into her car and driving home just yet.
She looks around to see if she can figure out where the bar is. There’s got to be a bar here somewhere, right?
No one ever said she had to do this totally sober.
Maybe a drink or two will help make this night more bearable.
Ben Solo’s cock is massive. It’s obscenely thick and heavily veined, with a cockhead that’s so wide it steals the breath from her lungs when he presses inside her.
She’s known this about Ben Solo for a long time, of course, but she has wondered—on the rare occasions she’s allowed herself to think about him over the years—whether her memory has exaggerated his size since high school. He was her first, after all, and he fucked her through a hard heat. She certainly hadn’t been in a position to think critically about anything when she last saw his dick—and, of course, back then she’d had no one else’s cock to compare it to.
But now, Ben Solo is spreading her legs apart with his massive hands right here in the hotel bathroom. A moment later, she feels the tip of his swollen, leaking cock nudging urgently against her aching center.
And… no.
No. She hadn’t misremembered a goddamn thing.
If anything, Ben Solo is even bigger now than he was ten years ago. Rey’s cunt clenches hard—around nothing—in feverish anticipation.
It’s been years—long before she started taking her new, high-end brand of suppressants—since her body has felt this achingly empty.
“You’re so wet for me,” Ben hums appreciatively. “Good. That’s very good.” He’s teasing her in earnest now, tracing through her folds with the tip of his cock as he fingers her clit, and Rey has to bite her lip to keep herself from begging. She won’t beg him for sex. She still has enough self-possession to promise herself that much. But her traitorous body—which cares nothing about her self-possession, or her pride—responds immediately to his praise. She feels another rush of slick leaking out of her, and Ben’s cock swells impossibly larger against her slit in response.
“I’m going to fuck you now, Omega,” he murmurs against the shell of her ear. “Would you like that?” He licks a hot wet stripe along the scent gland closest to his mouth—the one right above the neckline of her dress. Her throat closes and her mind snaps blank with the searing pleasure of it.
“Please,” she begs him desperately, already breaking her promise to herself. She needs his cock. She needs to be stuffed so full of him she can’t feel anything anymore that isn’t him . “ Please, Alpha . ”
Ben only chuckles against her gland, and Rey wonders if this is what dying feels like.
She doesn’t notice him right away.
Much later—once Rey is finally able to think back on this night with some clarity—she realizes that shouldn’t have been surprising. Before tonight, it had been years since she’d seen him. Even longer than that since she’d smelled him. The cheap suppressants she had to take in high school might have been almost useless, but the stuff she’s on now is great. And the room is stuffy, too full of people—too full of their pheromones and their cloying perfumes—to pick out any one scent in isolation.
True—he had made her nearly crazy with lust back in high school anytime she got within ten feet of him. And, yes, the last time she saw him, he had his knot buried so deep inside her she could feel him in her lungs . But the fact remains that the scents of all the terrible people in this room should have been enough to block out almost anything her top-of-the-line suppressants might have missed.
Should have been.
Rey is standing at the bar, ordering a glass of Chardonnay and trying to ignore the looks she’s getting from a couple of alphas near the dais, when she first catches a hint of Ben Solo’s scent. It’s sharp and tangy, and unmistakable, cutting through the acrid smells in the room like a hot knife sliding through butter.
Rey’s nostrils flare, and she involuntarily gulps in another lungful of air as she takes the wine glass from the beta bartender behind the counter. She tightens her grip on its stem as the scent she spent the better part of four years trying to ignore worms its way into her body through her pores. As if on cue, her glands start to itch, her palms start to sweat, and—
Rey can tell from halfway across the room that he’s unmated. If he were mated he’d smell different to her than he did back then. He wouldn’t smell like warmth, and fire, and raw, unfiltered sex. He’d smell more subdued and less demanding. Less like everything Rey has ever wanted.
She clutches at the back of a nearby chair to try to get a grip on herself, so that the desire that nearly undid her ten years ago doesn’t cause her to completely unravel in front of all these people.
It doesn’t really help. Nothing helps. A few moments spent near his scent, and suddenly she is right there with him again in the backseat of his car, her new prom dress shoved up to her waist and her white cotton panties lying forgotten on the floor.
(His knot had been blindingly thick, she remembers, when he buried it within her, stretching her tight little cunt so deliciously she’d felt seconds away from bursting at the seams.)
Rey takes a large gulp of wine to try and steady herself and bring her back to the present.
Already, she can feel her heartbeat starting to race. Already she can feel the slick her body makes whenever she allows herself to even think about Ben Solo starting to leak from her cunt. If she doesn’t do something, and fast, soon it will be running down her legs. Ruining her dress.
She closes her eyes, and grips the back of the chair harder, struggling to maintain control.
“Get down lower,” Ben rasps.
“Lower?” Rey’s trying to make sense of what he’s telling her. But he’s teasing her in earnest now, fucking her with just the tip of his cock before pulling all the way out again. Her brain has liquified, gone utterly useless, in the face of her raw, desperate need.
“ Lower ,” he repeats, more firmly this time. “Rest your forearms on the counter. Use them as a pillow for your head.”
She squeezes her eyes shut tight. “Why?”
“ Do it .”
Rey whimpers, and does as he instructs. She’s too far gone to fight this, too far gone to do anything but exactly what he—her alpha—tells her to do.
He grabs her hips with both hands, and then fucks into her to the hilt in one sharp thrust, so forcefully she can’t help but cry out.
Rey tells herself she isn’t going to go talk to him.
He’s just… standing there, on the other side of the room, staring at her with his arms folded across his stupid broad chest, and she doesn’t owe him anything, not anymore. Not after all these years.
She doesn’t risk a glance in his direction, but she knows he’s staring at her all the same. She can feel the heat of his gaze on her body as acutely as any physical touch.
Why is he even here ? Ben Solo might be the only person she went to high school with who hated it as much as she did. When she told Kaydel she’d come to this event, it never even crossed her mind that she might end up running into him.
Rey looks around the room for something— anything —to distract her before she goes and does something she’ll definitely regret later.
She spots Kaydel Connix out of the corner of her eye, standing by herself near the bar and nursing a drink, and recognizes her for the lifeline and savior she is.
She lets go of the chair she’s gripping and makes a beeline right for her old friend.
“Kaydel,” Rey says in a breathless rush.
Kaydel looks up from her drink and smiles happily at her, the slightly glazed look in her brown eyes and her flushed cheeks confirming that she’s visited the bar a few times already. Rey dimly notes that she can’t smell an alpha on her. She must not be mated yet, either.
Kaydel was one of the few people who was good to Rey back in high school. She used to drive a used red Toyota Corolla and would give her a ride to school sometimes. Her dad taught in the art department at Chandrila University, and he painted landscapes that used to sell for thousands. Rey forces herself to remember all of these details about Kaydel and her family, to repeat them to herself over and over in her mind like a mantra, if only to distract herself from how desperately she wants to cross the room— right fucking now —and bury her face in Ben Solo’s neck.
“Rey!” Kaydel says happily. “It’s so good to see you.” The smell of liquor on Kaydel’s breath is strong—which is a good thing, a distracting thing. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite strong enough to completely overpower Ben’s intoxicating scent, but it’s better than nothing.
“It’s good to see you too,” Rey says. You have no idea how good. “How’ve you been?”
“I’ve been great,” Kaydel says. “I graduated from law school a couple of years ago, and I’m an associate with Butzel & Gossett now.” She tosses her dirty blonde hair over her shoulder and—yeah, there’s her unbitten mating gland. She’s definitely not mated. “It’s too much work. You know how that goes, I’m sure. But it’s interesting. I like it.”
Rey smiles at her. Or tries to, anyway.
“And how have you been, Rey?” Kaydel asks. If she notices how uncomfortable and distracted Rey is right now, she shows no sign of it. “God, it’s been, what—five years now?”
“About that, I think,” Rey says. In truth, she has no idea how long it’s been, and also doesn’t really care—though she has no reason to doubt Kayde’s right. “And I’m... I’ve been good, too.”
“Are you still in engineering?”
“Yeah. I am.” Rey swallows hard. Her mouth is starting to water. Ben’s scent is growing stronger, creeping inside no matter how hard she tries to keep it out, and her body is starting to react. He must be heading this way. Fuck. “I work for the city now and… yeah. It’s great.”
“Yeah?” Kaydel says distractedly. Suddenly, all of Kaydel’s attention is focused on something just beyond Rey’s right shoulder. Her eyes flit between whatever she’s looking at and Rey and then back again. She presses her lips together into a tight, thin line.
Rey doesn’t have to look behind her to know exactly what—or who—Kaydel is looking at. Her heartbeat quickens to a rapid staccato in her chest because she realizes she’s only seconds away from being face to face with the man who made her life a torment back in high school. The person who teased her more mercilessly, more cruelly , than anyone else.
The closer he gets, the thicker the clouds of lust and anger fogging her brain gets. They make rational thought—or even listening to what Kaydel is telling her—almost impossible.
And then—
“Hello, Rey.”
Ben Solo’s voice in her ear is like molten honey, like a cool drink of water on a hot summer day. His smell, this close to her, defies description. Rey closes her eyes and breathes deeply before she can stop herself, the omega inside her greedy for every drop of it she can get. She takes another deep breath, and another, letting his scent suffuse all of her senses before she can tell herself she should be shutting it—and him—out completely.
When Rey opens her eyes again the world has gone fuzzy at the edges. Kaydel’s eyes are still on Ben, not her
Ben puts his hand on Rey’s upper arm—warm, strong, alpha is so strong —and gives her a gentle squeeze.
Kaydel turns to leave, but Rey hardly notices her go.
Ben is fucking her in earnest now, the sound his thighs make as they slap against her bare ass filthy and indecent, and she does what he asks her to do, lowering the front half of her body until her forearms rest right on the granite countertop. It changes the angle of Ben’s thrusts, and somehow opens her up even more for him. It allows him to go deeper, lets the head of his cock brush up against parts of her that have never been touched.
It feels like no part of her isn’t full of him now, that everything in her is him. She lets out a low, animalistic groan at the pleasure of it, at how good it feels to be full .
Her noises seem to please him. His thrusting speeds up even more as his grip on her waist tightens.
“You—feel—so— fucking—good ,” he grunts appreciatively, sliding a hand around her body to grab one of her tits. They are bouncing so much from the force of his fucking her he has to grip tightly just to hold on.
She’s still wearing her party dress. It cost a fortune, and she loves it, but right now, she wants him Ben rip it off her and cup her bare little tits in his massive hands. His palms are so warm—and the thought of what they would feel like on her rock-hard nipples is nearly enough on its own to make her come right then and there.
As if he can hear her unspoken thoughts, a moment later Ben roughly tears down the neckline of her dress. Her tits pop out of it—and the noise he makes when he realizes she isn’t wearing a bra tonight—
He growls as his knot starts to form and swell inside her. And as Rey’s orgasm starts to build within her, and then crest, and finally pull her under, her body shakes apart on a silent scream.
He looks good tonight.
He’s a little taller than he was back in high school, and a hell of a lot broader through the chest. Broader everywhere else, too. At some point over the past ten years he must have ditched the jeans and the band t-shirts because tonight, he’s wearing a charcoal grey suit that fits his body so well it might as well have been tailored specifically for him.
Of course, Ben Solo has always looked good. Back when he was a skinny teenager with ears that stuck out and features that didn’t quite sync up, there was always something arresting about Ben’s appearance. Even if he hadn’t made it his life’s mission to torment her mercilessly—even if Rey hadn’t been driven completely mental by the irresistible way he smelled—she’s pretty sure she would still have noticed him.
The smile he gives her now that Kaydel has left them alone together almost causes her brain to short out completely.
“Rey,” he says, letting go of her arm. Part of her wants to burst into tears at the sudden lack of physical contact with him even as the rest of her fills with revulsion at the realization that even all these years later she is as helpless to resist him as ever. “What a surprise to see you here.”
He sounds genuinely delighted—like he really hadn’t expected to see her here, but is glad to see her all the same. He isn’t smirking at her, there’s no mocking tone in his voice…
Something’s wrong.
“So, Rey,” he continues, when she doesn’t say anything in response. “What have you been doing the past ten years? Do you still live in Chandrila?”
At his benign questions, something inside her snaps.
“Don’t act like you care,” she spits at him, her irritation rising. He never cared before, when they were in school together. She refuses to let herself be seduced by this asshole. She will not go down this road a second time.
Ben looks legitimately affronted.
“I’m just making small talk,” he says. He sounds so innocent, but Rey isn’t fooled. “I didn’t come here tonight to attack you or to piss you off.”
“Why did you come here tonight?” Rey folds her arms in front of her chest—partly to show him how annoyed she is to be talking with him right now, but mostly to hide the fact that her nipples are already starting to get pointy and hard with arousal beneath the thin fabric of her black sheath dress.
He shrugs a shoulder and inclines his head towards her. She can smell him better this way, can practically count the individual bits of stubble that dot his chin. Before she can stop herself from doing it, she finds herself imagining what the rough rasp of that stubble might feel like, scraping rough against her inner thighs.
Her cunt clenches at the involuntary image of his head between her legs. She has to dig her fingernails into her palms to keep from whimpering.
“Why did I come here tonight?” Ben repeats.
Rey nods. She doesn’t trust her voice.
He shrugs his shoulder again and leans in even closer. “I didn’t have anything better to do,” he says in a mock whisper.
“Why do I find that hard to believe?”
“I have no idea,” he says. He looks at her, then— really looks at her—his dark brown eyes raking down her body from head to toe with a heated intensity that makes Rey’s galloping heart race even faster. “Why did you come here tonight?”
“Because apparently I’m insane,” she says. She tries for harsh, but her words come out much breathier than she intends.
At that, Ben laughs.
“You are many things, Rey Niima,” Ben says. “But insane has never been one of them.”
“Oh, fuck you,” she says.
The instant the words are out of her mouth, Rey immediately regrets it. The impact they have on Ben is immediate and impossible to miss. His pupils dilate, and his mouth droops. His scent is spiking so much now that...
If she thought ignoring how Ben smelled before was difficult, right now…
Right now, all she wants to do is drown herself in it.
His nostrils flare, and his eyes flutter closed on a soft groan. He can smell her too, she realizes. He can smell exactly how turned on she is right now.
When he opens his eyes again, there is no doubt in her mind that he’s just as turned on as she is.
How is that even possible ?
Before Rey can make sense of that thought, Ben’s hand shoots out and clamps down around her wrist like a vise.
“Rey,” he murmurs, very quietly. Rey hates the way the sound of her name on his lips make her shiver. “I... happen to know the bathrooms here are quite soundproof.”
Rey’s stomach lurches, and her heart leaps into her throat at the unspoken implication behind his words.
She swallows hard, and wills her knees to stop shaking.
“So?” she says, as defiantly as she can manage.
“ So ,” he continues, “you are the most interesting thing here in this stupid party. I... think I’d quite like to try out just how soundproof they are.” A beat. “With you.”
His scent is spiking even further the longer they stand here together, and her panties are so wet right now that she’s going to have to go home and change soon even if this stops right now.
But, god—she doesn’t want this to stop right now. She wants this man to fuck her, to use her, just as she wanted it when she was a stupid little sixteen-year-old girl and he was an asshole to her in front of everybody in Calculus. Worst of all, she can tell by the suddenly smug look on his face that he knows it, that he can smell her arousal on her as easily as if his face were buried in her cunt right now.
“Please help me test out how soundproof they are, Rey,” he almost purrs, making Rey’s thighs clench. She closes her eyes, but it doesn’t help; behind her eyelids all she can see is Ben—his face; his hands on her body. His cock, slamming into her. “I promise to make it worth your while.”
Then he puts his hand on the small of her back, and all reason leaves her.
It feels like hours before Ben’s knot softens enough for him to pull out of her. The moment he does, Rey quickly extricates herself from her awkward position between him and the bathroom sink.
“Fuck,” she mutters as she hastily pushes her arms through the cap sleeves of her dress and pulls its skirt down. His cum and her slick are starting to run down her legs now that he isn’t inside her anymore, and she grabs a wad of paper towels to clean herself with as she looks around the floor for her underwear. She has a dim memory of him ripping them off her at some point before he fucked her, but she can’t remember if that actually happened or if it was just her imagination.
Either way, she can’t see them anywhere right now.
“Maybe I’ll see you around?”
Rey looks up sharply at Ben’s question. His face is red and flushed from the events of the past hour, and his suit—immaculately pressed when he showed up here tonight—is now so badly rumpled even the betas who can’t smell the sex on him will know exactly what they’ve just done in here the second they step outside.
Rey scoffs. Fortunately, the blistering orgasms he’s just wrung from her have cleared her head in a way nothing else could have. She is able to see Ben for exactly what he is, without a haze of lust and pheromones clouding her judgment.
And she can see exactly what a terrible mistake this was.
“I don’t think so,” Rey says, sharply. She opens her purse to make sure everything is still inside it. There are her keys, her lipstick, her cell phone, her wallet. Good. Nothing missing.
Ben clears his throat. “You have a heat coming up soon, do you not?”
Rey glares at him. “How do you know that?”
“You’ve always been very attuned to my scent,” he points out. “You can’t really think that’s a one-sided thing, can you?”
“I’ve... honestly never given it any thought,” Rey says. Which is a lie, of course; but he doesn’t need to know that.
He smirks at her. “Either way, I can tell you’re going to have a heat soon.” He moves closer to her, but Rey keeps her eyes fixed firmly on the contents of her purse. “Just like I could always tell, back when we were kids.”
Rey’s face goes hot at the memory. He’d known her cycle all right. But in the end, what good had it done her?
“Ben,” she says, her irritation rising. “What are you trying to say?”
“I’m offering up my services.” He pauses. “I can help you, Rey. I know you’re not mated.” He trails off, and looks meaningfully at her unbitten mating gland. “And sex with you is—”
“Never going to happen again,” Rey finishes bluntly.
He sighs. “Rey…”
“This was a mistake.” She shoulders her purse and adjusts her skirt one last time. It’s long enough to cover her ass, thank god. She’s just going to head out to her car and drive home; it doesn’t matter if she isn’t wearing underwear. She has more paper towels in her car if she ends up needing them. “Coming to this reunion was a mistake. And… what we did tonight was also a mistake.”
“Rey—”
She doesn’t let him finish his sentence. Rey unlocks the bathroom door with a flourish and practically runs out of the room, letting the door slam shut behind her.