Chapter Text
"Jobe? Aren't you coming down for breakfast?"
"In a bit."
Jude frowned as he watched his younger brother hunched over his laptop, brows furrowed and lips pressed into a tight line. Jobe's fingers flew relentlessly across the keyboard, the rapid clacking filling the room with a steady rhythm.
"What are you doing?" Jude asked, bewildered, as he walked over to the bed.
Jobe immediately slammed the laptop shut. His pupils narrowed as though he'd been deeply offended, and his bright white canines flashed into view. Jude raised both hands in surrender and slowly backed away. His little brother was probably researching something. He was used to these intensely serious research sessions that Jude had back home. It’d be best to head downstairs and give the kid his quiet now.
"Right then, I'll eat first. Don't stay up here too long, ok?"
Jobe gave a brief nod, his eyes already back on the screen as his fingers resumed their relentless typing. Jude watched him for a few more seconds before quietly closing the door behind him.
Weird...
Ting.
Jude let out a surprised sound before thundering down the stairs, practically diving for the phone lying innocently on the table.
Morning!!!
Someone promised they'd come round to my place today, you know.
Jude couldn't help laughing. Thank God no one was around to witness how utterly ridiculous he looked right now. Still grinning like an idiot, he quickly typed back.
Who could that be, I wonder...
Bruh, I'm serious.
Solfy is waiting for you.
The little menace just took a massive shit in the back garden, and there isn't a single saviour around to clean it up :(
Fuck you >:0
Whatever. Hurry up :D
Jude smiled to himself and slipped the phone into his pocket. The pile of dog poo could wait until after his breakfast.
Solfy was the cool thing Erling had been showing him all night yesterday, a Golden Retriever puppy that was only a few months old. The little thing had stared at Jude through the tiny phone screen with those pitch-black eyes, before enthusiastically licking the camera despite Erling desperately trying to stop it. Jude had once considered getting a dog himself, just for the company, but Jobe had quietly placed a hand on his shoulder and given him the most sympathetic look imaginable.
"You can’t even look after yourself," he said.
Jude hadn't been able to argue with that statement, so he'd reluctantly buried the idea.
Pushing the thought of the puppy aside, Jude spread butter over his toast with his mind elsewhere. The house was strangely quiet this morning. Sunlight streamed through the windows, leaving bright strips across the table and half of Jude's body. Tiny specks of dust drifted through the light like falling snow.
It was how it had always been.
Jude took a bite of his toast and leaned back in his chair, his gaze fixed on a random spot on the table as though he could bore a hole through it.
Since yesterday when Jobe had arrived, the morning had been filled with his chatter across the breakfast table or his constant nagging whenever Jude walked somewhere near the kitchen, and silence had rarely had a chance to show itself. Even when it did, it became something soft and comforting, like a warm blanket over the two of them. Jude had almost forgotten how lonely this house, far larger than anyone really needed, could make him feel. Now that he was alone in the living room, he could almost hear every sound, every thought echoing around the four walls. And his mind began to drift again. To places he didn't want to touch yet, places he was terrified of touching at all.
Jude was possibly gay…
And he was very, very possibly in love with his best friend, Erling Haaland, as well.
He didn't know when it all had started. They had always been comfortable around each other. Erling was the one person who never made him second-guess himself or keep his guard up. They had simply let things unfold in their own time, and Jude had trusted their friendship more than anything.
What he had never realised was that he had gradually drifted away from where they had started. That he had been pulled much farther than he'd ever intended to go.
"I like the way you smell."
Erling had smiled softly and said it to Jude after training one day.
His scent patches had started peeling off because of the sweat, so Jude had taken them off completely for a bit of relief. He just hadn't expected Erling to say that the moment he noticed Jude's bare neck. And he certainly hadn't expected that one casual remark to make him completely abandon his habit of wearing scent patches around the clock at training.
Jude could still remember that moment with painful clarity. The blood had rushed straight to his face and ears. At the same time, his throat had closed up as though he'd swallowed a stone. Erling had looked impossibly gorgeous when he said it. His golden hair had fallen messily across his face and neck, as though sunlight had melted and decided to stay there forever. His cheeks were flushed pink after hours of training, and those bright blue eyes had looked at Jude with a gentleness he couldn’t bring himself to forget.
And perhaps that moment had changed everything Jude had ever believed about himself.
On the evening of the third day after that, after several afternoons filled with nothing but stolen glances and the tingling warmth spreading through his chest every time Erling hugged him had become more than he could bear, Jude decided he had to do something about it.
The website's bold rainbow-coloured title, "Take This Quiz to Find Out If You're Gay", rippled across the screen like it had been cut straight out of an LGBT flag, and Jude felt thoroughly mortified. The poor cursor hovered up and down as his thoughts tangled themselves into knots.
Jude knew perfectly well that websites like this should probably have gone extinct years ago. They were fine for a laugh, but the advice they gave was so fucking useless that even nine lives wouldn't be enough to make it worth anything. But then again, they had to serve some purpose if they were still around. A purpose for some specific situations, for someone like Jude, perhaps.
He didn't need advice, all right? The only thing he wanted from the quiz was to feed in all the information he already had and get a single answer back: yes or no. No need for reassurance. No need for explanations. Just one simple answer.
These days, hardly anyone cared whether you liked men or women. What mattered was whether you were attractive, whether your scent was irresistible, whether your personality was interesting enough. No one needed to know if you were gay or straight. But the problem was that Jude had always thought he liked women. He had always imagined a small family with a lovely beta woman and a few adopted children after retiring. That had been the only kind of relationship he had ever pictured for himself, right after finding out he was presented as an omega. Being a man only made everything more complicated. He couldn't bear the thought of being pregnant and trailing after some successful alpha woman like some dogs, or, even worse, becoming so weak and pliant that he'd end up dropping to his knees at the sound of an alpha man's command.
Like a true slut, Jude went pale.
He swallowed hard, grabbed the thin duvet, and pulled it over himself, covering both his head and the laptop screen still glowing in front of him. It served absolutely no purpose. He was the only person in the room, and the only person in the house. But Jude still felt an overwhelming urge to disappear from the world, to hide somewhere as far away as possible while taking this...embarrassing quiz.
Taking a deep breath, he squeezed his eyes shut and clicked the button Start.
The first question nearly stopped his heart.
"Have you ever had romantic feelings toward a close friend of the same sex?"
If not, what the hell am I doing here?
Rubbing a hand over his face in defeat, Jude ticked "Maybe."
The second question made him choke on his own spit.
"Have you ever wanted to kiss someone of the same sex?"
Jude coughed so violently that he could barely breathe. Kissing Erling? He hadn't even dared imagine them holding hands or calling each other ridiculous pet names, let alone think about what it would feel like to touch those lips.
Taking a long, shaky breath to steady the relentless pounding in his chest, Jude selected the answer that seemed the most reasonable.
"Not yet, but I'm curious."
He wasn't lying. The thought of Erling's lips against his wasn't nearly as terrifying as it’d seem.
A few more questions appeared, all of them more or less asking the same thing. Jude's answers came surprisingly easily, and painfully predictable. And yet, a tiny sliver of hope still lingered inside him, desperately wishing that whatever he felt for Erling was nothing more than the kind of deep, unshakable bond that existed between teammates who had become soulmates in friendship, nothing more.
Again, why was he doing this, really?
When he finished the last question, Jude moved the cursor to the See Results button and squeezed both his eyes shut. He had prayed, actually prayed. Ridiculous as this stupid gay quiz was, it had somehow come to mean something far bigger than that. He had never been attracted to alphas, let alone male alphas. So how on Earth had he ended up like this? Jude screamed internally.
With a single fateful click, his eyes flew wide open.
And there was no room for doubt anymore. The giant rainbow-coloured words "You might be gay!!!" running across the screen, followed by an explosion of confetti all over his sight, felt like the final verdict passed upon Jude's entire conscience.
He slammed the laptop shut and started breathing hard. The website sounded as though it were celebrating the happiest moment of his life, congratulating him for winning a bloody spaceship or something. The imaginary pops of confetti kept echoing in his head for the rest of that night, and haunted him for days afterwards.
It doesn't have to mean anything. Being gay doesn't mean I'm in love with Erling. It doesn’t mean I’m in love with an alpha. There're still plenty of beta men out there. That was what Jude kept telling himself.
But only a week later, when his heat arrived right on schedule, he found himself curled up on his bed, tangled in a mess of blankets, pillows, and clothes soaked through with his own release. Sweat and sticky warmth clung to his skin, everything saturated with the sickeningly sweet scent of honey that belonged to him alone. Jude could still remember that one broken, breathless moan that had escaped his throat. It had been fragmented and hazy, blurred by the feverish fog clouding his mind.
But he knew exactly what he had said.
Who he had yearned for.
"Erling..."
And that was the moment he realised he was completely, utterly fucked.