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Nick should have seen the signs sooner. They’d been there the whole time, but he’d been so busy having a proper full-on gay (bi, actually) crisis that he didn’t realize he was having another sexuality crisis simultaneously.
It wasn’t until Paris when he really started to become aware that something might be…wrong…with him. Well, something else. He already knew that his heats were anything but normal, a secret he planned to take to his grave, if possible. But he assumed that was just a quirk of his presentation, something in his genetic makeup that gave him the usual pain and physical arousal of a heat, but without the overwhelming and all-consuming urge for sexual release.
But Paris… Paris had made him painfully aware that maybe those feelings weren’t restricted to his heats.
When Charlie expressed that he’d wanted to share a bed with Nick, Nick had shared that desire and was as disappointed as Charlie was when their friends each claimed one half of each bed, leaving Nick and Charlie no choice but to separate. “We’ll get to do it one day,” Nick had said. What he hadn’t anticipated was Charlie’s blushing face giving him a mock scandalized look and his eyes dilating with what was clearly arousal. Then Charlie looked away, no longer able to make eye contact, giggling shyly, and Nick realized what he’d said, spluttering to correct himself. He hadn’t meant do it like “do it,” he hadn’t tried to be suggestive, yet Charlie’s head had gone there, and Nick was left blushing even redder than Charlie was as his brain caught up with his mouth.
“I can’t wait to do it with you one day,” Charlie had said back, a cheeky glimmer in his eye, and Nick wasn’t sure which “it” they were talking about anymore. Sharing a bed or…
“Y-yeah,” Nick had stammered, because he felt like that was what he was expected to say. Because he absolutely wanted to share a bed with Charlie, to fall asleep in each other’s arms and wake up tangled together in the morning, sharing kisses from the moment they returned to consciousness before stumbling out of bed to brush their teeth side by side, grinning at each other in the bathroom mirror. He wasn’t so sure he wanted…what he suspected Charlie was still thinking about, if the look in his eyes was anything to go by.
That wasn’t the only moment, either. He had thoroughly enjoyed kissing Charlie’s neck (and apparently giving him a hickey, even though Nick would continue to swear that he didn’t think he’d known how to do that). He loved the way Charlie completely melted, speechless and breathless with just the simple touch of Nick’s lips against the sensitive skin of his neck. But Nick couldn’t help but notice that Charlie had enjoyed it a lot more than he did. When Charlie had stopped them, afraid they might get caught, Nick had rolled off of Charlie, accidentally brushing across his crotch in the process. Charlie was hard, and Nick… Nick wasn’t sure how to feel about that. He supposed he should feel flattered, that something he’d done had been so good for Charlie that Charlie had wanted him like that. But…did Nick want Charlie like that? He didn’t think so. Not yet, anyway. Maybe not ever…
And that fact had fully sunk in when Charlie promised Nick “payback,” and Nick panicked. The weight of Charlie in his lap, the emptiness of the room save their two bodies, the vigor with which Charlie attacked Nick’s neck… It was too much, too fast, and Nick couldn’t help but tense up, which Charlie of course noticed. Nick felt a bit juvenile when he admitted to Charlie he wasn’t ready to do anything more than kissing, but appreciated that Charlie didn’t push the issue and even mollified him with the reassurance that if Nick never wanted to have sex, then he wouldn’t either. Nick wasn’t sure that was entirely true; he could see the want in Charlie’s eyes, that spark of desire that Nick had never felt himself. Shouldn’t he be feeling it by now? He had a gorgeous boyfriend who he loved spending time with, loved cuddling, loved kissing… But he couldn’t imagine doing anything beyond that.
He’d never really thought about sex, aside from the fact that he definitely didn’t want it during his heats. But now it was seeming more and more like he didn’t want it at all. And that was scary. He was a teenage boy, for God’s sake. Sex was supposed to be a prominent thing on his mind and Nick… Nick didn’t want anything to do with it.
Why? Why did he always feel like an outsider when the lads in the locker room talked about getting with girls and losing their virginity? Why didn’t he feel the same jealousy his single friends felt when they heard about others’ sexual conquests? Why was he so uncomfortable whenever anyone implied that he and Charlie were…doing things…? They weren’t, but no matter how many times he protested, people saw his beet-red face and assumed he was blushing because he was thinking about all the sex he was having with Charlie, instead of because he was mortified at the thought of others thinking about him having sex with Charlie.
What was the big deal about sex anyway? Nick didn’t understand how scantily clad models enticed people to buy whatever they were advertising. He didn’t know how people could watch intimate scenes in tv shows and movies and not feel the need to look away. He couldn’t make sense of seemingly PG song lyrics actually hiding secret sexual undertones. Sex was everywhere, and people didn’t think that was weird. They weren’t uncomfortable with it. Why was Nick?
And so Nick did what he often did in situations like this, where he had too many questions floating around his brain; he sat down at his laptop and opened Google. His pulse raced as he rested his fingers on the keys. What was he supposed to ask that would get him the answers he so desperately needed?
He experimented with several phrases, frustrated that most of his initial searches seemed to be targeted to people already in sexual relationships who had “lost that spark” and were trying to get it back again. Nick didn’t even know what that “spark” was, and he was positive he hadn’t felt it before.
Then he spiraled for a bit down a rabbit hole about various medical conditions that could cause decreased libido or erectile dysfunction, but that wasn’t quite right, either. As far as he could tell, there was nothing wrong with him…down there… The parts all seemed to work; the problem was that he didn’t have the urge to use them with someone else. Hell, he rarely even used them by himself. He found masturbating to be a frustrating and overly unsatisfying endeavor. He definitely could get off, but it was rare for him to be in the mood for it, and he wasn’t really sure what to think about on the few occasions he found himself with his hand wrapped around his dick. He gathered he was supposed to fantasize about being with someone when he did that, but he just couldn’t picture it without getting completely turned off. Even after he and Charlie had gotten together, he tried to imagine himself having sex with Charlie, wondering if he just hadn’t had the right…inspiration…to make touching himself feel good. The thought of Charlie’s naked body pressed to his was fine, good even. But as soon as he tried to picture things going further, he felt uncomfortable, sometimes even disgusted. And that made Nick feel horrible. There was nothing about Charlie that disgusted him; he loved him, loved every part of him. So why did the thought of Charlie touching him like that make him want to crawl out of his skin?
There had to be an explanation. He just needed to keep researching.
The crux of the issue was that Nick was not entirely sure he was attracted to his boyfriend. Sexually attracted, that is. He wasn’t really sure what that felt like. So he moved his cursor back to the search bar and typed in, “What does sexual attraction feel like?” As he read, his stomach twisted itself into tighter and tighter knots. Because with each article he skimmed, he realized that he’d never felt sexually attracted to another human being in his entire life. And that felt…important. His heart pounded in his chest. He was so close to finally understanding why he felt so different. It was a thrilling yet terrifying thought.
One last search before he would stop for the night. “Lack of sexual attraction,” he typed, and suddenly his screen was filled with articles and blog posts and videos, all sharing a common word: “asexual.”
Nick slid off his bed and took his laptop over to his bean bag chair. He sank into the seat, the beads molding to his body as he clicked on the first article and began to read. He spent hours combing through page after page, the new terminology swirling around his brain. But it felt…right. The more he read, the more seen he felt.
Then he stumbled on a Reddit thread about ace omegas describing their heats. What he soon learned was, while the type of heats he experienced were relatively rare, there were others out there like him. He read several comments by omegas experiencing heats without the desire for sexual release. Some became aroused with no desire to act on that arousal, some admitted to acting on it just to get some temporary release, even though they didn’t really want to. Some had been put on hormones by well-meaning but mistaken doctors, and it had made no difference. Some allowed their partners to help them through their heats, but only under certain circumstances, where others wouldn’t even allow an alpha in the same room as them during their heats for fear of being taken advantage of. Some nested every heat, while others didn’t have those instincts at all. But the commonality among all the posters was that they felt so…abnormal. They didn’t necessarily want to experience a traditional heat, but they also felt that something was wrong with them for not being “true omegas,” that alphas wouldn’t want them or understand them. They felt broken.
Most of the commenters, however, described the difficulty of having normal heats as asexuals and how they struggled with the drastic shift to horny, sex-crazed, hormonally driven omegas. One person, self-described as “sex-repulsed, asexual and aromantic,” bemoaned the fact that they felt like an entirely different person when in heat. Once their hormones took over, they craved not only sex with an alpha, but the desire to mate, and how when their heat finally ended, they always felt dirty and disgusted. Another person chimed in that they spent a heat with their alpha girlfriend once and as soon as their heat was over, they ran out crying because they felt so wrong afterwards. In the moment, the sex had felt good, but as soon as the hormones were gone, they felt betrayed; not by the alpha, but by their own body, for making them want something they didn’t desire.
Nick’s heart broke for the omegas as he read story after story of those with normal heats wishing to be like the few “lucky” ones at the start of the thread. He also felt guilty that he wished he could be one of the ones with a normal heat. If he was, he could at least give Charlie sex whenever he was in heat. Maybe that would be enough of a compromise that his boyfriend wouldn’t break up with him if and when Nick ever got the courage to explain why he’d been so reluctant to take their relationship further. But Charlie didn’t even know Nick was an omega. Nick knew that was something he had to come clean about soon, too, but he just didn’t know how. Charlie hadn’t presented yet, so he kept telling himself he would do it whenever that happened, though he knew that Charlie could present tomorrow and Nick would immediately chicken out and continue to pretend like he hadn’t presented at 13 and was on the strongest heat suppressant/scent blocker combination pill his doctor could prescribe.
Nick scrolled back up to re-read the few comments at the top. Those were his people – ace omegas with non-typical heats struggling to understand how they fit into the world. He still felt a lot of confusion, but now a few pieces were slotting into place. Maybe with a bit more research, he’d better understand just who he was. And when he did, maybe, just maybe, he would someday be brave enough to share it with Charlie.