Chapter Text
“Was it expensive?”
“Isn’t that subjective? She flew out to see me.”
“Anything more than a hundred bucks and airfare is absurd.”
“Let’s take bets.”
“Five hundred. Hot or cold?”
“Including the flight?”
“Yeah.”
“Cold.”
A resounding chorus of drawn-out “damn’s” swells through the bar.
Will fidgets with the whiskey glass in front of him, sliding his thumb through droplets of condensation. Six or seven alphas interrogate a lone omega at the table diagonal to him, and he’s been eavesdropping on their conversation for the better part of an hour.
Judging by their lightly amused and jovial banter, they’re all friends, but that doesn’t change the fact that the omega is—as they’ve been for most of human history—the butt of the joke.
“Please say less than $1,000,” the priggish one snorts, pressing his nearly empty beer can to his forehead in mock exhaustion.
“Cold,” the omega barely gets out before the Alphas around her hoot, holler, and performatively gasp again.
Will takes a sip of his drink, wincing at the hot sting of bitter fluid as it slides down his throat. He shouldn’t be surprised at their lack of self-awareness. This is Boudreaux’s, a historically alphan bar in the heart of New Orleans. Sticky resin tabletops, red vinyl upholstered booths, the stale stench of hops and rancid oil lingering in the air—there are dozens of dive bars like this downtown. The bathrooms are decked out floor to ceiling with annual group photos of various alphan organizations from the early 70s, when omegas were still banned from bars and clubs.
One man’s vintage decor is another man’s generational pain. Go figure.
“Was it even worth it? There’s a heat clinic a block from here, and another a block up from that one,” the smallest one says, with a voice as shrill as nails on a chalkboard.
“Was she even hot?”
“Yeah, pull up the roster!”
The omega obliges, because of course she does, pulling her phone out of her back pocket.
Will has heard of these sorts of ‘companies’ before, the ones that prey on single omegas suffering mind-melting heats. The companies that fly out exorbitantly priced alphan escorts as substitutes for partners, attractive and skilled enough to have you thinking they really like you, not the fat paycheck.
“The Count and the Courtesan?” the arrogant one chuckles, nearly spitting out his drink. He rips the phone from the omega’s hand and pinches at the screen. “What the fuck kind of service is this, Meg?”
“A classy one,” the omega, Meg, insists.
“So who’d you screw?” someone else butts in.
“Or who screwed you?” another corrects.
Meg blushes, tucking her jet-black hair behind one ear. “She’s in the second row.”
The alphas squish in closer together, their greedy eyes squinting at the small, illuminated screen.
“Doctor Du Maurier,” the arrogant one drawls with a sarcastically haughty lilt, as the rest of them nearly topple over each other trying to get a better view.
“Oh, now I get it!”
“I’d pay a hell of a lot more than that to spend the night with her.”
“Is she actually a doctor?”
“I’ve never wanted to be an omega so fucking badly.”
“Did she scent mark you? Let me get a whiff!”
“Can you keep her on retainer?”
“She looks like Scully but…blonde.”
Will glances down at his glass, eyes shifty, trying not to stare but nevertheless suffering curiosity’s pesky itch. It’s not like he has anywhere to be tomorrow, he can drink and eavesdrop all night if he pleases. The internal affairs investigation is officially over. He surrendered his badge, firearms, and keys this morning. He’s too much of a risk, or so his sergeant gently explained. New Orleans PD doesn’t give second chances to omegas who can’t pull the trigger when they need to. Especially not when it ends with them being stabbed in the shoulder.
But New Orleans PD doesn’t want a lawsuit either, so the negotiated severance package is hefty, at least.
Firing an omega in a field dominated by alphas isn’t a good look. Will could have blamed his hesitance to shoot on poor training, discrimination, pressure to perform and prove himself—all of which would’ve been true to his experience—but it wasn’t worth the fight. Not when they offered him more than he knew what to do with, and not when, in reality, going off of his suppressants was the real culprit.
Double vision, tremors, dry mouth, insomnia—stopping his monthly dose of suppressants cold turkey left him with a host of terrible symptoms, somehow even worse than the ones that made him want to stop taking them in the first place. It wasn’t fear that prevented Will from shooting, it was withdrawal wreaking havoc on his body and mind.
It’s the curse of the omega: would you rather be sick and sterile, or so fertile you’re sick? Would you rather your psychosis be induced by medicine, or by your own biology? Do the dozens of alphas waiting to ease your pain make the decision easier?
So, everyone wins. Will gets the money, saves himself the hassle, and the police department gets to pretend their diversity initiatives are ‘initiatives’ at all.
Now that he’s out of the hospital with a faulty rotator cuff and the worst of his withdrawal symptoms have passed, living suppressant-free has been fairly easy. He hasn’t felt any of the tell-tale signs of his heat making a return, and he isn’t planning on dating, fucking, or bonding, so his risk of pregnancy is low.
Will glances up again. From a small space between the broad shoulders of the alphas squished together hip to hip, he can just make out the bright, platinum-blonde hair of the woman on screen. Her features are pinched and regal, her eyes half-lidded and sultry.
“Alright, alright,” Meg says, waving her hand dismissively at her captive audience. She takes a sip of her drink and steadies herself. “It’s not that big of a deal. Is it expensive? Yes, but none of you know the shame and pain of a heat clinic. If a stranger is gonna fuck me, I’d rather they at least pretend to be into it.”
The understatement of the century, Will thinks, brain flooding with agonizing memories from his early twenties—random nurses plugging him with knotting dildos, the astringent smell of bleach in the air, the walk of shame to the sign out desk when his heat finally passed.
“Besides, the application was pretty thorough,” Meg continues. “They match you with someone who best fits your needs, based on what they glean from the form.”
“So you couldn’t just pick, I don’t know, this guy? For example?” One of the alphas zooms in on the photo below Doctor Du Maurier’s.
The man in the photo is striking, his features angular. His cheekbones are high and pronounced, and his lips are quirked in an all-knowing, almost mischievous pout. He’s handsome, of course, but more than handsome, he looks like no one Will has ever seen before. Unique, with a glint in his eye that stirs something in Will, even through a tiny, pixelated photo.
The pack of alphas ooh and ahh as the phone gets passed around. Some begin to snicker and jut elbows at each other’s ribs. Some stare at the image, wide-eyed, like deer do when bright headlights signal demise.
“Count Lecter? Oh, he’s just the matchmaker,” Meg shrugs. “But no, you don’t get to choose. That’s sort of the appeal. He has a background in psychiatry, so he’s particularly good at it.”
“Does he ever match himself?” the alpha holding Meg’s phone asks.
Meg shakes her head, tossing a crumpled napkin into a red, plastic fry basket. “No. It's a policy.”
“Policy?”
“He’s never had a star.”
The voice of a newscaster buzzes softly in the background. Will is lying on his couch in his boxers and a plain, white t-shirt that’s seen better days. His dogs—all four—are sound asleep in various beds around the living room, gently snoring and twitching their ways through innocent dreams. There’s a hot mug of tea on the coffee table, a rooibos blend Will picked up at the last motel he staked out. He doesn’t have a hangover yet, but there’s a buzzing in his skull that signals one is already brewing.
Whoever handles the analytics and marketing for The Count and the Courtesan deserves a raise, because the website appears immediately upon Will’s first Google search. The homepage loads, and a gallery of stunning alpha portraits populates the page. Their faces float against a rich burgundy-and-black damask-patterned backdrop, the light from Will’s laptop screen illuminating his face in a bloody haze.
Will wasn’t exactly drunk by the time he left Boudreaux’s, not according to his own definition, but he does feel his stomach lurch with every vertical scroll through the page. There must be at least fifty alphas on this roster, each one with their own unique set of quirks and assets to suit any conceivable preference.
He scrolls past Madam Verger, who looks like she’d eat Will for lunch (and if she bears any relation to the meatpacking magnate Mason Verger, that might actually be true.)
Agent Price has a chipper smile and kind eyes, but he also looks like every forensics technician Will has ever worked with. Is he actually an agent? Everyone on the website uses some sort of honorific, but it’s hard to tell if they’re genuine descriptors of their careers or status, or sexual in nature.
Maestro Budge’s empty stare and menacing grimace must appeal to someone, but that someone is not Will Graham.
Below Maestro Budge is a devastatingly attractive woman under the pseudonym Professor Bloom, whose eyes are a mesmerizing, piercing blue, but she too closely resembles Will's mother, based on the few childhood photos he has with her.
Will sighs and moves his cursor over a woman with skin as ivory white as her hair is fiery red and clicks to read through her profile.
Miss Lounds (α)
She/Her, 31
Miss Lounds is an investigative journalist and amateur photographer. She enjoys voyeurism, dominating her partners, and dealing a healthy spanking. She dislikes vore, shibari, and being gagged.
If you’d like to test your compatibility with Miss Lounds, click here.
Will squints at the screen—vore? Shibari? Spanking? Will had a handful of partners throughout college and the most experimental he ever got was moaning the wrong name.
Sex has always been a means to an end for Will, a fast track to intimacy and connection without the vulnerability. He feels too much and wants too little, much to the displeasure of his sexual partners. He can’t imagine he’d enjoy being tied up, let alone spanked. Aren’t those just disciplinary corrections reserved for bad dogs?
Will closes Miss Lounds’s profile with a deep furrow in his brow and clicks open the next profile.
Daddy Dimmond (α)
He/Him, 33
Daddy Dimmond is an aficionado of baroque art and literature. He enjoys group sex, bondage, and finsubbing. If you ask nicely, he’d be more than happy to help you untwist (to your mutual benefit, of course.)
He dislikes blood, pain, and humiliation.
If you’d like to test your compatibility with Daddy Dimmond, click here.
Daddy Dimmond could be Will’s doppelganger if Will had a shred of self-confidence and the urge to preen. There’s more gray in his feathery waves, and he’s donning a swanky-looking scarf, but the resemblance is there.
Lord Chilton is eliminated as an option by name alone, which is saying a lot, because there’s a very severe looking man with a heinous back tattoo that goes by The Great Red Dragon. Different strokes for different folks, Will supposes.
The list goes on and on and on. Some of the alphas have essay-long biographies, some only list their names and pronouns. Some of them get hyperspecific about their likes and dislikes, some of them opt for vague platitudes, like Kitten Katz, whose bio states, “Good things come to those who wait,” followed by a winking emoji.
At the very bottom of the page, Will spots Doctor Du Maurier’s photo. She is striking, in a regal and polished way. Up close, Will can clearly see how the omega at the bar might have been tempted by her enigmatic gaze. Will isn’t interested in her sexually, at least he doesn’t think so, but he’s curious if her profile is as…specific as some of the others. He clicks her photo and reads through:
Doctor Du Maurier (α)
She/Her, 43
Doctor Du Maurier is a trained psychoanalyst. She currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland with her beloved Chartreux, Soletta.
If you’d like to test your compatibility with Doctor Du Maurier, click here.
Will frowns. He scrolls down and the page bounces back up. Miss Lounds’s bio was sparse, but at least it was direct, informative enough to paint a tempting picture. Doctor Du Maurier either deeply values her privacy, or her interests are so salacious they defy the decorum of a profile bio altogether.
The only profile left to examine is the one that brought Will to The Count and the Courtesan in the first place: Count Lecter. While Will was able to make out a general impression of his features from a distance, up close and in the comfort of his home, Count Lecter looks like a god.
He’s dressed in a pristinely tailored navy pinstripe suit, with a deep burgundy, paisley-patterned tie. His dirty blonde bags sweep the sharp contours of his browbone, but his eyes are still visible, resplendent in their honey-brown, almost reptilian beauty. His expression is all-knowing, smug, slightly wicked, but also warm, enticing, and approachable. He’s beautiful, and exudes a confidence that tells Will he knows he’s beautiful.
There’s something else too, though. Something else to that glint in Lecter’s eyes Will noticed earlier at Boudreaux’s. Will has seen something similar in worse men. Hell, he’s seen it in the mirror, in himself. It’s something he’s always rejected, but seeing it in the count…
Will clicks the photo until it expands. He doesn’t even notice he’s salivating until his twinge of interest manifests as other, less covert bodily reactions. He shifts his legs to accommodate his quickly swelling length, hastily moving his laptop from his lap to the coffee table in front of him when it whacks into a mug of tea, spraying hot liquid all over the rug.
“Shit,” Will mutters, scrambling to save his laptop and his rug at the same time. The stench of his own slick and bitter rooibos fills the air as tea drips from the table into an unsightly cluster of stains.
Will stumbles into the kitchen to fetch some paper towels and cleaner, but it’s no use. The tea is already bonding itself to the light-colored fibers of the rug. The living room probably looks like a crime scene, all splattered in oxidized reds and browns.
Never take your work home with you, his sergeant used to caution. With Will’s eidetic memory and empathy disorder, the irony of that advice always gave him a chuckle.
He spritzes some rug cleaner and dabs at the splatters, hoping that with a little time and luck they’ll fade. Buster, Izzy, Harley, and Max will surely make their own marks soon, tracking mud over the splatters until they morph into some other, more gruesome index of a non-existent struggle.
Will picks up his laptop, defeated and grouchy, and moves into his room. He settles against his pillows, laptop propped open in his lap, and clicks on Count Lecter’s profile again.
He doesn’t normally put himself out there like this, but that omega at the bar made a good point.
“If a stranger is gonna fuck me, I’d rather they at least pretend to be into it.”
Will hasn’t had a heat in years, so there’s been no biological imperative to seek out someone to warm his bed, but doesn’t he still deserve companionship? He’s too… complicated for anything long-term. The idea of being bonded makes his skin crawl, but with a service like this, he won’t have to do any explaining, or make any false promises.
A night or two with whoever Count Lecter deems suitable might be exactly the distraction he needs until he picks up another job. Maybe he’ll get his master's degree, move to another state, and start over. George Washington University has a decent criminal justice program, and he’s always been tempted to dip his toes into forensics.
Will’s eyes bore into Lecter’s photo. He’s drawn to it in a way that’s difficult to put words to—but maybe everyone is. Is Lecter already bonded? Is that why he never matches himself with any of the lonely omegas seeking out his services?
Will’s eyes trail from Lecter’s plush lips to the soft skin of his neck. There’s no bond mark, just smooth, perfect skin framed by the crisp collar of his button-down.
Count Lecter (α)
He/Him, 45
Count Lecter is the founder and owner of The Count and the Courtesan. In his free time, he enjoys practicing the harpsichord, hosting dinner parties, and sketching. He has little tolerance for the rude.
If you’d like to fill out the general application, click here.
To schedule a preliminary call, or for additional inquiries, click here.
Will clicks the link to the general application. He might not be paired with the count, but there must be space in the application to specify who he already knows he doesn’t want to be paired with. Besides, Lecter is a psychiatrist by training, and Will doesn’t respond well to being psychoanalyzed. Someone else in his roster is probably a better fit.
Section 1: Personal & Contact Information
Will quickly fills in the basics—his name, contact information, profession—then clicks ‘continue.’
Section 2: Personal & Contact Information
There are five health screening questions, which he answers easily and mostly honestly.
What is your primary gender?
Will clicks the circle indicating ‘Male.’
What is your secondary gender?
Will clicks the circle indicating omega, though he’s surprised to see alpha and beta listed, too. Maybe this isn’t a service particular to omegas? Do alphas get lonely, too? Surely they can force their way into romantic entanglements far easier than omegas or betas can.
Are you currently using suppressants? A complete list of manufacturers can be downloaded here.
‘Yes,’ Will types out quickly, because he doesn’t want to explain that he’s probably infertile, that he stopped taking suppressants because he abused them for so long he nearly put himself into psychosis. That when he cut them out cold turkey, he was psychotic. His lingering symptoms are so bad he can barely smell himself anymore.
Select the primary purpose for your request.
From a menu of options, Will chooses the response that feels the most true: To soothe, eliminate, or reduce the symptoms caused by a heat. There will be no heat to soothe, but the other options are too committal. No, he’s not looking to establish an intimate connection or to explore socially taboo desires. He needs someone to get him out of his head by getting into his body.
Have you had a serious illness, operation, or been hospitalized within the last five years?
Will winces, instinctively reaching for his recovering shoulder. Phantom pain wracks through his scapula. He was only discharged from the hospital a month ago. The fresh, pink scar tissue is still swollen and angry. If he lets himself drown in this feeling, the memories will start to resurface, too. They come in glimpses—his head slamming back onto the concrete, the weight of the assailant straddling his chest, the dull shine of the blade before it punctured his skin.
‘No,’ he types, because it isn’t relevant. He doesn’t need sympathy or surgical competence from the alpha who ends up driving him through a motel mattress. It’s an invasive question, anyway. There’s probably a waiver attached at the end that recuses anyone providing the service from any real responsibility.
Will clicks continue, and the matchmaking portion of the application loads.
The matchmaking portion is only eight questions long, with every question requiring a written response under 250 characters. Short, Will thinks. How accurate can a match based on eight measly questions be?
Question one: On which do you place more importance: experience, or the memories that remain when those experiences are over?
Question two: Does an invitation to your bed come saddled with any non-negotiables?
Question three: What is your most enjoyable dream? Your most awful nightmare?
Question four: What, if anything, caused you guilt as a child? Does it still?
Question five: Would you accept a consolation prize? How would you reject one?
Question six: Do you see yourself in others? Do you ever feel like someone else?
Question seven: If god is real, do you fear him? Rebuke him?
Question eight: When, if ever, is it appropriate to lie?
Will checks the clock on his nightstand. The bright red numbers glow like an omen of bad sleep—it's 1:30 in the morning. He sighs and scrubs tight fists into his tired, dry eyes.
Just this once, he thinks, before I get the hell out of Louisiana. One night of fun before I finally leave this swamp, these crazy sons of bitches.
Then, Will begins to type out his answers.