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“Nice,” Lin Ling groans, “would you stop that? There’s nothing there to smell in the first place.”
Nice, attached to Lin Ling’s back like a limpet with his nose pressed to the meat of Lin Ling’s shoulder, merely inhales. Goddamn snuffling at Lin Ling’s dormant scent gland.
Lin Ling rolls his eyes and none-too-gently drives his elbow into Nice’s stomach. It doesn’t hurt, given the laugh Nice tucks into his nape, but it does succeed in getting Nice to pry himself off Lin Ling. Satisfied, Lin Ling turns and sits down on the edge of the bed, reaching for the shoes he has tucked under the frame.
He’s taking his shift as Nice in about an hour, and he’s already technically late; he needs to be at Treeman HQ in time to get his costume and makeup done, and the next train’s due to leave in ten minutes. He’ll make it if he runs, but…Miss J’s going to give him hell for giving the prep team more work by sweating through his clothes and mussing up his hair.
They can’t send the car for him all the time, because people recognize the town car as belonging to Nice’s management team, and frequenting Lin Ling’s apartment block would just lead to crazy fans camping out by his front door. Miss J would rather he live in the Tower with Nice and Moon, and she’s extolled the virtues of such an arrangement to Lin Ling many…. Many times. Rather aggressively at that.
But it’s not part of his contact, at least not right now, and Lin Ling is desperate to some degree of normalcy in his life. The Tower’s for heroes, anyway, and Lin Ling, for all that he pretends to be one three days out of the week, is only borrowing Nice’s good name.
Not that that’ll stop Miss J from using this “incident” as a bargaining chip in future negotiations. An inability to be on time is a pretty egregious error on his part in this line of work, and it’s a problem that could very easily be solved by relocating him to Nice and Moon’s floor.
I’ll tell her it’s Nice’s fault, he decides, wrinkling his nose as he shoves his feet into his shoes. She can lecture him tomorrow instead. It’s not like I’m trying to waste everyone’s time—
He gets a single loop of his laces done before Nice shoves him backwards and pins him to the bed by his wrists.
“Nice!” Lin Ling yelps, struggling against Nice’s hands and failing miserably. A portion of Nice’s Trust does grant him powers on par with Nice, but it’s only effective when he’s acting as Nice. “I’m gonna get chewed out by Miss J if I don’t—“
“The only one doing any chewing is going to be me,” Nice mutters, aiming for sultry, suggestive alpha and landing somewhere in the vicinity of four-year-old fussing over having one of his toys taken away. He’s pouting, for fuck’s sake, never mind that Lin Ling can’t see his expression at the moment; the curve of his mouth against Lin Ling’s throat is an all-too familiar feeling, and he’s come to learn the many and varied shapes Nice loves to draw his mouth into.
Sighing, Lin Ling lets his head fall back against the mattress as Nice settles pointedly on top of him, caging him in with his knees on either side of Lin Ling’s hips. Knowing that fighting any more than this would be pointless, he tips his chin up in invitation and Nice pounces like a starved animal, rubbing his nose along the length of Lin Ling’s throat. His breath falls warm and damp across Lin Ling’s skin, raising gooseflesh in its wake.
Lin Ling squeezes his eyes shut, toes curling as a shiver rolls through him.
He doesn’t know what Nice gets out of this. He knows what Nice claims — that Lin Ling does, in fact, have a distinctive scent, beyond his cologne or his detergent or his body wash. But Lin Ling is a beta; his scent glands aren’t nearly as developed as an alpha or an omega’s, and they’ve largely atrophied since he hit puberty. Whatever Nice thinks he’s smelling, it can’t be Lin Ling.
Nothing he says will convince Nice of that, though, so he very magnanimously allows the man to sniff to his heart’s content — most of the time.
Nice’s teeth scrape over the straining tendon in Lin Ling’s neck and nope, uh-uh, that’s where he draws the line. If he lets Nice get away with gnawing on him, they’re never going to leave this bed.
Lin Ling bucks his hips, unseating Nice enough that he can draw one of his legs up and jam his knee into Nice’s ass. Surprised, Nice’s grip on his wrists slackens, and Lin Ling yanks his hands down to fist them in the front of Nice’s shirt. He manages to wrestle Nice down to the bed, rolling on top of him, his hands pressing into Nice’s chest and at least giving the illusion of keeping him in place.
“I’m not actually your chew toy,” Lin Ling reminds him, knowing even as he says it it’s a ridiculous point to have to make.
Nice’s smile is a slow, syrupy thing that starts somewhere around the corners of his eyes rather than his mouth. “Those adorable squeaks you make when I have you in my mouth say otherwise.”
Lin Ling can feel the blood rising in his face, the prickling heat a sharp contrast to the saliva cooling in the hollow of his throat. There’s no way that Nice isn’t hyperaware of how much that gets to him, either, not with how tense his stomach muscles have gone beneath Lin Ling’s ass. “Down, boy.”
“Woof,” Nice replies through a shit-eating grin.
“Nice, c’mon.” Lin Ling very unsubtly squirms atop Nice, trying in vain to find some relief for his suddenly too-tight pants. “Later, alright? I’ll make it up to you. You can…” He racks his brain for something that Nice would find enticing enough to let him leave the apartment with his clothes intact. “I’ll let you scent mark me, you possessive fuck.”
Given the fact that Nice looks like he’s just been hit over the head with a hammer, Lin Ling probably judged that right.
Lin Ling doesn’t hate when Nice smothers him in his own scent — he actually enjoys the hell out of it, because he gets to scent Nice as he goes about his day, comforting himself when work forces them to be apart for hours or days on end. The problem is that Nice tends to go overboard. He rubs his scent into every crease and crevice of Lin Ling’s body, ensuring that anyone who stands within ten meters of him gets a big, aggressive whiff of horny, territorial alpha.
People have literally crossed to the other side of the street to avoid having to stand next to him, and he can never tell if it’s the enormity of the scent itself or the prominent notes of FUCK OFF HE’S MINE that drive them away.
But desperate times call for desperate measures.
“Deal?” Lin Ling asks, raising his brows and quirking a hopeful smile at Nice.
In response, Nice — in a move Lin Ling can’t figure out for the life of him — yanks Lin Ling in with both palms on his ass and sits up at the same time, resting his chin against Lin Ling’s breastbone and staring up at him with half-lidded eyes. It’s also worth noting that this position pins Lin Ling’s rapidly hardening dick against Nice’s abdomen, and that’s… a lot of friction he really doesn’t need right now.
“Tempting,” Nice says, fluttering his lashes, “very tempting. Does that mean I’ll be fucking you tonight?”
Lin Ling’s dick twitches. He swallows hard, resisting the urge to smack his palm over Nice’s entire face so he doesn’t have to see the way the man’s looking at him. Like he’s peeling away Lin Ling’s damn skin along with his clothes.
“Hm?” Nice turns his cheek into Lin Ling’s chest, nuzzling at him. Never breaking eye contact. “I’ll get you ready first, of course. Get you loose and sloppy on just my fingers. I’ll take my time with it, because you’re not made to take it, are you, A-Ling?”
The hands currently pawing at his ass squeeze, fingers spreading to cover more ground. They slide along the seam of Lin Ling’s leggings, applying more pressure the closer they get to his hole, and oh, god, fuck, why did he think it was a good idea to wear leggings around Nice? Lin Ling’s breath hitches as the pads of Nice’s thumbs rub slow, agonizing circles around his rim. Soft, teasing touches designed to leave him wanting more. Designed to make him beg.
“But you take me so well,” Nice murmurs, digging in with his nails and making Lin Ling gasp. They catch on his rim through the fabric and Lin Ling ruts forward instinctively, he can’t help himself, not when Nice is so willing to tense his muscles and serve as a warm, firm body for him to fuck against. “So well, A-Ling. You let me stretch out that tiny hole of yours with my fingers, my tongue… you let me mold you into something that so perfectly fits my cock. Isn’t that incredible? You weren’t made for me, but you’re so willing to remake yourself for me…”
Incredible isn’t the word for it — insufferable, more like, because yes, god, yes all of this is true. There’s so much prep involved with being able to let Nice fuck him, he’s not built like an omega, a knot is not meant to be forced into his asshole, but he wants it anyway. Things are easier when it’s the other way around, when it’s Nice on his stomach and Lin Ling plastered to his back, fucking him into the mattress until he’s too far gone to make demands. And Lin Ling loves those times, he loves that Nice goes against his instincts for Lin Ling, that Nice wants him just as much—
But god does he love Nice’s dick. He loves the stretch, that indescribable feeling of fullness when Nice pops a knot inside of him, when pleasure blurs into pain and everything goes blindingly white and he comes harder than he ever has in his life—
Fuck. Fuck. He has work.
“You need to stop getting fucking… philosophically erotic when you know I have to leave,” Lin Ling mutters, uncurling his fingers from their death grip on Nice’s shoulders and pushing him back a bit in the process. He tries not to pay attention to the crescent marks denting Nice’s shirt, or the small dots of red beginning to bloom beneath them. Nice will throw the shirt out later, probably — after he’s gotten off to the scent of Lin Ling’s blood on his clothes.
“You should stop smelling like you want me to knot you, then.”
“I do not smell like that!” Flustered, Lin Ling smacks his hand on Nice’s chest. He does it again, for emphasis: “I. Do. Not. Have. A. Scent.”
“You smell delicious, A-Ling, and one day you’ll believe me.”
Lin Ling wrinkles his nose. “You’re just… fucking horny all the time.”
Nice concedes the point with a wicked smile. “I am, yes. Only for you, A-Ling. I was a lot like a doll before you caught me on that roof, though. Sexless, uninterested. But the moment I got your scent on the roof…”
“Don’t say it—”
“I was so hard I nearly drilled a hole through my suit.”
“That’s disgusting. And probably unhealthy? The way you talk about that moment is so…”
“Mm, I don’t care so long as I have you, A-Ling. You accept all of me, don’t you?”
God help him, he really does. “Shut up. I still have to go to work.” Before Nice can open his mouth for another awful quip, Lin Ling grabs him by the jaw and smacks a kiss to his lips. “Later. You can scent mark me later. I promise. Now I’m gonna go, and if you try to follow me out the door I’m gonna start wearing that omega collar that Xiao Yueqing bought for me.”
As Lin Ling climbs off Nice, lamenting the fact that he’s going to have change pants because the leggings hide fuck all, a thunderous look crosses Nice’s face.
“No, you can’t stage a freak accident with Wreck, don’t even think about it.”
Nice clicks his tongue, annoyed. “Xiao Yueqing shouldn’t be sticking her nose into our relationship.”
The first three drawers of his dresser yield nothing but wrinkled t-shirts and unmatched socks — laundry day looms over Lin Ling like a fucking guillotine — and in the bottom drawer he only finds an old pair of jeans he hasn’t worn since… college? He squints at the label. Maybe high school, actually. Ugh. They’ll have to do, and Miss J has no right to say anything because it’s not like he’s publicly acting as a hero under his own name. No one’s going to care about his raggedy jeans that show a little too much ankle.
Well, Nice might care. But Nice is a certified freak and Lin Ling doesn’t have the mental capacity to account for all the things that make him almost inhumanly horny.
Lin Ling wiggles into his jeans, ignoring the laser-guided stare Nice has trained on his ass. “She’s just looking out for me. Miss J, uh, was not happy when I came in that day with my neck… mauled, as she put it.”
“Mauled would be a more apt description for the state of your ass,” Nice points out dryly, smirking at the choked noise Lin Ling lets out in response. “That was the first time you let me knot you, no?”
“Shut up. If I ruin another pair of pants, I’m going to make you take this shit to the dry cleaner, let you explain things for once.”
They both know Nice would never do that, for a myriad of reasons. Namely because he’s a top-ranked hero who would be instantly — and disastrously — recognizable to pretty much anyone in the county, and the headlines would not take kindly to him bringing cum-stained clothes to the cleaners.
It’s also because Nice would rather add Lin Ling’s clothes to his collection. Because he’s a freak who made a fucking… pseudo-nest out of blankets and sweatshirts he’s pilfered from Lin Ling’s apartment, which he drags out of his closet whenever he’s too busy to sneak away to Lin Ling’s apartment for more than a few days.
(Xiao Yueqing’s sent him pictures. It’s maybe the most pathetic thing he’s ever seen. It’s also, concerningly, something so endearing Lin Ling had to go lie down after he saw it for the first time)
Anyway.
“Tonight,” Lin Ling says, meeting Nice’s eyes as he finally gets his shoes on and slings his bag over his shoulder. “I promise. I won’t let them keep me late.”
Nice hasn’t moved from his place on the bed, though he’s settled into a more languid position, leaning back on his hands, one leg crossed gracefully over the other. Observing Lin Ling through his lashes in that disconcertingly intense way that reminds Lin Ling of a bird of prey. As Lin Ling looks at him, though, the tense line of his shoulders relaxes, and he rolls his eyes.
“I’ll just kidnap you if it comes to that,” Nice says, smiling cheerfully and sounding very much like he’s not joking in the slightest. “You’ll keep your promise one way or another, A-Ling.”
“Right…” Lin Ling can’t even laugh, awkwardly or otherwise; he’s too used to Nice’s unique brand of obsessive behavior at this point. He tries not to dwell on what it says about him that he’s mostly flattered by it these days. It’s easier than willing his uncomfortable erection to disappear before he gets on the subway, at least. “You gonna stay here tonight? You can,” Lin Ling quickly adds, already fumbling for his keys so he can hand them off to Nice, “I just, I don’t have any… food. Or… anything to drink besides tap water.”
Grocery shopping is never high on his list of priorities when he has so many other things to occupy his time, but never more so than when Nice drops by. They barely leave the bed, let alone the bedroom, which is… probably also unhealthy, if Lin Ling thinks about it for too long.
“I’ll take care of it.” Nice grabs the keys that Lin Ling tosses to him, swinging them around his finger before tucking them into his back pocket. “You won’t have to stop for food on your way back.”
How sweet, Lin Ling thinks, huffing a laugh to himself, he just doesn’t want me taking any detours.
“Sounds good,” he says aloud, crossing the room to stand in front of Nice again.
Nice tips his head back, still smiling, and Lin Ling can’t resist kissing him again — once on the lips, and then again on the top of his head as he runs his fingers through Nice’s silky-soft hair. This close, and without the distraction of Nice’s hands on him, Nice’s scent is thick enough on the air to coat the roof of Lin Ling’s mouth when he breathes in. His senses aren’t as developed as an omega’s, so he can’t tease out the intricacies of Nice’s scent — he can’t judge his mood or read his thoughts by scent alone. It might’ve bothered him with someone else (there was a reason betas often ended up with other betas), but with Nice… with Nice he simply lets himself enjoy the warm, earthy scent of petrichor and wildflowers that Nice carries with him.
Lin Ling traces his fingers down Nice’s temple, his cheek, cupping Nice’s chin to pull him in for one last kiss. “Love you,” he murmurs, his lips brushing against Nice’s with each word, “Mingming.”
When he draws back, he’s rewarded with a faint, pink flush to Nice’s cheeks and Nice’s kiss-bruised lips open on Lin Ling’s name.
It’s a sight that’ll hopefully carry him through whatever ordeals Treeman’s set up for him today, because he doubts he’ll have any time to call. Miss J frowns upon him contacting Nice while he’s working anyway, considering there’s the possibility of the press spinning it into a scandal — too focused on whoever’s on the end of the line instead of his perfect girlfriend, Moon. Never mind that it’s true, and never mind that he and Xiao Yueqing aren’t even the ones who are pretending at a relationship to build their respective Trust Values.
Not the time to worry about that. Work first, existential crises later.
“I’ll see you later, okay?”
Nice, recovering, gives a noncommittal hum. “You certainly will.”
“Uh-huh. Just don’t end up on the news, please. It was such a shit show pivoting marketing to cover up the last time you came on the scene while I was there.”
“I make no promises.”
“Of course you don’t,” Lin Ling sighs. Nice is nothing if not consistent. “Okay, whatever, I’m really going now.”
“Mmhm.”
“I am. I’ve got my bag, my phone, gave you my keys… totally ready to walk out the door.”
“A-Ling?”
“Yeah?”
“Those pants you’re wearing have a sizeable hole in the left asscheek.” Nice smiles beatifically, so eager to help. “Just thought you should know.”
“Fuck.”
Lin Ling shuts the door and trudges back into his apartment. These are the last clean pair of pants he has, apparently, so the logical next step is to wrestle Nice out what he’s wearing and borrow them to get to work.
Yup, that’s what he’s going to tell himself when he arrives at Treeman HQ a sweaty, disheveled mess and Miss J gives him that appraising look that makes him feel like a bug about to get squished under a microscope.
Totally the only logical move. Couldn’t have handled the situation any other way.