Chapter Text
Rey feels the beginning of her Heat a week before Super Tuesday and wants to die.
Not literally.
Not even—as Rose will sometimes joke with an eyebrow waggle—in the metaphorical sense, though that will come very soon she’s sure.
In the humiliation sense.
Which is new, she supposes.
But the past six months have been a time for newness.
Rey has been working on Leia Organa’s presidential campaign for four of those six months, and had been volunteering for the two months prior to that. Volunteering is a strong word. They’d promised to feed the volunteers and Rey, never quite sure where her next meal would come from, had leapt at the opportunity to help deliver lawn signs to donors who wanted to proclaim proudly for all their fellow suburbanites that they supported Leia Organa for President. Rey had her own bike and the promise of pizza or sandwiches was enough to make her work up a sweat every day until Poe Dameron had mistaken her fervor for food for actual fervor and offered her a job.
Which she’d shocked herself by actually being good at, given that she’d dropped out of high school several years before.
And maybe it was that she was smart and quick; or maybe it was that she was good at getting people to see the truth of matters so frequently forgotten during presidential primaries in the name of just trying to get your name out there; or maybe it was just luck; or maybe (if Rey believed in fate) it was fate; but somehow she ended up working on the General’s team after they’d won three primaries and were fast catching up to Anib Ney—if they kept the leads the news told them they would have on Super Tuesday.
Super Tuesday, a week away, and Rey’s Heat about to rip through her body and make this already stressful week that much more difficult.
At least she has suppressants. At least they are covered by the medical insurance she has now that she works full time.
Not that it would matter.
The General is part cat too, and the one thing the nice doctor who’d prescribed her suppressants to her had said was that they did not necessarily work on other demis with cat species markers.
So her boss will know she’s in Heat.
And, worse, so will her son.
“I want to die,” Rey told Rose as they stand off-stage, listening to the General give her stump for the third time that day. That the General has yet to lose her voice is a miracle, but Rey supposes she has to have stamina, given that she is running for a job that requires the utmost stamina.
“It’ll be fine,” Rose tells her, squeezing her hand. “I can’t smell it on you.”
“Rose, you’re a dog. You can’t smell me on my suppressants.”
“So no one else will,” Rose says. “You’ll be fine.”
But even as Rose says that, Rey sees Ben—who is sitting at the table behind his mother as she speaks to the gathered audience—turn, his face magnified on the great big screens that were projecting Leia Organa throughout the room. There is a cross breeze across the stage—fans to keep those sitting under the big hot stagelights from sweating too much. And she thinks she catches the scent of him—musky and catlike—there as he stares at her. As she watches, Rey definitely sees his nostrils flare.
“Shit, I need to get out of here,” Rey mutters. She can feel her face turning bright red, and her heart beating harder in her chest, which will only make it worse because blood flowing faster through her heart will mean blood is also flowing faster down between her legs.
She hates Heats.
Fulls will complain about periods and how they come once a month, and Rey always nods in sympathy because she gets periods too—if less frequently. They’re definitely not fun at all. But no full will ever know the experience of feeling like your body will fall apart if you don’t get fucked and soon for a full week. They’ll never understand that no PMS in the world is quite like the experience of Heat anger when you’re not fucked, that no cramps are anything like the way your uterus seems to swell in your body because it wants to make as much room for cum as it can.
And no full will ever know the experience of watching as the son of the person who you want to get elected president smells that on you.
At least I have suppressants, she reminds herself. At least it isn’t every alpha in the room—it’s just (she groans internally) Ben Solo.
Rey spent most of her adolescence without suppressants, and it’s not a time she particularly wants to remember. Not that she wants to particularly remember her past at all. But her particular dislike of Heats comes from sleepless nights in her shack, afraid her fingers aren’t enough, and not wanting to unbar the door. And when she’d been older, there had been of course the repeated assertion from many an alpha, tugging his pants back up his legs, that she is a shitty omega.
Rey shakes herself. Her present is more than unpleasant enough without dragging up memories of her early Heats. The warmth from her flush of embarrassment won’t go away, the way her heart lurches blood through her won’t go away, and she’ll end up masturbating furiously in the hotel room for hours before they fly out at ass o’clock tomorrow morning. It’ll be enough for her suppressants to handle the rest and she might actually get to sleep, which would be a new luxury for her Heats. Until her suppressants, she couldn’t sleep a wink since her cunt was throbbing and wet and needy and kept her up all night. (Seriously. Insurance is the best thing to have happened to her.)
She’ll just do her best to avoid the General over the course of the next week.
And Ben—
Well, it’s not like she spends a lot of time with Ben anyway.
Ben doesn’t spend a lot of time with anyone.
He is a solitary creature. The General says it’s always been in his nature—perhaps the cat coming in strong in him—but more likely, Rey has always assumed, it is that until his mother announced her presidential bid, he had spent a good amount of time working for Snoke, a crime that was practically unforgiveable within his mother’s party. If he’d been anyone else’s son, he wouldn’t have been allowed within a thousand feet of this campaign.
And he definitely scented her at the event tonight.
God, she could die, she really could.
She’s halfway back to the hotel in her cab when her phone buzzes.
Where are you?
She doesn’t actually know who is texting her, and yet she feels it down in her gut.
Who are you?
Ben. Where are you?
I’m heading back to the hotel.
I caught your scent during the stump. Do you want me to help you out?
She stares at the words on the screen for a moment.
It’s by no means out of the ordinary for an alpha to offer himself to an omega in Heat—and Ben’s offer is significantly more polite than what she’d grown up with—lead pipe in hand just in case someone tried to break open her door, driven to Rut by her scent. She even suspects that if she does text back those two little letters, he won’t come banging on her door when he gets back to the hotel.
She should say no. She should, because she really…doesn’t want to fuck her boss’ son, potentially the son of the future president. Just because she is in Heat. Just because he had caught a whiff of her through her suppressants.
But her brain—a rare ally to her hormones in this unfortunate situation—fills her head with the image of her straddling him, of feeling him stretch her perfectly while his hands trailed fire across her skin and his plush lips—
Fine, if you think you can cut out. I’m not going to be waiting for very long.
I should also warn you, I’ve been told I’m a shitty omega.
I doubt that somehow.
I’ll be along soon. What room are you in?
802.
He doesn’t reply to that and Rey leans her head back against the seat and closes her eyes. This will be fine, she tells herself. I’ll fuck him, he’ll get the idea, and that’ll be that. And having his cum inside me will ease the Heat. Probably better than any other alpha’s would. He is part cat after all. She’d read on the internet that cum from someone in your species soothes your Heat a lot more than someone with a different species marker. Which makes all this very convenient, she supposes.
And which was why she is in this situation to begin with. He can smell through her suppressants and no other alpha can.
She wants to die.
And ride him. Ride him until she can’t breathe, until she can’t feel any part of her body except—
“Here we are,” the cab driver tells her, and Rey sits bolt upright. She thanks him, and gets out of the car, painfully aware of how wet she is as she makes her way through the hotel lobby to the elevator. Every step she takes, the swelling flesh of her labia rubs against itself and it makes her breath come through a little shaky. She can totally at least finger herself a little bit before Ben bets there.
When she reaches her hotel room, however, the key-card is not in her purse. She looks through it twice, searches through every part of her wallet, but it is gone.
Growling in the back of her throat, she returns to the elevator and makes her way to the front desk, praying there aren’t any other demi-cats in the lobby who will be able to smell just how dripping wet she is. And this is from just a whiff of him on suppressants, she thinks bitterly as she waits behind a businessman who is checking in. It doesn’t feel any lighter than her other Heats, now that she is in the swing of it. Should she call her doctor?
She smells him before she sees him—smells him the moment he comes through the doors of the lobby and he’s definitely reacted to her Heat from the way his hormones are rolling off him now. She doesn’t turn around, she refuses to. But god if she doesn’t feel her nipples get harder under her blazer. Maybe suppressants don’t work on him in both directions, she thinks glumly as the businessman thanks the desk clerk and makes his way towards the elevator. She’ll have to check forums about it later. Someone will know. This will have to have happened to someone before.
“Hi,” Rey says as she steps forward. “I’m Rey Johnson and I’m staying in 802. I can’t find my key.” She slides her ID across the desk and the clerk assures her that she’d have a key ready in just a moment.
She hates how her body is quivering just from the nearness of him. She hates that she has to force herself to breathe. She hates that a few times a year, it feels like she loses complete control of who she is, and that her mind and her body stopped working as one.
And right now, she hates Ben Solo for standing there, knowing all of this, and making it worse by smelling so damn good.
“Here you are Ms. Johnson. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“No, that’s everything,” she responds and she turns away from the desk. Ben is standing by the elevators, his hands in his pockets, seeming to be reading a framed letter that informs the guests in the hotel what time the continental breakfast will be served. His shoulders are ridiculously broad, and his hips are ridiculously narrow and the way his torso tapers between the two makes her mouth water. Lithe. Lithe like a cat. She’s never been with a cat before.
She presses the button to take them upstairs and a moment later they are in the elevator.
It’s unbearable—the scent of him that close. Her body aches for him to pin her to the wall, or at least wrap his arms around her, or take her hand, or something. But he just stands there, his hands in his pocket, and Rey’s head at least is glad of that. Maybe her head and her body aren’t in as close cahoots as she’d initially thought. That’s comforting, because she doesn’t want him touching her until they’ve actually talked somewhat.
He follows her to her room and the key unlocks the door with ease, despite the way that her hands are trembling.
The moment it clicks shut behind him, she whirls around. “First things first,” she says firmly, acting before her body takes over, “No ripping my clothes. I don’t have an endless supply.”
He inclines his head. “How about you undress for me?”
She hates that her breath catches at that suggestion. Her head jerks in a nod.
“No commands,” she says next. Her voice is a little shakier. “I hate that.” It was bad enough that she didn’t feel like herself during her Heats—she didn’t need an alpha using that part of his voice to command her, to take away any part of her autonomy.
He nods again, and there was something else, she knows there was something else. But she can’t think because her stomach is quivering and she can see the way his dick is getting hard in his pants. And her mouth is watering again.
“That it?” he asks her dryly, and her eyes jerk back up to his face. He’s smirking at her, because she’s easily just spent a good fifteen seconds staring at his hard-on and he is an alpha. And that smirk…it does something to her.
She shrugs off her blazer and hangs it over the back of the chair. She unbuttons her blouse in not even a little bit close to a sexy way, folds it, and puts it on the desk. She takes off her bra, unzips her skirt and lets it fall to the ground and kicks off the pumps she’s wearing. Then and only then does she strip her underpants—big cotton granny panties because she’s never understood how people wear thongs when it feels like your ass is just hanging out like that and lacy stuff is itchy—and turn around to face him, completely naked.
He’s undressing too, hanging his own sport coat on a hanger by the door and folding his slacks so that they don’t wrinkle. His shirt he seems to care less about because it’s ended up along with his tie on the desk next to Rey’s.
He’s still wearing his underwear and his socks—both black—but he’s frozen as he glances up at Rey standing there naked and waiting for him. He seems to drink her in and she—she’s frozen staring right back at him.
She’d expected the lines from his shoulders to his hips—she hadn’t expected the eight pack with a trail of dark hair that went from his belly button down to his cock. She hadn’t expected his arms to be so well defined in their muscles either. She’d been wrong. The complete picture of him—well, it was better than what she’d let herself begin to imagine in the car ride back from the event.
And from the look on his face, he’s having a similar reaction to her as his eyes rove from her tits down to the dark down that covers her sex. He’s breathing slowly. They haven’t turned on the lights—Rey hadn’t bothered since cats can see just fine without them in the dark—but she can see the way his pupils get even wider as he stares at her before bringing his eyes back to her face.
Then he pounces, and Rey doesn’t care because the moment his skin connects with hers, the moment they land with a sharp umph on the bed behind her and all the air leaves her lungs from the weight of him, bliss runs through her body. Her legs snap around his hips and her hands fist in his hair and he’s reaching down between them, pulling his dick out of his underwear and shoving it right inside her and yessssss.
Yes.
That is what she needs, that slick full feeling of cock jammed into her as deep as it’ll go, and she writhes underneath him, trying to pull him in deeper as his hips snap against hers. This is the good part of Heats, the way her whole body delights at being full of him, the way her blood is singing in her ears, her cunt is throbbing with delight as he sinks into her, his lips at her throat and his breathing ragged.
“God, you smell so,” his hips jerk into her as he growls, “fucking,” and again, “right.”
And Rey comes with a sharp moan, her fingers tightening into his back even as her legs go limp around his waist. It’s not a strong orgasm by any means. It’s a start, she knows, not the end of the night, and so she lets her body flood with warmth while he keeps jerking his hips into her, lets her head come back to her a little bit because a little bit is all she needs.
The edge is gone and Rey—
Well, Rey’s always been a shitty omega.
Ben’s older than her, and he doesn’t seem phased at all that she’s come already. She takes that as a good sign. Some of the younger alphas she’s been with have seen that as a sign of their prowess rather than a sign of her need. And so they really don’t like it when she does as she does with Ben now: shoving him so that he’s lying flat on his back and straddling him, her hands resting on his shoulders—keeping him where he is as she slows the motion of her hips. She’s sensitive from that first orgasm, and she wants the next one to hit her deeper.
She locks eyes with him, seeing surprise there. “You like to play, kitten?” he asks her, sounding amused.
“If I liked to play, you wouldn’t be here,” she responds, her voice low in her throat. She drops her lips to his collarbone and sucks on it, nipping at him lightly with her teeth.
“Show me what you’ve got, then,” he says and there’s a curious bemusement to his voice.
That’s about as good a response as she could have wished for, and she nips at him again—closer to his throat this time—and rubs her face against his neck. One of his hands curls up weave fingers through her hair and it’s only when they’re there that she realizes what instinct had made her do. She’s putting her scent on him with the glands next to her sinuses, right at one of his strongest pulse points. His nose will be even fuller of her than it already is. He seems to be enjoying it, though. His fingers are rubbing lightly at a spot behind her ears now and it feels so damn good that her eyelids flutter for just a moment.
No one’s ever rubbed behind her ears like that while she’s been in bed with them before.
“Are you purring for me?” There’s a smirk to his voice. “I thought you were supposed to be riding me.”
She hadn’t even realized she’d been humming softly until he’d spoken and she pulls away from his hand, sitting up and looking down at him. His hand is now lying lazily on the pillow by his head and the other one is drifting down towards her thigh. She’s still moving only a little bit, just enough to keep him amused and not enough to take his breath away.
“Or do you not know what to do—you just like playing at being an alpha?” She sees his eight-pack flex, knows he’s about to sit up and try to take control and she reaches for his shoulders again and thrusts against him, hard. His cock strikes her cervix and ordinarily, when she’s not in Heat, she doesn’t like that at all because it does actually hurt, but when she is in Heat—well it’s the best thing in the world, a pressure that twists up through her womb and stomach, buzzing all the way up her skin to her lips and she lets the need for that take over as she bucks her hips to him.
“Fuck,” she hears him choke out and his hands are on her hips now, his grip tight as though holding on for dear life as she slides herself up and down the length of him, and squeezing at him with the muscles he finds himself buried in. She lets that buzzing feeling build in her, lets her head fall back and her back arch thrusting her chest forward as she loses herself in the sensation of it all.
This is what she likes about Heats. Sex makes her feel alive in Heat.
She lets him sit up underneath her, lets him bury his face between her breasts. He thumbs her nipples and she lets out a moan from somewhere low in her throat. Her nipples have been hard for what feels like hours and when pointer fingers join his thumbs and he begins to roll them in his large hands. Rey starts to tremble because that—along with the warm buzzing and the delicious way she’s taking him as she rides him—that’s a recipe for exactly what she needs.
She lifts her head slightly and looks down at him. His lips are moving their way to her throat and she slows her hips for a moment to get his attention, reaching a hand up to run through his hair. She hadn’t expected it to be so soft. She finds the spot behind his ear used to make her purr and rubs at it until he does.
“Lick me?” She means it as a statement, a strong suggestion as she’s close, but instead it’s a question, a whimper, and Ben pulls away from her neck and looks up at her, and his eyes are so dark as they drink in her face. His nostrils flare for a moment, and then, without breaking eye contact, he bends to take one of her nipples in his mouth.
His lips are so hot and her nipples are so sensitive and his other hand leaves her breast to drop to her hips again and he’s guiding her faster again—not that Rey needs urging. What Rey really needs is to come, and it’s a little more difficult to ride him hard while he’s sitting up and his lips and teeth are nipping at her tits, but Rey’s nothing if not a determined person and before long she’s trembling and gasping as the orgasm rips through her—significantly stronger this time and enough to send her head spinning for the clouds as her heart races in her chest and her skin flashes hot and cold in time with her contracting cunt.
That, she thinks contentedly as she lets herself collapse forward onto Ben, pushing the both of them back to the mattress, should be enough to be getting on with for the time being. Her body no longer feels less like a coiled spring. It feels almost normal. Almost. She’s still aftershocking and she sucks at the skin of Ben’s neck as he gently jerks his cock into them. His skin tastes as good as it smells, she thinks. And he’s let her ride him and hadn’t seemed all alpha about it. He’s got his hands in her hair again, and it’s not long before she’s purring into his neck, rubbing more of her scent into him.
“Do you want me to knot you?” he asks her, his voice low, his voice alpha, and she stiffens.
She’s never been with a cat before. And knots only happen if you have the same species markers. And because he’s offering, because it’s possible, she nods into his neck.
And his dick is gone from inside her and he’s shifting from underneath her, rolling her onto her side then returning her so that she’s face down on the bed again. He’s pulling her hips up so that she’s on her knees, face still pressed against the pillows. “You’ve got a beautiful ass,” he tells her, and she feels his large hands squeezing it. She hums so that he knows that it feels good. “Do you like having your tail scratched?” And he scratches between her tailbone and her spine and she feels her back arch instinctively because it feels divine. “Yeah,” he is smirking again she can tell. “I thought so, kitten.”
And she feels the tip of his cock lining up with her entrance again and he pushes into her as he scratches her again and she cries out as her back arches again. And the rhythm he sets for himself is overwhelming and between his hand at her tailbone—and how has she never tried that when masturbating—and the way he’s filling and voiding her with the long strokes of his cock, it’s not long before Rey is crying out incoherently and all the blood in her body is thundering in her ears as her heart pumps it through her in time with his movements. She’s gasping and choking and shuddering and purring and her cunt is twitching as though unsure when the orgasm will end, as though her body doesn’t know how to stop.
And then she feels it, feels the bulge at the base of his cock that swells through it and he lets out a strangled cry and the knot locks into place.
Rey has never in her life felt anything quite as strange as being knotted.
Ordinarily, she’s not one to cuddle after sex. She blames being a cat—even if the doctor told her she was likely a lion when push came to shove and lions are more social cats than others. It’s easier to blame being a cat than the simple fact that she just might not be a cuddler. But when Ben’s dick is literally trapped inside her, pulsing cum into her for however many minutes it’ll take him to come down, there’s nothing to do but let him spoon around her, rubbing the scent glands in his face into the back of her neck while he purrs quietly. She could almost get used to it—there’s something nice about feeling someone purring at her back. Except that being knotted feels goddamn strange.
“You keep making these noises,” Ben murmurs after a few minutes.
Rey is fully back to herself now. Her body is sated, relaxed, boneless, and her mind is at ease. But not quite at ease enough to just say what is running through her mind without a voice in her mind reminding her that it’s Leia Organa’s son behind her, pumping seed into her womb.
As if he read her mind, he whispers, “Leave the rest of it outside for a little while longer.” He brushes a kiss to her neck and that, more than him actually being inside her right now, is almost frighteningly intimate.
Rey’s not used to that. No one’s ever cared about where her head shouldn’t be after sex. Sometimes alphas have tried to get her to focus on them, but Ben’s suggestion seems more about her than about him.
Rey swallows and he nuzzles at her again.
I’m going to smell so much like him, she thinks. Other alphas might not be able to smell her heat, but they’d sure as fuck smell Ben’s hormones on her tomorrow if she didn’t have time to shower before they headed off for their flight. Given that her body is sated, she is surprised at how much she likes that idea.
“It’s just really bizarre to feel the way your cum is pushing through my cervix into my uterus,” she tells him.
He snorts, and she rolls her eyes even though he can’t see her. “Is this your first time being knotted?” he asks.
“Yeah,” she admits. “You’re the first cat I’ve been with.”
His hand drifts along the curve of her hip and it sends an odd shiver down her spine that sends her wiggling back towards him as though the warmth in his chest will make it go away.
“So you’re just unused to the feeling?” he asks.
“Yeah,” she replies.
He pauses, then, “What does it feel like?”
She turns her head to look at him over her shoulder, to see if he’s mocking her but she finds only genuine curiosity in his eyes. “It’s like…it’s like it can’t go anywhere else. Your dick’s blocked out the other direction it can go, so it’s just kind of…shoving it’s way through my cervix. Like the opposite of my period.”
“Wait,” and the curiosity in his face only deepens, “Can you like…feel your blood passing through your cervix? When you’re on your period?” His face gets defensive in reaction to her expression, “Look—you brought it up and I’ve never had anyone talk about it before.”
“I didn’t until I started wearing a menstrual cup,” she says. “Like with pads or tampons, I couldn’t, but a menstrual cup sort of spreads you out and then you can just feel the blood dripping through your cervix.” That had taken some getting used to. She supposes this will too.
“So this is the opposite of that.” He sounds like he is trying to understand some sort of political theory or something far more complicated than menstrual blood and semen passing through her cervix. It’s oddly endearing.
“Didn’t have your past knots tell you about what your cum feels like inside them?”
“Only ever in a dirty talk kind of way,” he shrugs. “And just the one. You’re the second cat I’ve been with.”
Suddenly, Rey feels distinctly less content. She imagines him stroking the ears or tailbone of some mysterious other omega, calling her kitten, making her purr, and she finds she doesn’t like it. That’s just the Heat talking, she tells herself. It’s normal for a pair to get possessive during a Heat. Especially with the scent of each other rubbed into one another the way it is.
“Sorry,” she mumbles as she turns her head away from him. It’s not embarrassment or shame she feels. She feels like they shouldn’t be here, like she has messed everything up—just like she always has.
“Sorry? What for?”
“For being a shitty omega.”
He doesn’t say anything and she wishes his cock would get on with it so that she could get off him and bid him goodnight.
Ben shifts behind her and a moment later he’s looming over her in the darkness, propped up on his elbow.
“What about that was shitty?”
“That I…you know…” she can’t bring herself to say it.
“No, I don’t know. Say it,” he demands.
“That I wanted to be the dominant one, all right? That’s not what omegas are supposed to do. That’s alphas.”
He rolls his eyes. “That was hot,” he shrugs. “I really didn’t have a problem with it.” Then, almost as though he can’t quite believe the words coming out of his mouth, “I sort of liked it, actually.”
“You’d be the first,” Rey snaps.
“Well, maybe they were shitty alphas. Did that occur to you?”
That makes her snort, and the snort turns into a longer laugh because it’s such a silly way for him to compliment himself—showing that he’s the best alpha because he didn’t mind it when she’d behaved more like an alpha than an omega.
Again, it’s like he’s read her mind. “It’s not about whether I’m the alpha and you’re the omega,” he says and there’s an intensity to his voice that catches her wholly off guard because the only other time she’s heard him talk like that is when they’re in strategy meetings. “It’s about who we are. What we want. Our bodies only dictate so much. The rest is here.” He taps her breast, just above her heart. He bends his head to kiss her neck before settling back down behind her. “And like I said—it was hot. I liked it.”
She’s not sure if she believes him, but she also can’t see what he’d get from lying about it. The other alphas had made it quite clear what they’d thought of the matter almost immediately. Show me what you’ve got, then, he’d told her. And he hadn’t seemed to mind that she’d been the one fucking him for a while, and not the other way around.
She feels him nuzzling his face into her hair again, bathing her in more of his scent. She closes her eyes, and lets her body start to purr.
She is asleep before his knot begins to loosen.