Spy Wolf 2 (Patreon)

2024

“Do you have any Midol?” Yelena asked. “I think I am having menopause.”

Kate’s mom always chided her for her startled gazelle face, but she thought it was justified now. Yelena had broken into her apartment, eaten her macaroni, threatened to kill her mentor, used her last name a bunch of times… and now she was talking about menopause.

“You cannot have menopause,” Kate said. “Old people have menopause. You’re… you’re not thirty, are you?”

“I was in Snap,” Yelena said defensively. “And show a little sympathy, I have been achey all day, I feel pressure, I am sore, have tension up in behind eyeballs—all day!”

“Are you on your period?”

“I don’t get periods.”

“Oh,” Kate said, wondering if that was something she’d trained to do or, “Is that one of your superpowers?”

“I don’t have superpower. I have hysterectomy.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Before Kate could figure out a better way to project her sympathy, because Yelena did not make it sound like a settled issue, Yelena barreled onward.

“So now I don’t know what this feeling is, with the tense and the throbbing and I am acting bitchy and sometimes very weird senses down in vagina like I am going to masturbate… I figure maybe menopause. Who know? Could be from turning into dust and then back into person. Can’t be good for my systems.”

“Are you sure you’re not just in heat?”

Yelena looked at her, boggling a moment, before breaking out in a rather pretty smile. “Kate Bishop, you are funning me! I do not in heat.”

Which was a lot to say to Kate, who had been smelling Yelena only slightly less than the mac and cheese. She was actually thinking about taking one of those BS PC classes on alpha/beta/omega hierarchism, because she’d been astounded that someone as witty and cool and badass as Yelena could possibly be an omega.

She knew it wasn’t, like, a rule that all alphas were take-charge and always knew what they were doing. Kate was proof of that. She hadn’t been able to tell Clint what to do once, beta or no. There was no reason an omega had to be wimpy or submissive.

But Yelena was just… really, really not submissive. It was hard enough believing she wasn’t an alpha—now she wasn’t even a beta?

But she was giving textbook biology class on being an omega in heat. Not to mention the way she smelled. Kate had never actually gone to one of those mixers for alphas and omegas to give each other the literal smell test… learning to get really, really good at trick shots had made a nifty excuse to avoid that part of college life… but shit, it was like Yelena had never even heard of an inhibitor. She smelled positively…

Well, Kate knew there were perfectly respectable omega who chose not to take inhibitors, for personal reasons.

They were just mostly sex workers.

“Next you are going to say I am omega,” Yelena continued, clearly taking Kate’s silence as agreement that she wasn’t in heat.

And Kate wasn’t a doctor and she hadn’t ever knotted anyone, but hell, when she stuck her hand out the window, she could tell when it was raining.

“Dude,” she said. “You are totally an omega.”

Yelena’s eyes bulged. She seemed staggered, even hurt, at the affront. “Now you are being mean, and why? We have disagreement on whether Barton live, so you don’t have to be nice to me?”

“I’m not being mean. But you’re absolutely an omega. You’ve been in here, what, half an hour? The place smells like—I mean, you’re not even taking an inhibitor.”

“I do not need an inhibitor. Am… not… omega,” Yelena insisted, punctuating each word with a tap of her fork on the pot her macaroni was in.

“Then why are you in heat?” Kate demanded. “Those symptoms you’re complaining about? They’re textbook omega that needs to be…”

Yelena quirked an eyebrow. “Yes? Go on, Kate Bishop.”

Kate flushed. Alphas didn’t go into heat, but put one in a room with an omega when their cycle was in full swing and shit got real.

She didn’t know how attuned she was to Yelena; maybe heat with no inhibitor and the alpha not having time to take her suppressant for a couple days was always like this. But she just wanted to bend Yelena over and—

She couldn’t let herself think like that. God, Yelena didn’t even know she was an omega, what was she, a little kid?

“If you took an inhibitor,” she explained patiently. “You wouldn’t have so many symptoms and you wouldn’t have every alpha turning their head when you walk by… shit, haven’t you noticed?”

“I am pretty. I get looks.”

“You’re getting looks because you’re practically wearing a neon sign that says ‘your place or mine?’ I don’t have any inhibitors here, obviously, but my mom’s an omega. She always says grapefruit is pretty good if you’re having a real bad cycle and your inhibitor isn’t enough.”

And if you don’t have an alpha around to fuck your brains out, Kate thought, but didn’t dare say.

She got up, her chair scraping back along the floor, and Yelena shrank back in her seat, breath picking up, eyes hooded as they scanned over Kate’s standing form. Slowly, her head drifted back, baring her throat to Kate, and she took a deep breath—her chest rising to prominence—her nipples stiff through her cashmere sweater.

Kate’s clit panged. She felt like she was in the middle of touching herself, like she’d stopped to turn the page in her really trashy romance novel, and if she just picked up where she’d left off, the fuse would finally burn down and the explosive would go off…

“Yelena,” Kate gasped.

Yelena blinked. She straightened. “ни хуя себе!”

Kate didn’t need to speak Russian to hear her confusion. “You really don’t know this stuff, do you?”

Yelena got up. Stumbling a little as she circled the table. Keeping it between her and Kate as the other woman went sideways to the refrigerator. “You are Barton’s fangirl? Then you must know Natasha—know where she came from.”

Kate did. All the official information on the Avengers was sketchy about their pasts—Bruce Banner had just ‘lived in isolation since a lab accident’—but Natasha had spoken out on at least some of it while opening women’s shelters, giving interviews to feminist magazines. The role model stuff that didn’t come any easier to her than to Clint, but that she seemed to feel compelled to do.

“The Red Room.”

“Yes. They tell me things I need to know for mission. They give me drugs. Had me pose as alpha… I assumed—”

“Some people do that. Think it’ll help them get a job…”

Kate threw the refrigerator door open. The cold inside was a balm on how sweaty she felt—she was getting to understand why some guys watched that really unrealistic show about the girl who grew up in the jungle and didn’t know about being an omega until she was eighteen.

“Look, that was a perfectly natural response just now. Omegas… respond to alphas, particularly when an alpha is, uh… assertive. It releases dopamine or something.”

“I feel better,” Yelena said wonderingly. “Less like I am full of hot air.”

“Yeah, your body is… it assumes that when an alpha is asserting themself, then they’re about to be… well, that they’re getting in the mood, and so they should start getting ready for… sorry.”

Yelena pointed unsteadily at Kate. “You are alpha?”

Kate found the grapefruit. “A-ha! Knew I had one.”

“You are alpha and I omega?”

Kate showed her the grapefruit. “Eat this. It’ll make you feel better.”

Yelena made no move to take the grapefruit. “Like being yelled at make me feel better?”

Kate set the grapefruit down on the table and shoved her hands in her pockets. “This isn’t easy on me either, you know. When an omega is in heat and she’s around an alpha, it makes the alpha feel—”

“Oh ho!” Yelena laughed performatively. She fluffed the lapels of her coat. “So now you are big bad alpha, yes? And I am weak little omega who is hoping, so hoping, that her alpha will make sex to her?” She barked a laugh and sneered. “I think you are wishful thinking.”

Kate shouldn’t have done it. She’d been trying to avoid doing it. But it was a heady feeling, being an alpha around a heating omega.

“Shut up,” she snapped.

She’d tried to warn Yelena. Hadn’t the Red Menace seen that show about the jungle girl?

Yelena seemed to lose her breath. She blinked repeatedly; trembled a little. Then she refocused on Kate, almost but not quite cowing her with the look of rage on her face. “What did you say me?”

How did she not know this? Everyone knew this. If you had an alpha and an omega and no inhibitor and no suppressant, the least you could do was be polite. They’d drilled that into her once a semester in high school. Because if an omega started being defiant, then the natural urge of the alpha was to be commanding.

“I said shut your mouth and while you’re at it, sit down.”

Like a switch had been thrown, Yelena dropped into her seat at the table. Her face was flushed. Her lips moistly parted, breath pushing and pulling through them like Yelena was caressing herself with the air. Then, soundlessly, her lips worked, forming the words she’d just heard, repeating them to herself in a kind of awed disbelief. Her eyes rolled up in her head before she shut her eyelids tightly.

Kate knew how she felt. All of her was suffused with the knowledge that all she had to do was lay one finger on Yelena, say one word, and she’d have the best orgasm since she discovered the wet shirt scene in Pride & Prejudice.

She pushed the grapefruit across the tabletop. “Eat that.”

Yelena stuffed it into her mouth, teeth digging into the yellow skin.

“You cut it in half first,” Kate told her, suppressing a sudden urge to laugh.

“Oh,” Yelena said through the grapefruit. She got up and meagerly spat the grapefruit into her hand.

Naturally, she had a knife.

“And you use a spoon,” Kate added.

“You have spoon?”

“It goes with my fork.”

“Okay.” Yelena nodded. She seemed lost, even shellshocked.

Which Kate understood. She probably wouldn’t have handled going through all of adolescence in thirty seconds well either.

Collecting the spoon, Yelena came back to the table. Cut the grapefruit in half and left one half in front of Kate.

“This smells good,” she remarked of the grapefruit.

“I told you.”

Yelena nodded. “I am going now. I am taking your spoon; you have taught me I should probably keep eating utensil on me and not just knives.”

“You’re welcome. That’s my only spoon.”

“I mail it back.” Yelena took a deep breath, gathering herself. “Do not get in my way, Kate Bishop. Clint Barton does not deserve to live.”

“Yeah, okay, but, uh… you wanna talk more about the omega stuff? I get that it’s all pretty new to you…”

“I will Google.” Yelena mantled up to Kate’s window. “Thank you for… your spoon. And half your grapefruit.”

And she disappeared.

Kate knew it was a tragic situation. That Yelena had been denied her natural coming of age, her sexuality, an entire aspect of her personhood.

That she had a lot of things to learn about herself and decide on before she could embrace herself as an omega and even be close to accepting an alpha into her life.

That she might even hate Kate for how vividly she’d shown Yelena that she was not the alpha she’d taken herself to be.

But right then, Kate needed to ride her hand like it was Seabiscuit.