Edmund rolled his eyes. That might be the right explanation, but it didn't give him anything practical to work with. "I'm sure it did," he said, with a flicker of his usual sarcastic jauntiness. It wasn't easy, when his hands were so, er, busy and his mind short-circuited with gratuitous lust. "The timing didn't help either." A full moon, and getting bit and thrown into heat right at the height of battle when his adrenaline was already at its peak.

"What I still don't understand is...how you came to be with me now. If you didn't trust yourself around me. If it really was that bad, that I'd be unnaturally...appealing." Edmund didn't know how else to put it, considering how honest their own body chemistry was right now. He breathed in audibly as the cooler glass pressed to his skin. "Aah... not that I'm complaining about you being here, you know. There's...no one else I'd rather. But. There were other loyal Alphas you could have asked."

Strangely, the conversation (at odds though it was with his actions right now) soothed him with the distraction of focus on something other than overwhelming need, enough that the first breach of the phallus sliding into him was greeted with only the tiniest of whimpers instead of a full-blown cry, like he might have if he'd been thinking about how warm and thick Al would be in its stead...