Devan
Canary-fucking-yellow.
It's obnoxious. It's blinding.
It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
Sam Sharma is wearing a hoodie the exact shade of a highlighter three rows up, tapping a pen against his teeth.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Professor Foster is droning on about utilitarian ethics, but all I can hear is that rhythm.
I'm staring at the back of his neck, where his black hair curls slightly over the collar.
My hand twitches on the desk. The urge to reach out, to span the fifteen feet between us and bury my nose right there, in that soft curve of skin, is so intense it makes my teeth hurt. Heat crawls up my collar. My fingertips ache with the phantom memory of those dark curls, of skin I've never touched.
This is pathetic. I'm pathetic. I got maybe three hours of sleep last night because I made the mistake of checking his Instagram at 2 a.m. and then spent forty-five minutes zooming in on aphoto from some party, trying to figure out whose arm was around his shoulder.
It was his sister's. His sister, who lives in Boston and was visiting for the weekend. I figured that out at 3 a.m. after scrolling back through eight months of posts like a complete psycho.
"Mr. Morse?"
I blink, tearing my eyes away from the back of Sam's head.
Professor Foster is staring at me over his glasses. The entire seminar—fifteen of Westbridge's brightest and most pretentious minds—is looking at me.
Fourteen of them are looking at me with the usual mix of wariness and annoyance.
Sam is looking at me with a grin that could power the entire eastern seaboard.
Cool. Love this for me.
"I asked," Foster says, "if you agree with the assertion that rational self-interest is the only reliable variable in this equation."
I don't shift in my seat. I don't fidget. I learned a long time ago that stillness unnerves people. "Variables are only reliable if the system is closed," I say. "But human systems aren't closed. Emotion is a constant variable. Ignoring it makes the equation flawed, not rational."
Sam's grin widens. He loves this. Loves when I talk, because it means he gets to tear me apart.
"But emotion isn't quantifiable, Devan," he says, twisting fully in his chair. "If you can't measure it, you can't model it. That's Econ 101."
"Just because you can't count it doesn't mean it doesn't count, Sharma."
"Ooh, poetry," Sam teases. "Didn't know you had it in you."
The class titters nervously. They don't know how to handle us. To them, we're the Hatfields and McCoys of the Philosophy Department. The brooding, silent alpha statue and the golden retriever omega who won't shut up. They think we hate each other.
They have no idea.
My alpha rumbles deep in my chest.He's looking at us. He's engaging with us.
I hold his gaze. I don't smile.
"I have a lot of things in me you don't know about."
Like my teeth. In your neck.
Sam's smile falters for a fraction of a second. A tiny flicker of something. Confusion? Or, if I'm praying to a god I don't believe in, awareness?
