Text me when you get home.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I would’ve walked her in, but Benji came to the door and did that job for me. Courting our omega would be so much easier without big brother watching, but it was a small obstacle to surpass for her.
Chapter Seventeen
Sylvia
I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Archer. We’d had an amazing time on our date and an even more amazing time in the car.
Benji didn’t seem to care about any of that. He was ready for Archer to leave, which he did without hesitation. Then Benji walked me straight home, as if he feared I was going to run after Archer’s vehicle.
My brother was ridiculous. But also, he was the best.
“You’ll thank me tomorrow.” Benji rubbed the top of my head and shooed me in.
I wasn’t sure if he was right on the thanking him piece, but I couldn’t be mad at him, either. He was doing what he thought was best for me—and really, that kiss had gotten a lot more serious than I intended. Something about the feel of his lips on mine…so good.
Once inside, I went straight to my room and fell back on my bed. My fingers touched my lips,remembering where his had been. Archer hadn’t pushed—not a single bit.
The deepening of the kiss had been all me. I was the one who intensified things. If my brother hadn’t gotten there, I’d probably have gone even further.
When Archer first asked if he could hold my hand, I was embarrassed, for no reason I could pinpoint. Holding hands was normal, and it wasn’t as if he asked me to hold hands naked. That didn’t stop those feels from building up in me. I braved through it and wrapped his hand in mine, and we held them along the way.
And then, after our date, when he asked if he could kiss me, that same giddy feeling came back—only this time, I embraced it. I wasn’t braving through it; I was savoring it.
And, well, I savored it a tad too much and it earned me an escort home from my brother.
I waited until Archer texted me to let me know he was home before getting up and taking a shower. I was wearing scent blockers, and while it was 100 percentnecessary to wear them when out in public, I hated it. I wanted to wash it all off of me.
The water was steamy and I rested under it, washing my hair. The entire time, I replayed that kiss over and over again in my head. It was my first date ever—at least that kind of a date.
When Dax came and hung out with me, that was a date of sorts, and so was the picnic. But this was what people thought of when they heard “date”—going to a restaurant, just the two of us. And it was nice. More than nice.
I finished showering and headed to bed, closing my eyes. Once again, my mind was back at that kiss. Not that it had left there, more that it had taken a back seat for a few minutes. I lay there for a long time, unable to sleep, my mind going too many places at once.
And when I did finally fall asleep, my dream was… Let’s just say it was a far cry from the nightmare I had over and over and over again for years.
Talon and I standing in my bedroom, me yanking him in for a kiss and then pawing at his shirt, trying toget it off. But as much as I tried, I wasn’t able to. We were stuck in that kiss with no way to move forward.
I woke up in a cold sweat, unsure how I went from a sweet kiss to panicking over a shirt on in my dreams—but there I was. I learned a long time ago that attempting to make sense of my dreams only led to frustration.
It was still dark out, and I looked at my clock. Sure enough, it was the middle of the night. I flopped my body over, a trick my mom taught me to not have the same dream come back to you.
And I suppose, in a way, it worked—because this time, it wasn’t Archer I was kissing. It was Talon. His shirt stayed on his body just as much, and I ended up growling at him and stomping away, only to come face-to-face with Dax and pull him in for a kiss as well.
Dream-me was real big into kissing, apparently—and also really bad at taking clothes off.
When I woke up the next time, sunlight was cascading through the window, and I was hot—so hot. I cleaned up, thinking that would help, but the heat wasmore than just my body temperature, and it wasn’t a fever.
It was need.
I needed another kiss.
No—that wouldn’t do. I needed to feel their arms around me. My heart pounded in my chest. I tried to think rationally about it, to figure out what was happening.
This wasn’t heat. It wasn’t intense enough for that. I’d heard Lily and Rumor talking about mini-heats—was that what this was? It had to be, right?
