"What?"
"Nothing."
"No, what do you mean, ahead?" I turn in my seat to face him fully, studying his profile. The set of his jaw. The way he is very deliberately not looking at me. The faint flush still coloring his cheeks and spreading down his neck. "Ahead compared to what?"
He does not answer.
Just stares out the windshield like the parking lot is the most fascinating landscape he has ever encountered. Like the row of student cars and the recycling bins and the crooked parking job in spot fourteen are worthy of his undivided, intense contemplation.
My brain kicks into overdrive.
Ahead. He said at least you are ahead there. Ahead implies a comparison. Ahead of whom? Ahead of what? Why would my having sexual experience make me ahead of...
Wait.
No.
No way.
There is absolutely no way.
I think about what Bastien said yesterday outside the dorm, the taunt he hurled at Etienne during their confrontation.
Probably still a virgin, are you not?
At the time, I filed it away as a cheap insult. An older brother trying to humiliate his younger sibling. Nothing more.
But what if it was not an insult?
What if it was the truth?
I stare at Etienne's profile. At the way his fingers have gone still on the steering wheel. At the way his breathing has shifted into something shallower and more controlled. At the way his scent has changed, that evergreen and old books base note now threaded with something warmer. More vulnerable.
"Etienne?" My voice is quiet. Careful. Not mocking. Not judging. Just genuinely, honestly curious.
He still does not look at me.
"Are you a virgin?"
CHAPTER 11
Defective
~ETIENNE~
Iam waiting for her to laugh.
That is what happens next, right? That is the natural progression of events. She asks the question, I confirm it with my silence, and then she laughs. Mocks me. Tells me that at my age, being a virgin is not just unusual but pathetic. That an Alpha who cannot get hard over an Omega is broken. Defective. Less than.
Every muscle in my body is coiled tight, bracing for impact.
Because that is what I have been conditioned to expect.
It is not like I had not tried. I got close once, back in my second year of high school. An Omega from the neighboring academy who flirted with me at a joint sports banquet. Pretty. Willing. Exactly the kind of girl every Alpha my age was supposed to want.
We went back to her dorm. Kissed for a while. She started pulling at my clothes, pressing herself against me, her pheromones filling the room like a fog designed to override every rational thought in my brain.
I remember thinking, this is it. This is the moment I finally become the Alpha everyone expects me to be. My brother hadstories. Rafe had stories. Cal had stories. And I was going to have mine.
