Avery:girls? girl? how does this work
Milo:honestly? no idea. we're figuring it out.
Avery:that's the spirit. good luck. don't die.
Milo:helpful. very helpful.
I pocket my phone and look at Quentin. He's already dressed in his usual uniform. I still need to figure out what to wear, but that's a problem for when we get back to the dorm.
"Ready?" I ask.
"No."
"Perfect. Let's go win an Alpha."
Tonight's either going to be the best decision of my life or an absolute catastrophe. Knowing me, knowing my track record with impulse decisions, it's probably going to be both.
But at least we'll beat Chad. That alone is worth several grand, worth every penny we're about to spend.
And if we get Iris too? If she looks at us the way I've imagined her looking at us, like we're worth her time, like we're something more than just faces in the crowd?
Thatwill be worth everything.
One night. How bad could it be?
quentin
I'vereadthesameparagraph about the skeletal system four times. I still can't tell anyone what it says. All I can think about isher.
The textbook has been open to page 247 for over an hour now. The highlighter in my hand dried out twenty minutes ago because I forgot to cap it, and my notes for the evening consist of two words scrawled in the margin:"Bones: important."That's it. That's all I've managed to produce in sixty minutes of so-called studying.
This is pathetic. I'm pathetic.
I have an exam in two weeks. I should be memorizing the two hundred and six bones in the human body, committing their names and locations to memory, and building the foundation for my future medical career. Instead, my brain keeps short-circuiting every time I try to focus, replacing whatever I'm reading with the same useless information on an endless loop.
Iris. Her smile. The way her braids click with those gorgeous gold beads when she walks.Iris. The sound of her voice when she's explaining numbers.Iris. The way she looked at me three months ago in that conference room.
Iris.
The thing is, I know exactly why I can't stop thinking about her, and that's almost worse than the distraction itself. It's not just attraction. Attraction I could handle. Attraction is simple, biological, and something I could compartmentalize and ignore until it faded. But what I feel when I look at Iris isn't simple at all. It's complicated and confusing and goes against everything I've been told about how designations are supposed to work.
She's an Alpha. I'm a Beta. By every social expectation, every biological norm, I should want to defer to her. Follow her lead. Let her take control.
Instead, I want to challenge her. Match her. Make her yield.
I'm a Beta who wants to dominate an Alpha. Totally normal. Nothing confusing about that whatsoever.
She smiled at me once. During a team budget meeting, of all places. It lasted approximately 2.3 seconds, and I've thought about it approximately seven hundred times since. That works out to roughly once every minute for the past twelve hours, which is a completely reasonable and not at all obsessive frequency.
Milo thinks I'm the composed one. The disciplined twin. The one who has everything under control at all times.
Milo is an idiot.
Control has always been my thing. It's how I survive, how I function, and how I make sense of a world that doesn't always make sense. I plan. I calculate. I maintain order in my own head even when everything around me is chaos. But Iris walks into a room and my brain just stops working. It shuts downcompletely, then reboots with only one thought taking up all the available space.
Her.
I don't lose control. I don't get distracted. I don't pine.
