The sound is involuntary, undignified, and completely authentic—the high-pitched, startled vocalization of a woman who was mid-kiss and has just been reminded that the public exists by a waitress who is holding two dessert plates and grinning like she’s witnessed the best thing that’s happened in this diner all week.
I try to pull back.
Oakley doesn’t let me.
Not aggressively. Not with the forceful, possessive restraint of an Alpha who considers interruption an offense. With the calm, unhurried certainty of a man who was kissing someoneand has decided that the kiss isn’t finished yet and the cheesecake can wait.
He holds the kiss.
An extra ten seconds.
I know it’s ten seconds because some part of my brain—the professional, operational, time-stamping-everything part that never fully shuts off—is counting. Ten seconds of his mouth on mine while the waitress stands there with two plates and a smile and the elderly couple three booths down has given up all pretense of reading their menus.
He breaks.
“Thanks,” he says.
To the waitress. Casually. As if he has not just kissed a woman in a diner booth for an additional ten seconds after the food arrived and as if this is the normal, standard, unremarkable progression of a lunch date and the cheesecake was simply early.
The waitress sets the plates down with a grin that she is not attempting to conceal and retreats with the speed of a woman who understands that she is not needed and is also, clearly, going to tell the kitchen staff everything.
And Oakley turns back to me.
And goes right back to kissing me.
As if the waitress’s existence has evaporated from his orbit. As if the interruption was a parenthetical in a sentence that he’s already resumed. His mouth finds mine with the same unhurried, attention-saturated pressure as before, and the kiss continues with the seamless, unbroken momentum of a man whose focus, once directed, does not waver.
This.
This is what I never had.
My former pack loved flirting with anything that moved. Every waitress, every barista, every Omega who walked past our table became an opportunity for them to demonstrate thattheir attention was a currency they distributed generously and that my share of it was never guaranteed. Meals were competitions for their eye contact. Public outings were endurance tests for my tolerance of being publicly deprioritized.
Oakley hasn’t looked at another person since we sat down.
Not the waitress. Not the woman at the counter. Not the table of college-aged girls who glanced at him when we walked in and whispered to each other in the way that women whisper when they’ve noticed an attractive man.
He hasn’t looked.
Because I’m here.
And when I’m here, his orbit has a single occupant.
He breaks the kiss when we’re both panting.
The separation is small—an inch, maybe two. Enough space for breathing. Not enough for the charge between us to dissipate. His forehead rests against my temple, his breath warm on my cheek, the candied blood orange of his scent so close and so saturated that it’s no longer a scent but an atmosphere. A climate. The specific, two-person weather system of a man and a woman who have been building toward something all morning and are both fully aware of what the something is.
He licks his lip.
The motion is slow. Deliberate. His tongue tracing his lower lip with the satisfied, post-kiss gesture of a man tasting the residual evidence of what he just did and finding it good.
“You have time after this, Chief?”
His voice is low.
Rough at the edges. The vocal equivalent of fabric that has been stretched by the force contained inside it—still intact, still controlled, but carrying the audible evidence of a restraint that is functioning at capacity.
And his eyes.
