“I didn’t get to ask you properly when you had the fever,” he whispers, and his voice is so careful, so deliberately gentle, that each word feels like it’s been placed rather than spoken. “But can I give you a kiss on the cheek?”
I blink.
The request is so unexpected—so wildly, disarmingly different from every other interaction I’ve had with an Alpha male in the context of touch and permission and the space where those two things intersect—that my brain produces no immediate response.
He’s asking.
He’s asking.
Not telling. Not taking. Not announcing what he’s about to do and doing it regardless of the answer.
He’s asking if he can kiss my cheek like it’s a thing that requires my permission.
Like my answer matters.
Like “no” is an option he would accept without consequence, without resentment, without the particular punitive coldnessthat I’ve learned to associate with the word “no” when spoken by an Omega to an Alpha.
“Sure,” I say, and my voice is confused. Genuinely, uncomplicatedly confused. The confusion of a woman who has been handed something she doesn’t recognize and is turning it over in her hands, trying to identify the mechanism. “Why?”
He gives a small smile.
Not the full, sun-bright grin I’ve seen him deploy in the bullpen. Something quieter. Smaller. A smile that lives closer to sadness than to joy, the kind that appears when someone is feeling too many things at once and can only express the gentlest one.
He leans in.
And presses a kiss to my left cheek.
Light. Barely there. The softest possible contact between his lips and my skin—a touch so delicate it feels less like a kiss and more like a whispered word that doesn’t have a translation. It lands on the exact spot where tears would track if I were the kind of woman who cried in front of people, and the warmth of it lingers after he pulls back, settling into my skin like something it has been waiting to absorb.
“My mom taught me,” he says, and his voice cracks. Just slightly. A fracture so small that most people would miss it, but I’m a woman who reads micro-expressions for a living and I hear it the way I hear the click of a safety being released—quietly, but with the full understanding of what it means. “That when you want to give someone an expression of love that proves you care, you give them a kiss on the cheek.”
He holds my gaze.
“Not everyone, obviously.” A breath. The moisture at the edges of his green eyes isn’t falling, but it’s present, held in place by the same force of will that he uses to maintain the easy-going exterior that covers the serious, deeply feeling man beneath.“But to someone deserving of love who may have forgotten they’re worthy of it.”
I look into his eyes.
And what I see there—behind the moisture, behind the smile that’s holding itself together through sheer determination—is a man trying not to cry.
Not for himself.
For me.
The sadness is there—dancing in the green like light on water, the specific kind of sorrow that occurs when someone recognizes damage they can’t undo. And beneath it, braided so tightly that the two emotions are almost indistinguishable, anger. Controlled. Contained. Burning at a frequency that doesn’t erupt the way Roman’s does but sits in the bones and in the jaw and in the hands that are still resting on my shoulders with a tenderness that contradicts everything the anger wants to do.
He’s sad for me.
And angry for me.
And trying to give me love in the same moment he’s holding back rage.
Because someone taught him that love is what you offer first.
He pets the top of my head.
A single, gentle stroke of his hand across the damp blue strands—the kind of touch you give to something precious, something you’re afraid of breaking, something you want to protect from the world that’s already proven itself unworthy of it.
I stand at the counter.
