He huffs and then turns onto his side facing away from me, Kit’s breathing evening out within minutes. I stay awake with my back against the mattress and my eyes on the ceiling, listening to him breathe. His scent has seeped into everything by now, and I'm going to be living inside it for days after he leaves.
I can almost hear my mother laughing at me.
Stop being your father, Easton.
This boy deserves someone brave enough to be honest with him in the daylight, not just in the dark with the door closed and the lights off.
Your biological response to his need doesn’t make him yours.
“I know,” I say to nothing in particular. “I have to earn him.” I twist to look over at Kit as he curls into himself. “I just don’t know if I can.”
KIT
Iwakeupwrappedin bourbon and cedar and for three disoriented seconds my body melts into it, my face pressed into a pillow that smells so good I want to burrow into it and stay. Everything feels safe in a way that doesn't make sense until my brain catches up and the memories from last night hit like cold water.
The wall. His hands. The knot. The way I shook apart when he called me good and then asked him to say it again like I was starving for it. Because I was. Because I am, and that's the part I can't survive knowing about myself in the daylight.
My eyes fly open to Easton's ceiling, the desk lamp still casting a low glow across the room. His sheets are tangled around my legs and my bare skin is covered in marks I can feel without seeing, the bite on my collarbone throbbing, scratches along my hips where his fingers gripped hard enough to bruise. I'm naked in my bully's bed with a new round of slick coating my hole andI need to leave before the full scope of what I've done finishes assembling in my head.
Easton is asleep beside me, his face turned toward me on the mattress. Without his glasses his face looks younger. One arm is stretched across the space between us, stopped halfway like he reached for me in his sleep and thought better of it. His breathing is slow and even and the sight of him peaceful while I'm mid-crisis makes me want to smother him with the pillow I stole.
I slide out of bed as carefully as I can, holding my breath as the mattress shifts. My clothes are scattered across the floor in a trail that reconstructs the night in reverse. Each piece I pick up is another piece of evidence. I dress fast, freaking out when I can’t find my shoes.
I find them by the door where I kicked them off last night during the part of the evening where I apparently lost my mind, my dignity, and my ability to make rational decisions, and I'm crouching to grab them when Easton's voice comes from behind me.
"You don't have to sneak out."
I freeze with one shoe in my hand. Of course this man is a light sleeper because the universe has never once in my life given me a clean exit. I straighten up and turn around, shoving my feet into my shoes without bothering to untie them, because the longer I'm in this room the harder it's going to be to leave and I have to leave.
Staying means thinking about what happened and thinking about what happened means feeling it again and I cannot feel that again. "I'm not sneaking," I tell him, my voice coming out colder than I intended. Good. Cold is good. Cold is armor. "I'm leaving because this is over and there's no reason to stay."
Easton sits up slowly, the sheet pooling at his waist, and the marks I left look so much bolder in the morning light. Nail tracksacross his pec, red lines down his shoulders. The evidence that I was here and that I wanted to be here and that wanting is carved into his skin for anyone in the locker room to see. My stomach lurches.
"Kit." He says it in the same voice he used last night when he was inside me, my body responding to it before I can stop the reaction, heat flickering in my belly, my scent threatening to go sweet. I crush it down with everything I have.
"Don't say my name like that."
"Like what?"
"Like last night meant something. Like this is anything other than what it was." I move closer to the door with my hand on the knob and I need to turn it and walk out but his eyes are on me. "This is exactly what I should have expected from an Alpha," I tell him, reaching for the cruelest thing I can find because cruelty is the only weapon I have left. "You got what you wanted. The Omega spread his legs and made pretty sounds and now it's morning and we both know how this goes. You go back to your team and your reputation and I go back to being the kid you shove into lockers. At least now you've got better material for the hallway."
Some part of me hates absolutely every word I just shoved at him but I refuse to fall for this man. I can’t. I won’t.I won’t.
Easton's jaw tightens. The muscle jumps beneath his skin, and I watch him swallow something that wants to come out. Old Easton would have fired back with something devastating. Old Easton would have met my cruelty with his own and we'd be screaming at each other and at least that would make sense, at least that's a dynamic I understand.
But he doesn't fire back. He sits on the edge of his bed with my marks on his chest and his eyes holding mine and he doesn't say a single word in his own defense.
The restraint is worse than any insult he could have thrown. If he fought back I could hate him cleanly, and could file this night under "Alpha took what he wanted" and never think about it again. His silence leaves with no enemy to fight. He's just sitting there, letting me be cruel to him, absorbing it the way he absorbed every command I gave him at the student commons.
"Say something," I demand, my voice cracking on the second word.
"What do you want me to say, Kit?"
"Tell me it didn't mean anything. Tell me it was just sex. Tell me the good boy thing was just a trick Alphas use to make Omegas compliant and you've done it a hundred times before." I need him to say it. I need him to give me the ammunition I'm looking for so I can leave this room hating him the way I'm supposed to. "Just tell me I'm right."
He looks at me for a long time but when he opens his mouth, it’s not what I want. "I'm not going to lie to you," he sighs. "Not about this."
"Forget it." I open the door and walk out.
