"What words?" he demands before I can speak. "You said you meant every word. What words? The ones where you called me just an Omega? The ones where you told your teammates nothing happened? Which words, Easton, because you've said a lot of them and most of them were shit."
He's wearing an oversized hoodie that swallows his frame and his hair is messy and his cheeks are flushed from what I'm guessing was a very fast, very angry walk across campus. His scent fills the hallway, two students down the hall listening in.
"Do you want to come in or do you want to do this where the entire third floor can hear?"
"Maybe the entire third floor should hear. Maybe I should scream it so everyone knows that Easton Cole texts Omegas he tormented like he's got something to say but can't manage to say it to their face."
I say his name without the smirk, quiet enough that the students down the hall can't hear, and his mouth snaps shut. The fury is still there but uncertainty flickers behind it that he covers by pushing past me into the room without waiting for a second invitation.
He stops in the middle of the floor with his arms crossed, vibrating with energy that has nowhere to go, and I watch his nostrils flare as my scent hits him, his shoulders loosening half an inch before he catches himself and forces them rigid again. His eyes find the bed, the one he slept in days ago, and his jaw tightens.
"Talk," he says. "You wanted to reach me? I'm here. So talk."
I close the door and lean against it, putting the width of the room between us. "I'm done pretending I hate you."
The honesty lands wrong on his face because the Omega definitely came braced for something sharper. "That's convenient. After six months of pretending really convincingly, you're just done? What, did you hit your quota?"
"Kit."
"Don't Kit me. You don't get to Kit me in that voice and expect me to just melt. That worked once and I'm not—"
"It was never about you being an Omega."
His mouth stays open around the next word, his arms loosening. "What?"
"The hallway stuff. The shoulder-checks. The comments." I push my glasses up because looking at his face while I say this is harder than anything I've done on a court. "It was never because you're an Omega. It was because you're you and I didn't know what to do with that."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"I know."
"You tormented me for six months because you didn't know what to do with your feelings? That's the most pathetic thing I've ever heard and I once watched Devon try to flirt with a vending machine."
"I'm not saying it's a good reason. I'm saying it's the real one."
Kit stares at me, the anger competing with confusion he can't quite suppress. He uncrosses his arms and then recrosses them. "You could have just talked to me," he whines, the fury thinning enough that I can hear the hurt underneath. "Six months ago in that stairwell. You could have said something normal instead of making a crack about Omegas clogging up the hallway. You could have been a person instead of a caricature and we could have skipped all of this."
"I know that too."
"Stop saying I know. It's almost as bad as okay." He drags a hand through his hair, tugging at the ends. "So why didn't you?"
The honest answer involves my father and my mother and a playbook I've been running since before I understood what it cost, but that confession is too big for tonight. Kit is standing in my room with his guard half-down and if I unload everything he'll drown in it, so I give him the piece that's true without the whole architecture behind it.
"Because I was scared. You walked into that stairwell and looked at me like I was furniture and my whole body lit up and I panicked. And when I panic I get mean. That's not your fault and it's not an excuse."
"You're right, it's not an excuse."
"What do you want me to say?"
His arms drop to his sides, the fight draining out of his posture. "I want you to say something that doesn't sound rehearsed. Something you haven't planned out. Somethingreal,Easton, because I'm standing in your room at nine thirty on a Friday and I don't even know why I came here except that you texted me four words and I haven't been able to stop thinking about them and that makes me so angry I could scream."
"You came because the text meant something and that scared you as much as the hallway scared me and you'd rather fight about it than sit with it."
His breath catches and the room goes quiet enough that I can hear the radiator clicking and someone's music through the wall. His scent shifts, the black cherry going syrupy the way it does when his body starts overriding his brain.
"I hate that you can read me," he says, quieter now.
"I've been studying you for over six months. I'd be a bad pre-med student if I hadn't learned something."
