"The night. Is. Young."
"You said that already."
His eyes narrow and for a second I see the version of Kit that scares me, the one who doesn't bluster or deflect but puts up all his walls and truly tries to hit where it hurts. The one who found the glasses comment in thirty seconds flat and used it like a scalpel. "You want worse? Fine. We're going to your room. You're going to sit there while I go through your things and find every embarrassing piece of your life and you're going to watch me enjoy it."
The words are designed to provoke and they do, just not the way he intended. Kit wants to come to my room. Kit, who has spent six months avoiding any space I occupy, just volunteered to enter the most private one. The fact that he framed it as a power move doesn't change what it is, and the way his scent spiked when he said it tells me his body knows even if his brain hasn't caught up.
"Okay," I say.
His mouth opens to argue the refusal that didn't come. He stands there on the path with his lips parted and his argument stalled. "Okay?" he repeats.
"You're in charge tonight. You said so. If you want to go through my room, we'll go to my room." I start walking toward the residence hall, passing him close enough that my shoulder almost brushes his. "Fair warning, my roommate is gone for the week. So it's just us."
I hear his footsteps behind me after a three-second delay. The hesitation is louder than anything he's said all night.
The residence hall is quiet at this hour, most of the basketball team still at the auction afterparty. I hold the door open and Kit walks through without acknowledging the gesture, his chin lifted, his posture screaming defiance. The elevator ride to the third floor is silent. Kit stands on the opposite side of the car with his arms crossed and his coffee cup crushed in his grip, the cardboard caving in under his fingers.
By the time we get to my dorm, I’m still not sure what he’s expecting to happen. I unlock the door, flipping on the desk lamp and leaving the overhead off. Kit follows me in and stops just past the threshold, his eyes scanning the room with the focused intensity of someone cataloging exits.
It's a standard double, my roommate's side bare since he packed for break. My side has the bed made because my mother wouldn't have it any other way and two years after losing her I still can't leave the sheets untucked without hearing her voice. A bookshelf crammed with basketball theory and anatomy textbooks. The framed photo of her on the desk, the one from her birthday the year before the accident, her laugh caught mid-motion, her hand reaching toward whoever was holding the camera. And a poster of Michael Jordan that Marcus gave me as a joke freshman year that I kept because it's actually a good photo.
Kit's gaze snags on the framed photo and stays there a beat too long. His expression softens the hard line of his jaw for a fraction of a second before he catches it and looks away.
"This is it?" he growls out, disappointed. "I expected more ego. Where are the trophies? The shrine to yourself?"
"Trophy case is in the athletics building. I can take you there if you want the full tour."
"Pass." He moves further into the room, trailing his fingers along the edge of my desk as he circles it. He picks up a textbook, flips through it, and then sets it down. The Omega opens a desk drawer, peers inside, and then closes it. His movements feel forced as he searches but his scent is going haywire, the black cherry thickening with every second he spends in a room that smells overwhelmingly like me.
I lean against the doorframe and watch him. God, I want to reach for him so bad but Dad said to let an Omega come to me. My mother used to laugh at him when he talked like that. She'd press her hand against his chest and tell him that the bravest thing an Alpha could do was ask for what he wanted and risk hearing no. He never argued with her about it. He just stopped talking about it after she died.
"Anatomy," Kit reads off the spine of a textbook, his voice pitched to sound bored. "Light reading?"
"Pre-med track. Orthopedic surgery, eventually."
He glances at me over his shoulder and there's a flicker of surprise he doesn't hide fast enough. "You want to be a surgeon."
"I want to fix things." The words come out more honest than I planned. My mother broke her hip in the accident before the internal bleeding took her, and the orthopedic surgeon was the one who kept trying after the ER team had already started using past tense. He didn't save her. But he was the last person who fought for her, and something about that lodged in me and never came out. Kit doesn't need to know any of this right now. But his hand has stilled on the textbook and the room feels smaller with both of us in it, my scent and his tangling in the enclosed space until every breath I take tastes like black cherry and the tightundercurrent of energy underneath it that I've been chasing since September.
Kit sets the book down and turns to face me, leaning against my desk with his arms crossed. His eyes keep dropping to my mouth and snapping back up, the movement quick enough that he probably thinks I can't track it.
I track every single one.
"What are you looking at?" he asks, his voice harder than his expression.
"You."
"Stop."
"No."
The room is so quiet I can hear the small hitch in his chest that he covers by uncrossing his arms and gripping the edge of the desk behind him. The new posture opens his body up, the blazer pulling back to show the cream sweater stretched across his chest, and I don't think he realizes what he just did. Kit's body keeps making decisions his brain hasn't approved, leaning in when his words push away, opening up when his voice locks down.
"You're staring," he says, his voice having lost the edge.
"I've been staring at you for six months, Kit. I'm not going to stop now because you told me to."
He pushes off the desk and takes a step toward me, then stops. The distance between us is maybe five feet and he's stuck in the middle of it, caught between the door behind me and the desk behind him.
