I did not expect him to.
The pasta water reaches a rolling boil. He feeds the spaghetti into the pot with the practiced hand of a man who does not need to consult the package for cooking times because his internal clock tracks the al dente window with the same precision his brain tracks power play formations.
I settle onto the couch with my book.
The paperback is a cozy romance that Jace recommended during one of our late-night dorm conversations before the plumbing catastrophe rendered our living arrangement extinct. The cover features a man in a hockey jersey and a woman with a gaming controller, their bodies angled toward each other with the specific lean that romance cover art uses to communicatethese two people are about to make extremely poor decisions together.
The premise is absurd. A professional gamer starts dating a cocky hockey player who is simultaneously the most infuriating and attractive person she has ever encountered, and theirrelationship unfolds through a series of bets, bickering matches, and the gradual erosion of emotional walls that both of them constructed for valid reasons and are now dismantling for equally valid reasons.
The parallels to my current living situation are so aggressive that I suspect the universe is ghostwriting my life and this novel is the first draft.
I intend to read sitting upright. Like a normal person. With my spine against the cushions and my feet on the floor and the book held at a socially acceptable angle that does not invite commentary about my relationship with gravity.
That lasts approximately four minutes.
By minute five, I have migrated to a horizontal position. By minute eight, my legs have climbed the back of the couch. By minute twelve, I am fully inverted, my spine draped over the seat cushion, my legs extended vertically against the wall, my head hanging off the front edge with my navy-and-emerald hair pooling on the floor in a dark tangle, and the book held above my face in a configuration that requires my arms to defy physics but provides the optimal blood-flow-to-brain ratio for processing romantic tension between fictional characters whose dynamic is uncomfortably familiar.
I am lost in the story.
Completely, irretrievably consumed by a chapter where the hockey player has said the precise wrong thing at the precise wrong time and the gamer is delivering a verbal evisceration so thorough it should require a medical license. My pout deepens with each page, my lower lip pushing forward in solidarity with a fictional woman whose frustration with a fictional Alpha mirrors my own frustration with a real one so accurately that the boundary between reading and living dissolves.
A touch lands on my forehead.
Light. Warm. The pad of a finger pressing against the skin between my eyebrows with the gentle, diagnostic pressure of someone checking a temperature they did not realize they intended to measure.
I blink.
Archie's face fills my vision. Inverted. His green eyes aimed down at me from above, his ginger hair falling forward in gravity-assisted strands that frame his angular features from an angle I have not previously catalogued. One eyebrow is arched behind the wire-rimmed frames, the expression communicating a blend of amusement and genuine scientific curiosity about the woman draped upside down across his furniture.
"Are you comfortable reading upside down?"
The blush arrives before the answer. Heat flooding my inverted face with the instantaneous, comprehensive coverage of a woman who has been caught in a position she did not intend to assume by a man whose proximity she did not hear arrive. His face is close. Inches close. The cedarwood scent concentrated at this range into a potency that my inverted olfactory system processes with the amplified sensitivity of a brain already receiving elevated blood flow.
I am literally upside down on his couch. Reading a romance novel about a hockey player while living with a hockey player. In his shirt. After being displaced by a flood. While he cooked me dinner.
This is SO fucking embarrassing. He probably thinks I am the strangest Omega to ever exist on a campus where "strange" is a competitive category.
"I totally didn't realize I'd done that," I admit, the words arriving inverted, my voice slightly altered by the gravity pressing on my vocal cords from the wrong direction. "But I'm not reading the book upside down. I like the sensation of being upside down. The position. It helps me focus."
"Doesn't the blood rush to your head?"
I smirk. Slightly. The expression rendered peculiar by its inverted orientation but carrying its intended warmth regardless.
"Only when you sit up too fast."
He nods slowly. Still close. His breath warm against my forehead where his finger rested a moment ago, the contact having withdrawn but the thermal impression lingering on my skin like a brand applied with tenderness rather than force.
The arena noise and the scrimmage chaos and the coaching office and the flooded dorm and every complication that has defined this day recedes into background static, replaced by the specific, intimate quiet of two faces separated by inches and the question that has been living in my throat since the locker room.
"Are you okay?" I whisper.
The words exit with the deliberate gentleness of a woman placing a fragile object on a surface she is not sure can support it. Not demanding. Not prying. Offering the question the way you offer an open hand to a frightened animal: palm up, fingers relaxed, available if needed and retractable if not.
He stares at me. Long. Hard. The green of his eyes filling my inverted field of vision with a depth that carries more data than his silence is willing to verbalize. His jaw works. The muscles beneath his freckled skin shifting with the pressure of words being considered and rejected and reconsidered in the rapid editorial process that governs his every utterance.
I ask only because I want us to return to the bickering. To the insults and the taunting and the specific, combative rhythm that makes the space between us feel navigable rather than vast. I want the Archie who calls me Wildcard and pushes me off beds and invites me to choke him with the dry audacity of an Alpha whose flirtation style was developed by someone who learned romance from a textbook and decided the textbook was boring.
But I also wish I could do more.
