He is holding me like I weigh nothing.
And that is doing terrible, wonderful, catastrophic things to my lower abdomen.
Our lips are smashing together with a ferocity that belongs in a different genre of fiction. This is not the soft, tentative, testing-the-waters first kiss that romance novels describe in slow motion with lots of internal poetry about melting and fireworks and the gentle collision of two souls finding their way home. This kiss is hunger. Raw, mutual, almost angry hunger. The kind that tastes like adrenaline and bad decisions and the specific desperation of two people who have been fighting their own chemistry for days and just lost the war simultaneously.
His mouth is devastating.
Firm lips, skilled pressure, a rhythm that alternates between aggressive and coaxing in a pattern I cannot predict and therefore cannot defend against. He kisses like he speaks: controlled, deliberate, every movement calculated for maximum impact with minimum wasted energy. His lower lip catches mine and pulls, and the sound that exits my throat is not a moan so much as a confession that my body is extracting without my consent.
He groans against my mouth in response. The vibration travels through his chest, through the fists I have buried in his shirt, through the bones of my wrists and up my arms and down my spine until it registers in a location significantly south of my ribcage. His fingers tighten on my thighs, the pressure of his grip shifting from supportive to possessive in a transition so subtle it would be invisible to anyone not currently wrapped around him like a vine on a trellis.
I have kissed people before.
Alphas at parties who tasted like cheap beer and confidence. A Beta in college who was gentle and forgettable. An Omega once, on a dare during a tournament after-party, which taught me that I am exclusively interested in men but deeply appreciative of good lip gloss.
None of them kissed like this.
None of them made me fight for dominance in their mouth like a territorial dispute conducted entirely through tongue and teeth and the increasingly aggressive angle of jaw against jaw. He pushes, I push back. He bites my lower lip, I bite his harder. He tilts his head to deepen the angle, I counter by gripping the back of his neck and pulling him where I want him, which is everywhere and nowhere and pressed against me until the boundary between separate bodies dissolves into irrelevant geography.
I disdain most Alphas.
Truthfully. Authentically. With the specific conviction of a woman who has been dismissed, underestimated, mocked, and threatened by Alpha men since she was old enough to hold a hockey stick. Past experiences and rejections have crystallized into a default distrust that I carry like equipment: heavy, familiar, essential for survival.
But this one.
This quiet, freckled, bespectacled nerd who emerged from a forest trail three days ago and has now stood up for me not once but twice, who positioned himself between me and a predator in my own living room and declared me his with the casual certainty of a man reading a weather forecast, who fabricated an entire tutoring arrangement on the spot and then let me drag him through my mother's house by the hand without a single word of complaint.
Watching an Alpha stand on business before your family and protect you against strange, sketchy Alphas who want amarriage of convenience with an Omega ten-plus years their junior is apparently a turn-on in my books.
Who fucking knew.
Before I fully register the transition, the geography changes. His legs hit the edge of my bed. He sits, the mattress dipping under the combined weight of two bodies and twenty minutes of accumulated adrenaline, and suddenly I am on his lap. Again. For the third time in three encounters, I am straddling this man's hips, which is starting to feel less like coincidence and more like a recurring theme that the universe is trying to beat into my skull with a hockey stick.
My bedroom snaps into focus around us in the periphery of my awareness, and mortification hits me with the delayed impact of a body check delivered three seconds after you thought you were safe.
This room.
This fucking room.
Because my bedroom, the private space that no stranger has entered since I was sixteen and my mother stopped scheduling interior design consultations without my permission, is a battlefield between two opposing aesthetic philosophies, and the one currently winning is not the one I would have chosen to display in front of a man whose tongue was inside my mouth four seconds ago.
The walls are blush pink. A soft, aggressively feminine blush that my mother selected when I was twelve and refused to let me repaint when I turned thirteen and developed opinions. The bedding is white with subtle rose-gold threading that catches the light from the window and makes the entire sleeping surface look like it belongs in a bridal magazine. There are throw pillows. Actual throw pillows with embroidered florals and tasseled edges, stacked against the headboard in a formation that my mother's decorator refreshes every time the cleaningcrew visits, despite my repeated requests to use them as target practice for my wrist shot.
The hockey posters and gear rack and analytics printouts are my contributions. My rebellion against the curated femininity imposed on every other surface. But they exist in an uneasy truce with the pink walls and the rose-gold threaded bedding, creating an overall visual impression of a girl who cannot decide whether she wants to be a Victoria's Secret model or a defenseman and has elected to be neither and both in a way that satisfies no one.
This tomboy sleeps in a room that looks like a flamingo exploded inside a Pottery Barn catalog.
And now a man is sitting on the flamingo's bed.
We are both breathless.
Lungs working in tandem, chests rising and falling with the synchronized urgency of two bodies that just expended more cardiovascular energy kissing than most people burn during an actual workout. My lips are swollen, tingling with the residual electricity of contact. His are flushed, a darker shade against the freckled skin surrounding them, slightly parted as he draws air through the gap between his teeth.
His green eyes are locked on mine.
My green eyes are locked on his.
And we are glaring.
