"You don't smell like a fucking wet dog." The words arrive with a ferocity that is completely disproportionate to their content, sharp enough to cut, carrying the specific indignation of a man who has just heard a factual error so egregious that his commitment to silence cannot survive it. "Who told you that?"
I bite my bottom lip.
It is a nervous habit. A leftover from childhood, from the years when biting down on the soft tissue of my lower lip was the only way to stop it from trembling in situations where trembling was a vulnerability I could not afford. I do it without thinking, my teeth catching the plush of my lip and pressing just enough to feel the yielding resistance of skin under pressure.
He watches.
His green eyes track the movement with a granular focus that makes the air between us thicken. They follow my teeth as they sink into the flesh of my lower lip, tracing the indentation they create, cataloguing the way the skin whitens under pressure andflushes pink when released. His pupils dilate. Not a lot. Just enough for the black to eat into the green ring surrounding it.
"You're annoying," he mutters.
And pushes me off his lap.
Not violently. Not with the kind of force that indicates genuine hostility. A firm, deliberate shove delivered with both hands flat against my hips, launching me sideways off his thighs with the efficiency of a man ejecting a piece of equipment from his workspace to clear room for concentration.
I hit the floor.
My ass connects with the hardwood beside the bed with a thud that reverberates through my tailbone and up my spine and directly into the center of my pride, which shatters on impact.
"You just pushed me onto the floor."
My voice emerges in a register of scandalized disbelief that I did not know I possessed. A pitch reserved for atrocities and national emergencies and the specific violation of having your body ejected from a mattress by an Alpha who is currently sitting on YOUR bed in YOUR room in YOUR house like he pays rent.
"While you're sitting on MY bed!"
He does not seem like he cares.
He is leaning back against my ridiculous throw pillows, his elbows propped on the whitebedding, his long legs stretched across the mattress with the territorial comfort of a man who has claimed this surface through occupation and intends to hold it through indifference.
This absolute fucker.
I am vertical in a heartbeat.
Up from the floor, across the two feet of space between hardwood and mattress, and onto him with the velocity of a forechecking winger closing a gap in the neutral zone. My body lands on his with a collision that forces a grunt from his lungs, my fists connecting with his chest in a rapid percussionof impact that is intended to communicate fury and instead communicates the structural integrity of his pectoral muscles.
"You arrogant, disrespectful, bed-stealing, floor-pushing piece of?—"
I punch his chest again.
And my hand detonates in pain.
"WHAT THE FLYING FUCK?!" I cradle my right fist against my stomach, the knuckles screaming, the tendons in my wrist vibrating with the aftershock of striking a surface that registered as significantly harder than human anatomy should legally be. "Your chest is made of fucking steel?! I could have broken my HAND!"
He rolls his eyes.
The motion is lazy, unhurried, accompanied by the deliberate placement of both hands behind his head as he settles deeper into my pillows with the infuriating serenity of a man who has been punched and found the experience boring.
"Whose fault is that, hmm?" The words are almost drowsy. Unbothered. Delivered through half-lidded green eyes that are watching my outrage the way a cat watches a bird that is slightly too far away to warrant the effort of pouncing. "You should know to keep your hands to yourself."
"Fuck off."
"I could." He tilts his head against the pillow, his ginger hair fanning across the white cotton in a sprawl of copper that my hindbrain finds unreasonably attractive and my conscious mind finds unreasonably offensive. "But you're lying on my lap, so I can't really do that, can I?"
I look down.
I am, in fact, lying across his lap. Again. My upper body draped over his thighs from the momentum of the tackle, my injured hand clutched to my chest, my face approximatelytwelve inches from his belt buckle in a configuration that is purely accidental and thoroughly incriminating.
"I want to fucking choke you."
