Running shorts. Oversized t-shirt slipping off both shoulders now, exposing the straps of my sports bra and a generous portion of the skin my mother considers "unladylike to display outside of a gymnasium." Flushed face. Ruined hair. Swollen lips. I look like a woman who has been doing precisely what I have been doing, which is making catastrophic romantic decisions at high velocity in a room that smells like two people's combined pheromones have been marinating in an enclosed space with no ventilation.
"Tell them I'm in the shower!" The whisper is urgent, hissed through teeth that are clenched so hard my jaw protests.
He arches an eyebrow.
The expression communicates skepticism with a precision that is almost literary in its clarity.
"You're going to make it seem like we're a thing." His whisper matches mine in volume but exceeds it in composure, the bastard. "If you're comfortable showering with me right here."
"We don't have a choice!"
I scramble off his lap, the second dismount from this man's thighs in fifteen minutes, a personal record I intend to never think about again. My feet hit the hardwood. My hands grab the first clean t-shirt I can find from the chair beside my desk, a faded black crew neck with a hole in the collar that will do absolutely nothing for my dignity but at least constitutes a change of clothing.
I sprint to the bathroom.
My bathroom, mercifully connected to my bedroom, a private ensuite that my mother installed when I was fifteen because sharing a hallway bathroom with a sweaty Omegateenager was, in her words, "an olfactory assault on the household staff." I yank the door open, duck inside, and twist the shower handle to full blast in a single motion, the spray hammering the tile with a white noise that will cover any conversation happening in the bedroom behind me.
Then I flatten my back against the bathroom door and listen.
The bedroom door clicks. The lock mechanism turning from inside, which means he unlocked it. Which means he is now facing whoever knocked with the bed behind him and the bathroom running and the combined scent of our pheromones filling every cubic inch of the room like a neon sign reading TWO PEOPLE WERE DOING SOMETHING IN HERE.
"Where's Sage?"
My father. The gruff, familiar cadence muffled by two closed doors and the shower's percussion, but unmistakable. Carrying the specific tonal weight of a dad who left his daughter in a room with a young Alpha and has returned to assess whether his trust was warranted or catastrophically misplaced.
"In the shower." Archie's voice is level. Calm. Not a trace of the grin I can hear in it, but I know it is there because I have spent the last fifteen minutes learning to read the difference between his spoken words and the expression that accompanies them. "She came straight from practice, so she was overdue for one."
"How do you know she came from practice?"
The suspicion in Dad's question is dense enough to taste through the door.
"We met in the parking lot of the community center a few days ago and exchanged contact information." The lie is smooth, built on the scaffold of Jeffrey's earlier corroboration, each detail reinforcing the last. "She offered to help with my coursework since I'll need a strong GPA to maintain the Valenridgescholarship. We discussed it over text and agreed I'd come by today to establish a study schedule."
A pause.
Dad is processing. Evaluating. Running the story through thirty years of coaching-calibrated bullshit detection and either finding it plausible or finding holes but choosing not to excavate them in front of the suspect.
More questions follow. When did they exchange numbers. What subjects does he need tutoring in. How long has this arrangement been in place. Each one delivered with the methodical persistence of a man conducting a postgame analysis on a play that does not add up, and each one fielded by Archie with a composure that makes me wonder how much practice he has had lying to authority figures and whether that skill was self-taught or inherited.
A laugh interrupts the interrogation.
Deeper than Dad's. Warmer. Carrying the easy, barrel-chested amusement of a man who finds his son's predicament entertaining rather than alarming.
Archie's father.
"You're interrogating him like he's going to marry her right now, Rick." The voice is laced with the affectionate mockery that exists between men who have known each other long enough to dispense with diplomacy. "Let the boy breathe."
"Well, forgive my concern," Dad fires back, and I can hear the tension beneath the humor, the protective frequency that enters his voice whenever my proximity to an Alpha is involved. "Since he was defending her and going against a forty-year-old Alpha in an aura standoff five minutes ago, I think a few questions are warranted."
"She shouldn't have been having a confrontation with those old geezer bastards to begin with."
Archie's voice cuts through the exchange with a sharpness that makes me press my ear harder against the door. The composure is gone. The careful, measured cadence replaced by a raw, unfiltered edge that sounds like the voice he used downstairs when he positioned himself between me and the predator in the suit.
"So why the fuck are you interrogating me for doing what either of you should have done by intervening? Don't tell me your reaction times are that slow, because I'm pretty sure you'd be drilling me on the ice if I acted as casually as you both did back there."
Silence.
Heavy, loaded, parental silence. The kind that follows a statement from a child that is simultaneously disrespectful and accurate, leaving the adults in the room stranded between the instinct to discipline and the inability to argue with the truth.
