"I don't even need your damn shirt!" I wave it in his direction, the fabric flapping with my indignation. "It smells!"
"It smells like wonder and exploration." His voice carries the serene, unbothered quality of a man who is enjoying this exchange far more than he should be. "Since you didn't seem to mind trying to climb me like a tree fifteen minutes ago."
Heat swarms my face.
"I did not?—"
"And surely trying to unbuckle my belt."
The heat reaches a temperature that could forge steel.
I am red. Not pink. Not flushed. The shade of a ripe tomato left in the sun during a heatwave, my entire complexion transformed into a beacon of mortification that confirms every allegation he just leveled without requiring verbal admission.
I did try to unbuckle his belt.
I forgot about that part. My brain helpfully erased that detail during the shower, filing it under Repressed Memories: Do Not Access, and now he has retrieved it from the archive and placed it on the kitchen table for everyone to examine.
I throw the shirt at his face.
Direct hit. The black fabric drapes across his features, muffling the chuckle that escapes him. Not a laugh. A chuckle. Low, warm, vibrating through his chest in a frequency that my hindbrain intercepts and files under Sounds We Would Like To Hear More Of, which is treason of the highest biological order.
He peels the shirt off his face, still grinning, and tosses it back.
It lands on my shoulder this time, the sleeve draping down my arm like a surrendered flag.
"Stop being a stubborn Omega, Wildcard." His green eyes meet mine through the fringe of ginger hair that has fallen across his forehead during the shirt exchange. The grin softens into that half-smirk, the asymmetric curl at the corner of his mouth that makes his dimples ghost beneath the freckles. "Didn't you have mail or some shit?"
"I don't know why you keep calling me Wildcard!"
But the reminder hits my brain like a cold bucket of water dumped on a campfire. The complaint dies mid-formation as the wordmaildetonates through the layers of flirtation and panic and clover-patterned humiliation that have been consuming my attention for the last three minutes.
The envelope.
Jeffrey's envelope.
The heavy, cream-colored, navy-and-gold-crested envelope from Valenridge University that Jeffrey produced from thin air in the living room to give me an exit and that I have been carrying in my free hand and then setting on my desk and then completely forgetting about because I was too busy kissing an Alpha and getting pushed off beds and throwing shirts at faces to remember that the most important piece of correspondence I have received in my entire life is sitting three feet from me.
"Wait." My eyes go wide. "You're right. I did have mail."
I scan the room, my gaze sweeping past hockey posters and gear racks and rumpled bedding until it lands on the desk, where the envelope sits atop a drift of analytics printouts, its navy-and-gold crest catching the bedside lamp's glow like a signal fire.
I cross the room in four strides, my bare feet slapping the hardwood with the urgency of someone who has just remembered that the oven is on and the house might be burning. The shirt he threw at me is still hanging off my shoulder. Ileave it there because my hands are busy: one snatching the envelope from the desk, the other working the adhesive seal on the back with fingers that are trembling from a combination of residual adrenaline and the specific terror of hope that has been disappointed too many times to arrive without anxiety as its escort.
I pull the contents free.
Multiple pages. Heavy stock paper matching the original letter's quality, each sheet printed with the Valenridge crest and formatted with the typographic precision of institutional correspondence that has been reviewed by a legal team before reaching the applicant. My eyes hit the first page and begin moving left to right with a speed that would impress the literacy specialists who tested me in elementary school and declared my reading comprehension "unusually advanced for a child who claims to only read hockey rulebooks."
My jaw drops.
The motion is involuntary, my mandible surrendering to gravity under the weight of the information my eyes are delivering to my brain. Because the first page is not a rejection. It is not a waitlist notification. It is not a politely worded acknowledgment of my application followed by the careful, euphemistic language of institutional decline.
It is an acceptance.
Dear Miss Sage Elowen Holloway,
We are delighted to inform you that your application to Valenridge University's Omega Integration Program has been approved.
Approved.
