And this woman has my body behaving like it discovered hormones yesterday and is trying to make up for two decades of lost time in a single shower session.
I clean up with the mechanical efficiency of a man performing routine maintenance on equipment he is slightly disgusted with. Soap. Rinse. The evidence of my surrender swirling down the drain alongside the cold water and the remnants of my dignity.
The shower cuts off with a squeak of aged plumbing.
Silence fills the bathroom, broken only by the drip of residual water from the showerhead and the sound of my breathing settling into its resting cadence. The mirror above the sink is fogged despite the cold water, the humidity from my overheated skin producing enough atmospheric moisture to coat every reflective surface.
I towel my hair roughly, the terry cloth scrubbing through the ginger strands until they stand in chaotic spikes. My reflection emerges in patches as the mirror clears: freckled skin still flushed, green eyes carrying the glassy, unfocused look of postorgasmic recalibration, jaw set in the particular clench it adopts when I am irritated with myself and do not intend to stop being irritated anytime soon.
This is pathetic.
You are a twenty-three-year-old Alpha with a full scholarship to a prestigious university and a kickboxing-conditioned physique and supposedly above-average intelligence, and you are standing naked in a bathroom feeling hollow because you masturbated to the memory of an Omega you met twice and cannot stop smelling in the walls of your own sinuses.
Get a grip, Rosedale.
A different kind of grip.
I walk into my bedroom without bothering to dress.
The room is sparse by any standard. A queen bed with navy sheets, unmade because I consider bed-making a task without functional purpose. A desk dominated by a dual-monitor setup surrounded by the detritus of a person who processes information through multiple mediums simultaneously: stacked textbooks, annotated printouts, three separate notebooks filled with handwriting that oscillates between obsessive neatness and the fevered scrawl of someone chasing a thought faster than their pen can move. A bookshelf that my father built when I was twelve, holding volumes that range from hockey analytics to advanced calculus to a paperback collection of poetry that I will deny owning if questioned under oath.
No posters on the walls. No decorations. No personal touches beyond the equipment bag in the corner and the pair of skates drying on a towel by the closet. The room exists as a functional space rather than an expressive one, designed for sleep and study and the occasional video game session, not for personality.
The opposite of her room.
Her room was a war between who she is and who she is expected to be, every surface contested territory. Pink walls she cannot repaint versus hockey posters she refuses to remove. Rose-gold bedding imposed by a mother who views femininity as a performance metric versus a gear rack occupying an entire wall because her priorities are organized by function, not aesthetic.
I liked her room. Liked the honesty of the conflict displayed on every surface. Liked that she has not resolved the tension because resolving it would mean surrendering one version of herself, and Sage Holloway does not surrender.
I crack the bedroom window. Three inches of November air infiltrating the frame, carrying the scent of cold earth and driedleaves and the distant, metallic tang of the first frost settling across the lawns. The temperature drop is necessary. I run hot. Have always run hot, my basal body temperature sitting a full degree above average in a way that makes clothing feel like punishment and blankets feel like incarceration.
Sleeping naked is not a preference. It is a medical requirement for someone whose thermoregulation operates on a setting calibrated for a furnace rather than a human body. Between the kickboxing and the hockey training and whatever genetic contribution my father's side of the family made to my internal combustion system, wearing clothes to bed produces the kind of trapped, suffocating heat that turns sleep into a wrestling match with cotton.
I collapse onto the mattress. The navy sheets are cool against my bare skin, absorbing the residual warmth from the shower and the deeper warmth that refuses to leave despite my best efforts to expel it through cold water and physical exertion.
My back hits the mattress. My eyes find the ceiling. A flat expanse of white plaster with a hairline crack running diagonally from the light fixture to the northwest corner, a flaw I have been staring at since we moved into this house and have never requested repaired because it gives me a fixed point to anchor my thoughts when they spiral.
She smelled like...
No. Stop. You are not doing this again. You literally just addressed this situation with considerable vigor and limited dignity three minutes ago. The topic is closed. The file is archived. Move on.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
The vibration travels through the wood surface and into the bed frame, reaching my awareness through the mattress springs with the persistence of a device that knows it is being ignored and has escalated its notification protocol accordingly.
I reach for it. The screen illuminates my face in the dark room, the blue-white glow harsh against my adjusted pupils.
Two notifications. Group chat. The contact names glowing on the lock screen in the familiar formatting that I have been reading for six years.
Ronan A.
Rowan A.
The Archer twins.
I met them the way my generation meets everyone who matters: through a screen, separated by an ocean, connected by a shared obsession with competitive gaming and the mutual inability to interact with real people in real spaces without severe discomfort.
It started with hockey simulation games. NHL franchise mode, specifically, during the summer I turned seventeen and my father's coaching schedule left me alone in the house for fourteen-hour stretches with nothing but a console, an internet connection, and the specific loneliness of a teenager whose social circle consisted of his own reflection and a golden retriever named Biscuit who was a great listener but terrible at video games.
