Why does she reel me in?
I asked myself the same question in the shower, and the shower provided no answer, only a mess to clean up and a persistent sense of longing that outlasted the orgasm by a considerable margin. I am asking again now, staring at a ceiling crack in the dark, and the ceiling crack is equally unhelpful.
The yearning is unfamiliar.
Adding itself to a growing inventory of sensations I have never catalogued before: the urge to protect someone who did not ask for protection, the impulse to claim territory I have no right to, the specific ache that settles behind the sternum when you are separated from a scent your body has decided it requires for basic homeostasis.
I don't do this.
I don't yearn. I don't fantasize in showers. I don't lie awake thinking about green eyes and clover underwear and the way a woman's hips felt beneath my palms. I am Archie Hale Rosedale. I am the nobody. The nerd. The quiet kid in the back row who does not want and does not need and does not feel the primal, consuming, bone-level hunger that other Alphas describe when they talk about Omegas.
Except I do.
For her.
Specifically, exclusively, catastrophically for her.
I exhale through my nose, the breath fogging slightly in the cold air creeping through the window crack. The November chill settles across my bare skin, raising goosebumps along my arms and chest but doing nothing to cool the persistent warmth radiating from my core.
She will be at Valenridge.
The thought crystallizes with the clarity of ice forming on still water.
She got in. The acceptance letter was in her hands. The same program, the same campus, the same four-week gauntlet of training and competition and the pressure of proving that Omegas belong on a professional hockey pathway.
Pretend you don't know me, I told her.
And she will. Because she is stubborn and proud and angry enough to honor that request even if it costs her. She will walk past me in hallways and sit in classrooms and lace up skates in the same arena and not acknowledge that she climbed me like a tree and kissed me until neither of us could breathe and wore my shirt while reading the letter that changed her life.
She will pretend.
And so will I.
Because the performance is all I have. The mask is the only thing standing between the version of me the world tolerates and the version of me that pins Omegas against shower walls in his imagination and stands up to Alphas twice his age in living rooms and whispers things into women's ears that would embarrass the person I pretend to be in public.
Both versions are real.
And neither one knows how to exist without the other.
I close my eyes.
The darkness behind my lids is warm, populated by afterimages of green irises and ginger-lit rooms and the ghost sensation of a mouth pressed against mine with an urgency thattasted like hunger and defiance and the barest, most guarded trace of trust.
Tomorrow.
Tour of the university. Orientation walkthrough. A chance to see the facilities and the rink and the coaching staff and the program that five coaches recommended Sage for and my father enrolled me in with the subtlety of a man who treats his son's future like a coaching decision he is empowered to make unilaterally.
And maybe.
The thought builds slowly, assembling itself from fragments of ambition I have been suppressing for years beneath the comfortable weight of invisibility.
Maybe I will actually step onto that ice.
Not as the coach's son watching from the bleachers with a notebook and an analytical distance that protects him from the risk of failure. Not as the quiet observer cataloguing technique from behind sports goggles, dissecting other people's gameplay because participating in his own feels too dangerous for a man whose primary survival strategy is not being noticed.
As a player.
As the center I trained to be during eighteen months of sessions my father thought were purely conditioning. The playmaker whose hockey IQ runs three moves deep and whose body has been quietly, privately, obsessively honed for a position on the ice that he has never publicly claimed because claiming it would require removing the mask and the mask is the only thing keeping the world from seeing what is underneath.
