Open practice: 5:00 AM - 6:45 AM.
Open practice. Two hours. The ice is mine until six forty-five, which gives me enough time for basic drills and a cool-down before the Alpha testosterone parade arrives and converts the rink from a training facility into a territorial marking ground with Zamboni service.
I dressed in the dark twenty minutes ago, pulling clothes from the narrow wardrobe in my dorm room with the practiced silence of someone who has been sneaking out for early morning sessions since she was twelve and knows exactly how much noise a zipper makes when deployed without care. Black compression tights that hug every muscle from hip to ankle. A baggy gray t-shirt that belonged to my father before I claimed it through the legal doctrine of I-wore-it-once-and-now-it-is-mine. Hockey socks. Sneakers for the walk, skates packed in my bag for the destination.
The outfit is functional. Practical. And exactly the kind of clothing that would make my mother press her fingertips to her temples and deliver a lecture about presentation and the importance of first impressions that I could recite from memory because I have heard it approximately four hundred times.
Should have gone shopping before coming here.
The thought nags at me as I walk, an irritant lodged beneath the surface of my focus. Appearance matters at Valenridge in ways it did not matter at the community center or the forest trails of the Holloway estate. Students here dress with intention. The Alphas favor athletic luxury, fitted joggers and branded compression wear and sneakers that cost more than my monthly suppressant prescription. The Omegas gravitate toward curated femininity, soft fabrics and muted palettes and the specific, studied elegance of people who have been taught that their value is proportional to their visual appeal.
And then there is me. In compression tights and my dad's shirt, smelling like peppermint toothpaste and the anxiety sweat that accompanies every morning when my brain reminds me that the gap between who I am and who this place expects me to be is measured in wardrobe budgets I do not possess.
At least the uniform provides cover. Jace and I collected ours yesterday from the campus store: navy blazer, white button-down, plaid skirt hitting just above the knee. Very preppy. Very prestigious. Very much the visual equivalent of a costume designed to transform diverse human beings into a homogeneous advertisement for institutional excellence.
The skirt is a problem.
Not a practical problem. A philosophical one. I have worn skirts exactly three times in my life, each occasion accompanied by such visible discomfort that my father described me as looking like "a hockey player trapped in a formal hostage situation." The Valenridge version sits in my wardrobe with its pleats pressed and its hem measured and its entire existence radiating the specific energy of a garment that knows it will be worn under protest and resents the arrangement as much as its future occupant.
Leggings and oversized sweaters. That is my uniform. Has been since I was old enough to dress myself and choose comfort over compliance. Fabric that hides my body from judgment rather than presenting it for evaluation. Layers that say "I am here to work, not to be admired" in a language that my mother cannot speak and the fashion industry refuses to learn.
The dorm is an adjustment.
I will not claim ingratitude, because having a roof and a scholarship and a roommate who does not require me to justify my existence on a daily basis is a luxury that many Omegas in my position would trade significant portions of their future for. But the space is compact in ways the Holloway estate never preparedme for. Two bedrooms branching off a common area the size of my mother's walk-in closet. A kitchenette with a coffee maker that has become the emotional centerpiece of my morning routine. Shared walls that transmit sound with the enthusiastic indiscretion of materials that were not designed with privacy as a priority.
Jace's room door was closed when I slipped out this morning, the soft silence behind it suggesting sleep rather than early-morning contemplation. He adjusts to new environments the way he adjusts to everything: quietly, methodically, with the contained efficiency of a person who has learned to occupy unfamiliar spaces without disturbing them.
I wonder how he is handling this transition.
The thought lingers as I cross the campus grounds, the November air biting through my tights and settling into the skin of my bare arms with the clinical persistence of weather that does not care about exposed biceps.
Being a male Omega is rare enough to constitute a statistical anomaly. Jace exists in a designation category that most textbooks mention in footnotes and most social structures have not bothered to accommodate. The world built its Omega infrastructure around female bodies and female presentations, and male Omegas like Jace navigate a landscape that was not designed for them and does not adjust easily to their presence.
And the dating question.
Does he prefer men? Women? Both? Neither? The designation does not dictate the attraction, and I have known Jace long enough to understand that his romantic life is a closed file he opens for nobody, a vault whose combination changes every time someone gets close enough to attempt the lock.
Just because an Omega is male does not mean they are into men. That assumption is the kind of reductive, designation-based thinking that I have spent my entire life fighting against on the ice, applied to sexuality instead of sport. But the world makes the assumption anyway, and Jace absorbs the weight of it with the same silent, stoic composure he applies to every other misconception projected onto his existence.
He has needs. Omegas have needs, male or female. Biological imperatives that do not politely recuse themselves because the social context is complicated. Heat cycles. Hormonal surges. The primal, bone-level hunger for connection that designation hardwires into our nervous systems regardless of our preferences regarding its expression.
And he has been single for as long as I have known him, which is either a choice or a consequence, and I love him too much to ask which one because the answer might be sadder than I am equipped to hold.
My thoughts drift, as they do whenever the morning is quiet enough to let them wander, toward a destination I have been trying to block since I left the Holloway estate.
Archie.
The cedarwood scent floods my memory before the visual arrives, a phantom warmth that my brain has catalogued and my hindbrain retrieves without permission. His lips against mine. The pressure of his hands on my hips. The controlled, precise way he kissed, like every movement was deliberate and every breath was calculated and the intensity behind the discipline was a furnace door being held shut by willpower alone.
I bite my bottom lip, the ghost of his teeth catching mine in the same spot he claimed during the kiss replaying in the nerve endings with a sensory fidelity that borders on cruel.
It is too fucking early to be a horny Omega craving an Alpha who clearly cannot be mine.
We do not get along. The bickering is constant. The insults fly in both directions with the velocity and accuracy of slapshots from the point. He pushes me off beds. I punch his steel-reinforced chest. He calls me Wildcard. I tell him his glasses are ugly. The dynamic is adversarial at its foundation, held together by a chemical attraction so intense it overrides the rational objections my brain produces at a rate of approximately twelve per minute.
And sure, he stood up for me. Twice. Positioned himself between me and danger with the quiet, terrifying confidence of a man who has been training for violence and is very good at it. No Alpha has ever done that for me. No Alpha has ever considered my safety worth the risk of his own, not without expecting ownership in return.
But that cannot be a pattern. That was situational. Adrenaline and proximity and the pheromone feedback loop that turns rational adults into biological puppets when the scent chemistry aligns. It will not happen again because we are at a university now, surrounded by hundreds of other students, and the probability of needing a freckled bodyguard in an academic setting is statistically insignificant.
