I strip my tank off.
The motion is efficient, not performative. Arms crossing, fabric lifting, the damp material clearing my head and leaving me in nothing above the waist. The arena's cold air hits the exposed skin of my chest and abdomen with an immediate, contracting bite that raises goosebumps along my rib cage and tightens every muscle visible beneath the surface.
I hold the tank out to her.
"There. Carry my stuff, Wildcard."
She stares at the offered garment like I have handed her a live animal of a species she cannot identify and does not trust.
"Ew. I don't want your sweaty-ass tank."
"What? You're going to chicken out of the bet?"
"Fuck off."
"I will. After you've left. Unless you want to be the perfect audience for my post-workout wind-down in the shower." I tilt my head, watching the implication register in her eyes with the delayed-fuse precision of a statement designed to detonate three seconds after delivery. "Can't promise it'll be a short one."
She groans, the sound vibrating through the corridor with the resonance of a woman whose patience has been stretched past its tensile strength.
"Alphas are all the fucking same!"
I chuckle, following her through the corridor that connects the rink to the locker facilities. The hallway is narrow, lined with team photographs and championship banners and the faded scent of decades of competitive sweat that has been absorbed into the concrete walls and never fully extracted. Her sneakers squeak against the tile. The tank she reluctantly accepted dangles from one fist like a captured flag.
Her scent fills the corridor. Peppermint and grass and cherry blossom, amplified by exertion, sharpened by frustration, sweetened by the heat that her body generates during physicalcompetition and distributes through her pheromone output with the indiscriminate generosity of a woman who does not realize that her scent at peak exertion is a controlled substance that should require a prescription.
She huffs over her shoulder.
"You'd get your dick sucked faster if you talked less with that cocky attitude."
I grin.
The expression arrives unbidden, wide and uncontrolled, breaking through the measured composure I maintain in public with the force of a statement so unexpected that my facial muscles override my social protocols.
We reach the lockers. Metal doors lining both walls in rows, each one numbered, each one assigned. The fluorescent lighting is harsh after the arena's amber glow, casting the space in a clinical white that eliminates shadows and reveals every detail with unforgiving clarity.
I step forward.
She steps backward.
Her spine meets the surface of the locker behind her, the metal cool against her sweat-damp t-shirt, the contact producing a faint, hollow ring that echoes through the empty room. I close the remaining distance until the geometry leaves no exit, my arms bracing against the lockers on either side of her head, my body creating a wall between her and the rest of the world.
We share a look.
Not the bickering variety. Not the competitive, on-ice glare that we have been exchanging for the past hour. This look is the other kind. The kind that strips the humor and the insults and the protective layers of sarcasm from the air between two people and leaves behind only the raw, unprocessed signal that theirpheromones have been broadcasting since the first collision on a forest trail.
Her green eyes are enormous at this range. Pupils dilated. The gold ring around the iris expanded by the low light of the locker room and the proximity of an Alpha whose scent is filling the enclosed space with cedarwood and amber at a concentration that makes the air between us feel carbonated.
Her breath accelerates. I can hear it. The shallow, quickened rhythm of a woman whose body is responding to proximity in ways her pride will not permit her to acknowledge.
I lean in.
My lips arrive at her ear with the specific proximity that I have learned converts my voice from communication into sensation, each word registering against her skin as vibration before her brain decodes it as language.
"And do you think I'm someone who would let any Omega get on her knees and suck me off?"
The whisper is low. Controlled. Carrying the quiet authority that I keep leashed in public and have allowed off its chain twice now, both times in her presence, both times because her existence in my proximity activates a version of myself that the rest of the world has never met.
I lean closer.
