Jaleesa
Mythighsareonfire. Not the metaphorical kind. The deep, muscular, next-day-after-a-marathon kind, except the marathon lasted two days and the finish line kept moving. Every shift of weight sends a pulse of soreness through muscles I didn’t know I owned. My hips carry the ghost-impression of his grip—ten distinct pressure points that I cataloged the first time I looked and have been trying not to look at since. My throat is raw. The bite mark at the junction of my neck and shoulder throbs with its own heartbeat, darker now, swollen and permanent against my skin.
I don’t touch it. Touching it would mean acknowledging it belongs to someone.
The bathroom mirror gives me the full report. Wild tangle of curls, wrecked beyond repair without a proper wash. Marks mapped across my body—his hands, his mouth, a cartography of the last forty-eight hours written on my skin in bruises and beard burn and the raw pink lines his teeth left below mycollarbone. The exhaustion in my own eyes is so deep it looks structural, like it’s been there longer than two days. Like my body has been waiting to collapse and only just got permission.
I turn on the shower. The hot water hits my shoulders and I brace both hands against the tile, letting the pressure beat against muscles that have been clenched for longer than any honest count. Steam fills the small space. I tip my head back and let the water run through my hair, over my face, down the length of me, and try to wash off what can’t be washed off—his scent, layered so deep into my skin it’s woven into my own biochemistry. There’s no telling where he ends and I begin.
The bathroom door opens.
I don’t flinch. Don’t cover myself. Forty-eight hours ago I would have thrown the shampoo bottle at his head. Now the sound of Hunter Vaughn entering a room I’m in registers somewhere below alarm and above inevitability.
He steps into the shower behind me. No words. His hands find my shoulders first—warm and deliberate—then move up to my hair. His fingers work into my curls, separating them, gentle in a way that doesn’t match the man who pinned me to the mattress two hours ago. He’s washing my hair. Actually washing it, massaging my scalp with slow, thorough circles, and my eyes close before I authorize the surrender.
He plays with the curls as the water runs through them. Wraps one around his finger, watches it spring back, does it again. Learning the texture the way he learned the rest of me—with the obsessive focus of a man who doesn’t know how to do anything halfway.
My hands drop from the tile. My head tips back against his chest. He’s solid and warm and his heartbeat is steady against my spine and the thought that forms is:I love him.
No.It.I loveit.This. The hands and the heat and the water. That’s all. Anything else is certifiable.
Then he kneels.
The water is still running, streaming over both of us, and he is on his knees on the tile floor with his mouth moving down my stomach, and I know exactly where this is headed because he’s told me—a thousand times, literally, over the last however-many hours—that he’s addicted to my taste. That the sounds I make when his tongue is on me are the only closing argument he never wants to win.
My fingers drive through his wet hair. Grip. Pull him closer.
I should have known. A man that skilled with words—that precise, that devastating with a sentence—was always going to be equally lethal with his tongue. The best orators always are.
***
We eat breakfast at the same oak table that was a legal battlefield two days ago. My briefs are still scattered across one end. His files still squared on the other. We eat in the no-man’s-land between our arguments, and the domesticity of it—him cooking, me in one of his shirts because my blouse is missing the button he ripped off—is so dissonant with everything we are to each other that I keep waiting for the scene to fracture.
“Tell me about your family.” He says it the way he says everything—direct, no preamble, like the question has already been cross-examined for relevance and admitted into evidence.
“Is this the discovery phase, or are you just fishing for deposition material?”
He doesn’t react. Doesn’t fire back. Just holds my gaze across the table with those gray-green eyes and waits. Patient. Unhurried. Certain the silence will do his work for him.
It does. The absence of a fight disarms me more effectively than any comeback could. I set my fork down.
“My family is normal. My mother is an omega. My father is a beta.”
His eyebrows shift. Barely—a quarter inch, maybe less—but I catch it.
“She wasn’t waiting around for some alpha to find her and pick her like produce at a grocery store. She chose her own life. Married a good man who loved her. Raised a daughter. Built everything on her own terms.”
“Risky.” He turns his coffee cup between his hands. “What if she’d found her alpha after bonding with a beta?”
“She never did. So it all worked out.” I hold his gaze. “She believed omegas should have choices.”
The sentence sits between us on the oak table, right next to the Maya Lincoln file and the breakfast plates, and I watch it land.
“Why don’t you?”
The shift in him is seismic and nearly invisible. A stillness in his hands on the coffee cup. His jaw tightening by a degree.
He tells me about his father. Not the corporate version—the real one. An alpha who bonded, loved completely, and when his omega died, dissolved. Not all at once. Slowly. Stopped eating. Withdrew. Lost everything that made him the man his sons remembered. Four boys watched it happen. Four boys decided: never us.
