Page 34 of Knottingley Ever After
There is the safe one, the one where I tell him to wait outside, get dressed in private, walk to lunch like a sane professional, keep the closed museum closed. And there is the other one.
The water has worn something down in me.
The cold, the adrenaline, the hour of being a wall, the release that took the edge off nothing at all and somehow honed it. My guard, the one I keep welded into place around every Alpha alive, has slipped its bolts, and underneath it is the version of me that does not wait to be offered things.
The version that takes.
I swallow the lump in my throat, and I choose the other branch.
“You could always come and check the temperature yourself.”
The silence that follows is so complete I can hear the showerhead drip.
“Pinky.” When his voice comes back it has lost every ounce of its lazy polish; low, rough, and warning. “Don’t start something we can’t finish.”
“And who,” I say, and I am astonished at how even it comes out, how much it sounds like a woman holding a winning hand, “ever said anything about not finishing?”
Another silence. Longer. Heavier.
The kind that has a decision being made inside it.
Then the curtain moves.
He has lost the crimson hoodie somewhere, and the shirt under it, because when the pool-blue fabric slides back he is bare to the waist, and the sight of him rearranges my breathing entirely.
Lean and cut and warm-skinned, a dark spill of ink running down one side of his ribs that I file instantly to be examined later, the small pale scar at his collarbone I clocked in the closet now part of a much larger and more interesting picture.
His eyes come up the length of me and lock on mine, and the scent of him pours into the small wet space and erases the bleach and the cold tile and the entire rest of the world.
“Iris.”
My name, this time. Not the nickname. He gives it to me deliberately, sets it down between us like a marker on a table, and I understand the message threaded through it perfectly.
This is not the bait.
I am not joking.
Be certain.
And the discovery that lands in my chest, warm and absolute, is that I am.
“Matteo,” I answer.
I say it slowly.
I let it roll, give it the full length, every syllable, and I watch what it does to him. Watch his jaw go tight.
Watch his teeth catch his own bottom lip and bite down on it, hard, the way a man bites down on a sound he is not ready to make yet. Two steps and he is inside the curtain with me, and the pool-blue fabric falls shut at his back, and the tiled stall shrinks to the exact dimensions of the two of us and the inch of charged air I am no longer sure how to breathe.
He does not crowd me against the wall.
That is the thing I notice, even now, even with my pulse going like a slapshot. For all the bulk of him, all the bare warm breadthfilling the stall, he leaves the choice in my hands, plants himself close enough to feel and not one degree closer, and waits.
His scent has spiked past anything the morning hinted at.
There is no filing it under adrenaline now, no kind story left to tell. Blood orange gone to dark rind, burnt sugar gone to woodsmoke, and beneath both the deep Alpha base of him climbing and climbing until the air has actual weight to it, until breathing him in feels less like a choice and more like a tide coming in over my head.
His hand lifts. His fingers settle along the line of my jaw and still my chin, tilting my face up to meet his, and when he speaks the words land as a rough warm whisper directly against my mouth.
