Page 24 of Rebound My Alpha
A beat. Knox's smugness doesn't vanish, but something shifts behind his eyes.
"Ask."
I could ask anything. I could ask about the DMs, the alley, why he keeps showing up at my door like a stray dog that memorized the route. I could ask something easy and waste this on bullshit.
But I didn't rig a sex competition and lose just to ask him his favorite color. I have one shot. One honest answer. No deflection. I can play it safe, or I can ask the thing that's been burning a hole through my chest for months.
I turn my head to look at him. He's still watching the ceiling, the picture of post-game confidence. But a muscle in his jaw is ticking. He knew this was coming. He knew it the second he took the bet.
"Why did you leave that morning?"
The specific morning. The one after our first hookup. The morning I woke up to cold sheets and a deleted KnotMe profile, standing in my bathroom staring at the empty space where he'd been, wondering exactly how I'd managed to ruin it.
Knox's face changes. The smirk fades slowly, like a dimmer switch going down. His jaw locks tight. His eyes stay glued to the ceiling.
The silence stretches. It goes on long enough that I almost snap at him—a deal's a deal, asshole—but the quality of the quiet stops me. He's not performing reluctance. He's trying to figure out how to force something true into the smallest possible number of words.
"I got a call." His voice comes out flat. Stripped bare. "Family shit. I had to leave."
Seven words. He doesn't add a single syllable. His eyes remain fixed above us, but his fingers have gone completely rigid against the pillow.
I wait for more. More doesn't come.
"Family shit," I repeat. The words taste foreign in my mouth.
"Yeah."
The room goes quiet again. My come is drying sticky on our stomachs. We're lying in the messy aftermath of a sex game that just morphed into a minefield. Knox is staring upward, jaw clenched so hard I can see the bone, and I'm trying to sortfamily shitinto a mental category. It doesn't fit.
The stories I've told myself for months—he got bored, I wasn't worth staying for—the lies that kept the anger clean and pointed in the right direction?Family shitruins them. It means there was a reason. It means he didn't just leave because I was a disposable piece of trash. And if I wasn't disposable, what the hell was I? Collateral damage? An afterthought in the middle of someone else's crisis?
Is that better? I genuinely don't know. The not-knowing sits heavy in my chest, a jagged little pill I can't swallow.
I want to push. I want to grab him by the jaw, force him to look at me, and demand details.What call? What family? Why couldn't you send one fucking text?Just "I had to go" would have been enough. He didn't owe me a novel, but he owed me a sentence. I checked my phone four times that morning. He owed me five words.
But the look on his face stops me. He looks like those seven words physically cost him something. I've seen Knox perform. I've seen him lie. This isn't either of those things.
My anger is still there. I'm still furious he left, and I'm still furious he came back. But there's a crack in the armor now. The story where Knox Rivera didn't give a shit has a seven-word fracture running straight down the middle. I'm not ready to forgive him, and I'm not ready to trust him, but the ground under my feet doesn't feel the same as it did ten minutes ago.
My hand moves on its own. My fingers find Knox's forearm, where dark, intricate ink wraps from his wrist past his elbow. I trace a line of the tattoo with my fingertip, following the curve of the design over the muscle. I don't consciously decide to do it;my hand just drifts there, the same way it drifts to the bite mark on my neck when I'm not paying attention.
It's the first time I've touched him without it being a fight or a fuck. Just a touch. My finger on his skin.
Knox doesn't pull away. He stays perfectly still, eyes on the ceiling, and just lets me. Slowly, his rigid fingers relax against the pillow. His breathing shifts, the tight, held-in breaths giving way to something deeper.
We lie there. My finger traces the ink on his arm. His breathing evens out. The come dries on our skin, andfamily shitsits in the space between us like a door that just creaked open an inch.
Knox
Three walk-ins, two cover-ups, and some guy who flinched so hard during a shoulder piece I had to redo a whole fucking line. Now I’m wiping down my station with the kind of intense focus I usually reserve for things that actually matter. The autoclave is running. The ink caps are sorted. I’ve checked tomorrow’s appointments twice, which Mars definitely noticed and filed away to use against me later.
Mars is across the room doing his own closing routine. He hasn’t said much tonight. Just a grunt about the supply order and a nod at the salvaged line on the flincher. He's got that particular silence going—the one that means he’s thinking about something he’ll say in his own time, or not at all.
My phone sits on the counter, the DM thread open. Benji’s last message came in a couple of hours ago—a photo of a band poster with the captionthe drummer wants flames. FLAMES. In 2026! I'm being tested by God.I’ve read it four times. I still haven’t replied because I keep drafting responses and deleting them. I used to just type whatever the fuck came to mind and hit send. Now I think about it. It's new, and I hate it.
Things have been different since the dare. The hostility is wearing thin, and what’s underneath is almost friendly. If Benji would ever let me use that word. He actually asked me about a stippling technique yesterday, and we talked about art for twenty minutes without insulting each other. I noticed. He definitely noticed. But underneath all of it, those two words—family shit—are sitting between us like a dropped weight. He hasn’t brought it up. I haven’t offered more.
Last Tuesday I almost walked over to his cafe. Got halfway down the block with some bullshit excuse about needing coffee at nine at night, then turned around at the corner because I couldn't figure out what I'd say when I got there. I've been circling his orbit for weeks, and the fact that I keep almost-going and then not-going is a confession I'm not ready to look at.
