Page 8 of Match My Alpha
Anonymous:When I get my hands on you I'm going to make you forget that word. The only thing you'll need to do is lie there and let me take care of you.
My eyes sting. I'm sitting in a library with a hard-on and wet boxers, about to cry because a stranger on a hookup app said something nice. I don't catch feelings over DMs. I don't leak slick at work.
I press my knuckles against my mouth and take a breath.
Milo:you're dangerously good at this
Anonymous:At what?
Milo:making me feel like an actual person and not just a warm body on an app
Anonymous:You're not a warm body. You're a person who stress-bakes and studies psychology and deserves someone who asks how your day was. I told you that the first night.
He did. He told me that the first night, and I've thought about it every day since. I screenshot the message, immediately feel pathetic for doing it, and then save it to my camera roll anyway because I'm past the point of pretending.
Someone clears their throat.
I fumble my phone. It clatters loudly against the desk. Soren is standing on the other side of the circulation counter, a coffee in each hand. He tilts his head, his dark wavy hair falling across his forehead. He's wearing a sweater that's at least four sizes too big.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi." My voice comes out an octave too high. I slide the phone behind a stack of sociology textbooks and try to arrange my face into something that doesn't screamI was just sexting.
Soren sets one of the coffees in front of me. Oat milk latte, from the good place off-campus. He remembered. He always remembers.
"You okay?" he asks, settling into the chair on the other side of the desk like he's got nowhere to be.
"I'm great. I'm very normal. Why?"
He takes a sip of his coffee and studies me over the rim with those calm, dark eyes. Soren doesn't push. That's his thing. He just creates a silence and waits for you to fill it. It works every time because the silence isn't awkward—it's patient.
"I'm fine," I try again. "It's just—there's this guy on KnotMe."
"The one from the other night?"
"Yeah." I wrap my hands around the warm paper cup. "We've been talking. Like, a lot. It's been two days and I've barely slept because we keep—it's just—he's..."
I trail off. I don't have a word for what Anonymous is.
"Different," Soren offers quietly.
"Yeah." I look down at my coffee. "Different. He asks me things. Real things. Like what I study and why, and what I think about. Nobody on KnotMe asks you what you think about. They ask you what position you like and whether you swallow."
Soren's mouth twitches. "So he's a conversationalist."
"He's a conversationalist who also says things that make me want to climb through my phone screen and sit on his lap. I didn't think those two things could exist in the same person."
"They can."
"Can they though? Because my experience suggests that guys who are good at talking are terrible in bed, and guys who are good in bed communicate exclusively in grunts and dick pics."
Soren laughs. It's soft and surprised. "I think you might just have been meeting the wrong people."
I open my mouth to deflect, but I catch the look on his face. He's smiling, but his eyes have drifted to the window behind me. For a second, he's somewhere else entirely.
"Hey." I nudge his coffee cup toward him. "You good?"
"I'm good." He blinks, refocuses, and gives me a real smile. "Tell me more about the conversationalist."
