Page 74 of Pin My Alpha
“Don’t,” I snap.
He stops so fast it makes my chest ache.
“I’m not going to touch you,” he says.
“Good.”
His jeans are down around his thighs. My shirt is somewhere behind the bar, my underwear hooked around one ankle. We look ridiculous. Like two idiots in a cautionary poster titled This Is Why You Don’t Fuck During A Workplace Dispute.
I bend to grab my clothes. Every movement pulls at me, reminding me of exactly what happened here, and I keep my face blank because that’s all I have left. My face. My hands. The ability to just follow instructions.
Pick up shirt.
Find jeans.
Do not look at him.
Do not cry in the bar you just helped save.
I’m wrestling my jeans over my hips when Declan says, “You don’t have to leave tonight.”
A laugh bursts out of me. It sounds awful.
“Actually, I really, really do.”
“Shay.”
“I said I’m leaving.”
“I heard you.” His voice stays level, but I can hear the strain under it now. “I’m saying you don’t have to go anywhere tonight. You can sleep upstairs. I’ll sleep down here.”
The upstairs apartment.
Oh, god. The bed with the pile of blankets and his shirts and the towel I stole because I’m apparently a biological cliché with a business degree.
My skin crawls. “No.”
“You don’t have to talk to me. You don’t have to be near me. Just stay somewhere safe.”
There it is.
Safe.
Like I’m not twenty-one years old and capable of crossing town by myself. Like I haven’t been getting myself home since I was fourteen and my mom forgot to pick me up from school because whichever alpha she was with that month had some emergency that somehow became our emergency, too.
“I’m not a lost puppy, Declan.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You didn’t have to.”
He scrubs both hands over his face. He’s still half-undressed, hair a mess, beard damp at the edges. There’s a red mark on his cheek from where he must’ve been pressed against the bar when we were knotted. He looks tired. Not bar-owner tired, not end-of-a-long-shift tired.
Broken. He looks broken.
And my body responds anyway. My omega does this ugly little roll under my ribs, wanting to go to him, wanting his big hands on me, wanting to bury my face in the soft, worn cotton of his shirt and let him tell me I’m okay.
I hate that part of myself so much I could peel it off.
