Page 100 of Pin My Alpha
My hand shakes once, a hard tremor over the keyboard.
I don’t stop.
Shay
The phone screen is dark, but I can still see Declan’s name burning a hole in the glass. It’s been twenty minutes of me sitting on the floor, staring at it, with a half-packed duffel bag at my feet and a stolen bar towel folded in my lap.
It’s pathetic. This is a new personal best in the Pathetic Olympics.
My room smells like nothing—just the clean, sterile scent of my own life. Cold coffee from this morning, the detergent I use, the vanilla candle Soren likes to burn in the living room. It’s the opposite of cedar and woodsmoke and old whiskey, the opposite of the clean cotton scent that’s lodged so deep in my lungs that breathing regular air feels thin and wrong.
My teeth ache. That’s how much I miss him. It’s a physical, stupid ache in my jaw.
I unlock the phone again. The message field is still blank.
Hey.
Delete. Too casual. Nothing about this is casual.
We need to talk.
That’s worse. Sounds like I’m about to fire him from a group project.
I’m sorry.
My throat seizes. Just typing it puts me back in his apartment, wrapped in that nest, his hand covering the bite on my neck while he murmured things into my hair. Puts me back at the bar after the relaunch, spitting the ugliest words I could think of because I was terrified, and I knew exactly how to make him hurt.
I delete the words. Type them again. Hover over send, then delete one more time.
Downstairs, the front door opens and shuts. Jude’s laugh echoes up the stairwell, sharp and loud. I catch Milo’s softer voice, then a deadpan mumble that can only be Benji. The sounds of my friends, all trying to pretend they aren’t waiting for me to shatter into a million pieces. They spent the better part of the evening letting me pace and rage, and now they’re giving me space to do whatever comes next.
I should go down there. I should eat something. I should finish unpacking the duffel bag, because where the hell am I going to go?
But I just keep staring at Declan’s name, and the one crushing fact I can’t spin or analyze my way out of: he hasn’t called. He hasn’t texted.
Which is fair. Completely fair. A man can only chase you so many times before he gets tired of you setting fires just to see if he’ll show up with a bucket of water. He has a bar to run. He has Tessa, who has probably told him he’s an idiot a dozen times by now.
God, Tessa. I think I’d rather face another one of my mother’s ex-boyfriends than her.
My fingers tighten on the towel, worn soft from a thousand washes, from being slung over Declan’s shoulder while he worked.
I don’t know if he gets that. I don’t know if I’ll even get a chance to explain it.
The screen goes dark again.
Then, a knock on the apartment door.
My entire body goes rigid.
“I got it!” Jude yells from the living room.
A man’s voice answers, too low for me to make out the words, but my body hears it anyway.
Oh.
My heart gives a single, painful thud against my ribs.
A moment later, the scent finds me, slipping under my bedroom door like it has a key. Cedar and clean cotton and the deep, warm note of aged whiskey—Declan.
