Page 43 of Pin My Alpha
Shay
“Do you take your coffee like a normal person, or am I about to find out you put twelve syrups in it?”
The question comes from the kitchen, and it’s completely unfair. Everything about this morning is unfair.
The bed is warm. Declan’s side is empty, but his scent is still tangled in the sheets—cedar and clean cotton and that deeper note of woodsmoke my body has apparently decided is a primary food group. My face is smashed into one of his pillows. At some point, I must have crossed the empty space between us and just…taken it.
Great. Very independent.
“I don’t use syrup,” I call back, my voice rough. “I’m not Jude.”
My phone buzzes on the nightstand, lighting up with the group chat.
Jude:i know you’re awake
Jude:i can sense it
Benji:you cannot sense anything. you once walked into a glass door
Jude:irrelevant
Milo:Did you sleep okay?
Shay:I’m blocking all of you.
Soren:??
A quiet, stupid laugh escapes before I can stop it. The sound dies as I look around. Declan’s room is still his room. Dark wood dresser. A chair in the corner with his jeans folded over the back, because of course this man folds his jeans. Like he has a pension and a favourite hardware store. And there’s a shirt on the floor I recognise from yesterday, dark blue and soft-looking, putting out enough of his scent that something deep in my chest gives a low, possessive hum.
Mine. Take it.
“No,” I whisper to myself. The urge is a physical thing, a tightening in my gut that I have to shove back down.
“Shay?” Declan calls.
“Coffee. Black. One sugar.”
There’s a pause from the kitchen. Long enough for it to be a choice.
“You want me to put the sugar in?” he asks.
“I can do it myself.” The words are out before I even think, sharp and automatic.
Another pause. Then, his voice is quieter. “I know.”
That shouldn’t land the way it does. But it does.
I shove the blankets down and swing my legs over the side of the bed, staring at that shirt on the floor like it’s a crime scene. The claiming mark on my neck gives a faint, warm throb. It doesn’t hurt anymore. It’s just there. Permanent.
I get up. Lying around in an alpha’s bed, smelling like an alpha, while he makes me coffee is how people end up as a cautionary tale.
The apartment is bright with late-Sunday-morning sun, lighting up the dust motes over the couch. The bar below issilent. All I can hear is the low hum of the coffee grinder and Declan moving around in his kitchen.
He’s barefoot in grey sweatpants and a faded black T-shirt that his shoulders test the seams of. His hair is a mess, the grey at his temples more pronounced in the daylight. One hand is braced on the counter as he scoops coffee into a filter. He looks like he’s done this a thousand Sunday mornings in a row.
And it feels like I’m supposed to be here watching him.
The thought is so unwelcome it’s almost a physical taste in my mouth. He belongs here. In this kitchen with its chipped mug tree and a bowl of lemons that I’m pretty sure are decorative. And the quiet, settled way he moves implies I belong here, too.
