Page 82 of Pin My Alpha
That’s why I built my life around one.
But people… fuck.
My fingers tighten around the glass.
Shay’s scent is still clinging to the air in here.
Sandalwood. Dark chocolate. That cool rain smell.
It’s everywhere tonight, sunk deep under the spilled beer and citrus and the greasy salt smell from the kitchen. His scent worked its way into the bones of this place over the last few weeks, so slowly I barely even noticed it happening. A brush of his shoulder when he squeezed behind the bar. His jacket thrown over the end of a booth while he yelled at Jude for filming a video the wrong way. His wrists on the counter, his throat tilted back when he laughed at something Benji said.
Now it’s all I can smell.
My mate walked out an hour ago. Maybe less. Time’s a little fuzzy when you’re standing in the place you spent years saving, realizing you just lost the only thing that ever made it feel like more than work.
I put the glass down too hard. It clinks sharply against another one.
“Easy,” I say, automatic.
Nobody answers. Of course nobody answers.
The bar looks good. That’s the sickest part.
Shay made it look good.
The numbers are still ugly, but they’re not impossible anymore. The buyout offer is sitting in my office drawer, right where it belongs. Ignored.
Byrne’s is going to make it.
And I don’t give a shit.
I lean both hands on the polished wood and just stare at the empty back booth. Their booth. The one Shay always pretended he didn’t care about, even though he’d get this personally offended look on his face if anyone else sat there before his friends showed up.
He’d always sit at the end, closest to the bar, close enough to see everything, and he’d act like he was only there because everyone else dragged him along.
The first time I really noticed him, he was drinking club soda and glaring at Jude like the guy had committed a felony just by laughing too loud.
I knew his order before I knew his name.
That should’ve told me something right there.
I know his coffee order—oat milk, no sugar, iced even when it’s freezing out. I know he hates maraschino cherries because they look fake. I know he pretends not to like old music but he stood in my kitchen, dead silent, listening while I put a record on.
I know he works himself into the ground because being useful is the closest thing he lets himself feel to being wanted.
And I offered him a bank account.
A key.
I offered him the exact thing he’s terrified of, then stood there like a fucking idiot while he spelled it out for me.
“I was trying to help,” I say to the empty booth.
The words sound pathetic. Not because they aren’t true, but because they’re not enough. Not even close.
The glass in my hand is bone dry. I keep rubbing the towel over it until the cloth snags on my rough knuckles.
Shay had looked at me like I was every single alpha who’d ever promised his mother a soft place to land, right before the floor gave out from under her.
