Keep My Alpha (KnotMe #5)

1. Soren

Soren

“Take the blondies,” Milo says, shoving a warm Tupperware into my. “All of them. Don’t argue.”

“I had two inside.”

“You had one and a half. The half you gave to Jude doesn’t count. He inhaled it like a seagull.”

“He looked hungry!”

“Jude always looks hungry. Jude is a bottomless pit wearing eyeliner. Take the blondies, Soren.”

I take the blondies. Milo has this way of offering things where refusing isn’t really an option, and honestly, brown-butter blondies at eleven on a Tuesday night is not the worst thing that could happen to a person.

The Tupperware is still warm against my palm, and the campus path stretches ahead of us, summer-dark and quiet except for the lazy buzz of the streetlights and someone’s music drifting from an open window.

It’s early June and everything has that vibe of the last gasp of finals week.

Half the student body is gone. The other half is clinging to summer leases and bar tabs and that beautiful, stupid conviction that real life can wait a little longer.

I like it. The whole campus gets gentler when the crowds thin out, like it can finally stretch and breathe.

Milo’s wearing Callum’s fire department hoodie, which hangs past his wrists and makes him look like a kid playing dress-up in his dad’s clothes. It’s sweet, the way Milo lives inside his alpha’s stuff now, like he doesn’t even notice he’s doing it.

“Tonight was nice,” I say, because it was.

Byrne’s & Thompson on a Tuesday is the best version of itself.

I’m still not over the fact that it’s Byrne’s & Thompson now, that Declan put Shay’s name on the sign like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

The bar was quiet enough that we could actually hear each other, which never happens these days now that Shay’s instituted a bunch of theme nights.

Benji’s cackle bounced off the walls when Knox told a story about the apprentice who tattooed a dolphin backwards, and I laughed so hard I had to put my drink down.

Declan kept Shay’s glass full without being asked.

Jude was draped across Rhys in the corner booth, boots up, stealing sips of Rhys’s beer while Rhys highlighted a journal article and occasionally said something dry and perfect that made Jude beam at him.

I looked around at all of them and thought, these people are mine.

That thought didn’t even hurt tonight.

“It was,” Milo agrees. “Callum texted that he set out the good bread for tomorrow, the sourdough from the farmers market. And also, that he found a moth in the bathroom and trapped it under a cup because he ‘didn’t want to hurt it but also didn’t want it flying at his face while he brushed his teeth.

’” He smiles down at his phone, and honestly the rest of us might as well be pressing our noses to the glass.

“That’s ridiculously cute. He made it a little moth house.”

“I know.” He doesn’t even try to look embarrassed about it. “Do you think there’s a word for when someone does something completely unnecessary and that’s what makes it romantic? Like, the uselessness is the whole point?”

“Superfluous devotion,” I say immediately. “Or, no. Gratuitous tenderness.”

Milo points at me. “See, this is why you need to submit to the Festival.”

“Wow. Smooth transition.”

“Thank you, I’ve been workshopping it.” He links his arm through mine like we’re in some period drama, and I let him, because it’s warm out and the night smells like jasmine and I’m the kind of person who walks arm in arm with his best friend under old trees.

I contain multitudes. “Professor Hannover specifically said your name. She pulled you aside after workshop and told you to submit. That’s not a casual suggestion, Soren, that’s a woman who has read your work and thinks—“

“She thinks I should get more experience with public submissions, which is professor-speak for ‘you need to toughen up, kid.’”

“It’s professor-speak for ‘your poetry is good enough to show people.’”

The Festival is this thing the university runs every July.

Visual art, music, creative writing, the whole deal.

It’s actually beautiful. They string lights across the quad and set up these little white tents.

People wander around with lemonade looking at paintings and listening to student readings.

Last year I went and cried a little at a watercolor of a heron, which was, uh, awkward for the artist.

Submitting my own work is a completely different thing.

“I’ll think about it.”

“You’ve been thinking about it for weeks.”

“I’m a thorough thinker.”

“You’re a chicken.”

“A cautious and discerning chicken with excellent taste in blondies.” I pop the lid on the Tupperware and pull one out, take a bite, and make a sound that should honestly only ever happen in private. “Oh my god, Milo, did you put miso in these?”

“Brown butter and white miso. Callum said it was weird and then ate four.”

“It’s perfect. It’s, like, salty and nutty and the edges are crunchy but the middle is still soft. Hang on, is this what we taste like to alphas? Because if so, I fully understand the whole ‘grrr I want to bite you even though I just met you’ thing.”

Milo snorts. “Did you just compare yourself to a baked good?”

“I compared all omegas to baked goods. It’s an equal-opportunity metaphor.”

A daisy is growing through a crack in the sidewalk, half-hidden by dandelions, and I stoop to pick it without thinking. My fingers find the stem and twist, gentle. It comes free clean: white petals, yellow center, a stem longer than I expected.

Milo has stopped walking. He’s watching me with his head tilted, but he doesn’t ask.

The bike rack is right there, a few steps ahead, one bike still locked to it.

Someone’s late shift or library cram session, or maybe just a person who forgot they owned a bike three weeks into summer break and now it’s rusting in peace.

The spokes are bare metal, nothing on them, and before I can talk myself out of it I’m kneeling on the pavement and threading the daisy through the front wheel.

The stem catches once, bends, and I ease it through slower until the flower sits tucked against the rim.

“Hold on.” I fish my notebook out of my bag, tear out a corner of a page, and scribble I just wanted your bike to have a flower. I hope tonight’s shift ends soon. I fold it small and tuck it under the seat where the owner will find it.

Milo watches me with the patient expression of someone who finds me both adorable and clinically unusual.

“What?”

“Nothing. You’re just the most romantic person alive and you won’t submit your poetry to a festival. The contradiction is staggering.”

“The notes are easy. The notes are for other people.”

“And the poems?”

I cap my pen. “The poems are for me.”

“That’s exactly why they’re good.”

I bump my shoulder against his. Milo bumps back.

We link arms again and keep walking until we hit the split where his path usually veers left toward Callum’s and mine continues straight. But instead of slowing, Milo keeps walking beside me.

“You’re not turning?”

“I told Callum I was walking you to your bench.”

“It’s not my bench.”

“You go there a lot, Soren.”

“It’s not a lot.”

“Mhm.” He squeezes my arm. “Any new birds lately?”

My heart does its little skip-hop, the one it does every single time. Maybe, maybe...

“Not for a couple weeks,” I say. “But the last one was the best yet. A cedar waxwing. You know those little crests they have? He carved it so the tip curves back and you can feel each individual barb with your fingernail.”

“He?”

“They. The anonymous person of indeterminate gender. The mystery carver.” I pause. “He. It feels like a he.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know.” But I do, somehow. It’s in the birds themselves, the care in them. The scent, mostly. Pine resin and linseed oil and something warm underneath that I’ve never been able to name, something that makes my pulse go slow when I breathe it in.

Jude thinks it’s romantic. Benji ran what he called “a conservative labor estimate” and informed me my admirer has invested roughly four hundred hours in me, then told me, deadpan, that at minimum wage that’s about three thousand dollars of free bird, and I should probably put out.

“I love that you keep them together,” Milo says. “Like they’d be lonely if you separated them.”

They live lined up on my bedroom windowsill in the order I found them: Stumble the robin, Button the chickadee, Heathcliff the house finch, Snowdrop the junco, Bronte the bluebird, Fig the nuthatch, and Keats the cedar waxwing.

A tiny pale-wood flock watching the parking lot.

I named every one of them, and yes, I know that’s a lot, and no, I’m not taking feedback on it.

I only ever bring one with me, and it’s always Keats, tucked into a little drawstring pouch so I don’t scratch her beak, nestled against my notebook. Milo says this is “a lot.” Milo also has a pantry full of decorative cake tins, so.

I glance down at my bag. “That’s a very Milo way of thinking about carved wood.”

“Is it wrong?”

It isn’t, actually. I don’t say that part.

Ahead of us the quad opens up, wide and moonlit.

The oak is enormous this time of year, its canopy so thick it swallows the streetlight, and the bench underneath sits in a pool of green-dark shadow.

My bench. The one that means nothing to anyone except me and, apparently, whoever carves birds and leaves them exactly where I sit.

I remember finding the first one. I’d been sitting there reading something very romantic and feeling poetic about my whole entire life, and when I dropped my bag on the ground, there it was.

A tiny robin, tucked under the armrest like it had landed mid-flight and stayed.

I picked it up and my thumb fit perfectly in the curve of its belly.

That was Stumble. She started everything.

Then Button, then Heathcliff, and so on, until Keats, who’s currently tucked safe in my bag and who I’m going to pretend I don’t carry around like a security blanket. Security bird? Anyway.

I slow as we get close, and Milo slows with me.

Maybe tonight, maybe there’ll be—

The bench arm is bare.

“Oh,” Milo says, and somehow the gentleness of it is worse than just finding nothing.

“It’s fine,” I say, and sit down. “It’s not like there’s a schedule. They just appear when they appear.”

Milo sits beside me. Tucks his legs up under him on the bench, Callum’s hoodie pooling around him like a blanket.

Above us the oak rustles. I can hear the fountain in the courtyard two buildings over, that soft continuous pour of water over stone.

I run my fingers over the bench arm. And then I stop.

“Milo.”

“What?”

I lean closer. Press my nose to the slat and breathe in.

Pine resin. Linseed oil. And underneath, warm honey, faint but there.

“Someone didn’t just fix this bench,” I say. My voice comes out a little airless. “Someone made this slat. By hand. The same someone.”

Milo goes very still beside me. “You can smell it?”

“It’s the same scent. The exact same. Whoever carves the birds replaced the broken slat on my bench.

” I sit back. My heart isn’t doing the skip-hop anymore.

It’s doing something bigger, something kind of insane.

“He fixed my bench. That’s not a gift you leave.

That’s a thing you do when someone’s not looking because you noticed the wood was splintered and you didn’t want them to get hurt. ”

Milo’s hand finds mine on the bench between us. He threads our fingers together and squeezes.

“That’s not a stalker,” I say. “Right? That’s a person who—“

“That’s someone who pays very close attention to you,” Milo says carefully. “And is very good with his hands.”

A laugh breaks out of me, bright and startled, and Milo grins because he absolutely meant it both ways and we both know it.

“Oh god.” I press my free hand to my face. “Oh god, Milo, what if it’s real? What if there’s an actual person out there who has been carving me birds for almost a year and fixing my bench in secret and what if he’s—“

I can’t say it. What if he’s mine? It’s too big a word.

It’s the word that changed everything for Jude, for Milo, for Benji, for Shay, and I’ve been circling it for almost a year, wanting so badly to believe and too scared to say it out loud.

Wanting something this much is the worst kind of superstition.

Like if I name it, if I let the hope get that specific, the universe will hear me and take it back. Not you. Never you.

“What if he is?” It’s the gentlest possible dare.

I lean my head on his shoulder. The hope and the fear tangle up together.

“I bookmarked the Festival submissions page,” I say after a minute. “I haven’t clicked submit. But I bookmarked it.”

“That’s a start.”

“And I’m going to sit here and smell this bench for a little while longer, and I need you to not make it weird.”

“I would never.”

“You’re already texting Callum about it.”

“I’m texting Callum that I’ll be ten minutes late. That’s completely different.” But he’s smiling, and I catch the edge of his screen before he tips it away from me.

We sit there in the warm dark, the oak rustling above us.

Eventually, Milo stands. He brushes off Callum’s hoodie and gives me a Look.

“For the record,” he says, “you’re allowed to want it.”

“That’s very wise for someone wearing his boyfriend’s hoodie as a dress.”

“It’s not a dress, it’s a look.”

“Goodnight, Milo.”

“Submit your poems, Soren.”

I watch him go, already talking into his phone, voice soft in that way that belongs to just the two of them. I let that be a good thing. It is. It’s also a little bit of an ache.

I sit on the bench for another minute. Run my fingertips over the new slat one more time, feel the grain smooth against my skin.

Then I pull out my phone and open the Festival submissions page. I read the guidelines, all of them, the way I’ve been avoiding for weeks. Submit three to five poems on a cohesive theme. Include a brief artist statement.

A cohesive theme. I have a year of poems about carved birds and anonymous gifts and the ache of wanting something I can’t quite name. That’s a theme. That’s the most cohesive theme I’ve ever had.

I don’t hit submit. Not yet. But I don’t close the page, either. I sit there with the screen glowing in my lap and the empty bench arm beside me and the whole quiet campus around me.

Then I stand up, hug the Tupperware to my chest, and head home. Fast, because I have blondies to eat and a whole evening of not thinking about the bench ahead of me. My bag knocks against my hip with every step, Keats in her little pouch bumping softly against my notebook.

Tonight I’m not calling it a jinx.