Chapter 6 Easton
EASTON
Kit's hand is still wrapped around his coffee cup when we leave the student commons, his fingers white-knuckled against the cardboard sleeve.
He hasn't looked at me since I placed my hand on his knee, the Omega who has spent six months making my life hell going perfectly still as he let me touch him.
And now, he's rebuilding his walls. His shoulders square as we push through the doors and the evening air hits us.
His jaw sets and his stride picks up that aggressive clip he uses in hallways, the one that dares someone to get in his way, and by the time we're halfway across the quad he's almost convinced me that the last twenty minutes didn't happen.
Almost. His scent is still sweet beneath the anger, the black cherry gone all syrupy. My Alpha is clawing at the inside of my ribs, every instinct telling me to close the distance, to grab his arm and turn him around and put my mouth on the spot where his pulse is hammering beneath his jaw.
I keep my hands in my pockets and match his pace.
My father's voice sits in the back of my skull the way it always does when Kit is involved: Alphas don't chase.
If they want you, they come to you. It's the same voice that kept me from saying a single honest thing in that stairwell six months ago.
The same voice that turned "you smell incredible" into a crack about Omegas clogging up the hallway.
I've been running my father's playbook with Kit since day one and it has done nothing but make both of us miserable, but the alternative means admitting the playbook is wrong, and if that's wrong, I don't know what else he got wrong, and I'm not ready to pull that thread tonight.
"So what's next on the revenge agenda?" I ask. "Because I have to be honest, the coffee was pretty tame. I was expecting something worse from the guy who once called me a 'sentient protein shake with a God complex' in front of the entire dining hall."
"The night is young." He still won't look at me. "And don't quote me back to myself. It's weird."
"It was a good line. I thought about it for three days."
His stride hitches, just barely, before he recovers. "You did not think about anything I've said for three days."
"I think about most things you say, Kit.
" I let that sit between us and watch the back of his neck flush pink above the collar of his blazer.
He walks faster. I match him without effort because his legs are half the length of mine and the fact that he's practically jogging to outpace me while I'm strolling is putting a smile on my face I’m desperately trying to hide.
"Next task," he announces, clearly irritated. "You're going to call Milo and tell him this evening is going exactly according to plan and that you're suffering immensely."
"Am I suffering immensely?"
"You will be."
"When? Because so far you've had me buy you coffee and taken me for a walk. This is the best date I've been on all year."
He whips around so fast his hair falls across his forehead and he has to shove it back with an irritated hand. "This is not a date. This is punishment. There is a difference and you are going to respect it."
"I respect it completely." I stop walking when he does, leaving about four feet between us on the path.
His cheeks are flushed from the cold and the anger and probably something else he'd bite my head off for naming.
"I'm just saying, if this is punishment, you might need to recalibrate. I've had worse Tuesday nights."
"The night. Is. Young."
"You said that already."
His eyes narrow and for a second I see the version of Kit that scares me, the one who doesn't bluster or deflect but puts up all his walls and truly tries to hit where it hurts.
The one who found the glasses comment in thirty seconds flat and used it like a scalpel.
"You want worse? Fine. We're going to your room.
You're going to sit there while I go through your things and find every embarrassing piece of your life and you're going to watch me enjoy it. "
The words are designed to provoke and they do, just not the way he intended.
Kit wants to come to my room. Kit, who has spent six months avoiding any space I occupy, just volunteered to enter the most private one.
The fact that he framed it as a power move doesn't change what it is, and the way his scent spiked when he said it tells me his body knows even if his brain hasn't caught up.
"Okay," I say.
His mouth opens to argue the refusal that didn't come. He stands there on the path with his lips parted and his argument stalled. "Okay?" he repeats.
"You're in charge tonight. You said so. If you want to go through my room, we'll go to my room." I start walking toward the residence hall, passing him close enough that my shoulder almost brushes his. "Fair warning, my roommate is gone for the week. So it's just us."
I hear his footsteps behind me after a three-second delay. The hesitation is louder than anything he's said all night.
The residence hall is quiet at this hour, most of the basketball team still at the auction afterparty.
I hold the door open and Kit walks through without acknowledging the gesture, his chin lifted, his posture screaming defiance.
The elevator ride to the third floor is silent.
Kit stands on the opposite side of the car with his arms crossed and his coffee cup crushed in his grip, the cardboard caving in under his fingers.
By the time we get to my dorm, I’m still not sure what he’s expecting to happen. I unlock the door, flipping on the desk lamp and leaving the overhead off. Kit follows me in and stops just past the threshold, his eyes scanning the room with the focused intensity of someone cataloging exits.
It's a standard double, my roommate's side bare since he packed for break.
My side has the bed made because my mother wouldn't have it any other way and two years after losing her I still can't leave the sheets untucked without hearing her voice.
A bookshelf crammed with basketball theory and anatomy textbooks.
The framed photo of her on the desk, the one from her birthday the year before the accident, her laugh caught mid-motion, her hand reaching toward whoever was holding the camera.
And a poster of Michael Jordan that Marcus gave me as a joke freshman year that I kept because it's actually a good photo.
Kit's gaze snags on the framed photo and stays there a beat too long. His expression softens the hard line of his jaw for a fraction of a second before he catches it and looks away.
"This is it?" he growls out, disappointed. "I expected more ego. Where are the trophies? The shrine to yourself?"
"Trophy case is in the athletics building. I can take you there if you want the full tour."
"Pass." He moves further into the room, trailing his fingers along the edge of my desk as he circles it.
He picks up a textbook, flips through it, and then sets it down.
The Omega opens a desk drawer, peers inside, and then closes it.
His movements feel forced as he searches but his scent is going haywire, the black cherry thickening with every second he spends in a room that smells overwhelmingly like me.
I lean against the doorframe and watch him.
God, I want to reach for him so bad but Dad said to let an Omega come to me.
My mother used to laugh at him when he talked like that.
She'd press her hand against his chest and tell him that the bravest thing an Alpha could do was ask for what he wanted and risk hearing no.
He never argued with her about it. He just stopped talking about it after she died.
"Anatomy," Kit reads off the spine of a textbook, his voice pitched to sound bored. "Light reading?"
"Pre-med track. Orthopedic surgery, eventually."
He glances at me over his shoulder and there's a flicker of surprise he doesn't hide fast enough. "You want to be a surgeon."
"I want to fix things." The words come out more honest than I planned.
My mother broke her hip in the accident before the internal bleeding took her, and the orthopedic surgeon was the one who kept trying after the ER team had already started using past tense.
He didn't save her. But he was the last person who fought for her, and something about that lodged in me and never came out.
Kit doesn't need to know any of this right now.
But his hand has stilled on the textbook and the room feels smaller with both of us in it, my scent and his tangling in the enclosed space until every breath I take tastes like black cherry and the tight undercurrent of energy underneath it that I've been chasing since September.
Kit sets the book down and turns to face me, leaning against my desk with his arms crossed. His eyes keep dropping to my mouth and snapping back up, the movement quick enough that he probably thinks I can't track it.
I track every single one.
"What are you looking at?" he asks, his voice harder than his expression.
"You."
"Stop."
"No."
The room is so quiet I can hear the small hitch in his chest that he covers by uncrossing his arms and gripping the edge of the desk behind him.
The new posture opens his body up, the blazer pulling back to show the cream sweater stretched across his chest, and I don't think he realizes what he just did.
Kit's body keeps making decisions his brain hasn't approved, leaning in when his words push away, opening up when his voice locks down.
"You're staring," he says, his voice having lost the edge.
"I've been staring at you for six months, Kit. I'm not going to stop now because you told me to."
He pushes off the desk and takes a step toward me, then stops. The distance between us is maybe five feet and he's stuck in the middle of it, caught between the door behind me and the desk behind him.
He wants to come closer. He wants to leave.
He wants to hit me. He wants something else entirely and the wanting is written across every line of his body, in the tension of his shoulders and the white of his knuckles and the way his breathing has gone shallow.
And my Alpha instincts are purring so fucking loud, it’s a miracle I don’t just tug him into my chest.
"You don't get to look at me like that," he states, his voice cracking on the last word.
"Not after everything you did. You don't get to stand there with your stupid glasses and your stupid surgeon hands and look at me like I'm something you want when you spent six months treating me like I was something you scraped off your shoe. "
"I know."
"So stop."
"I can't."
He takes another step. Three feet between us now.
His scent has gone so thick and sweet that my vision is starting to blur at the edges, my Alpha snarling against the restraint I'm barely maintaining.
Every muscle in my body is locked tight, my shoulders rigid against the doorframe, my fingers curled into fists inside my pockets.
My mother would tell me to reach for him.
My father would tell me to hold still. For the first time in my life the two voices are pulling in opposite directions and I am standing in the middle of a dorm room trying not to shake apart while the only person I've wanted in six months closes the distance one agonizing step at a time.
"Why won't you just be the asshole?" he whispers, the anger drained out of his voice entirely. What's left is raw and vulnerable and confused. "I know how to deal with the asshole. I had a whole system for the asshole. This version of you is..."
"Is what?"
"Worse." He closes the last of the distance in one step and his hand comes up, fingers curling into the front of my shirt, the fabric bunching in his fist. His face tilts up toward mine, close enough that I can feel his breath against my chin, and his eyes are bright and glassy and searching mine for something I hope to god he finds.
"Kit." His name tumbles out in a whisper and I’m unable to say anything else, because I don't trust myself with more than one word right now.
He pulls me down.
His mouth finds mine off-center, teeth catching my bottom lip as his fist tightens in my shirt and drags me closer.
The sound that comes out of me is low and raw and beyond my control, something from the base of my throat that I couldn't have stopped if I'd wanted to.
My hands are out of my pockets and on him before my brain can catch up, one finding the back of his neck and the other bracing against the doorframe beside his head as I angle my mouth over his and kiss him back with everything I've swallowed for six months.
My mother was right. My father was wrong. Reaching for what you want isn't weakness. Letting someone see you need them isn't losing. The bravest thing I've ever done isn't any play on any court. It's kissing Kit back and letting him feel how much I mean it.
Kit gasps against my lips as his other hand comes up to grab my jaw, holding my face to his, and the sound he makes when I pull him closer, when my arm wraps around his waist and lifts him slightly onto his toes because the height difference demands it, is small and broken and everything I’ve ever needed.
He tastes like coffee and chocolate cake and fury, and beneath all of it something sweet and desperate that I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to earn.