Chapter 14 Easton
EASTON
I see Kit in the stands during warmups and my chest cracks open right there on the court.
He's sitting in the middle of the bleachers with Milo on one side and Quentin on the other, the Omega wearing the same oversized hoodie he wore to my room every night for a week before I ruined everything by touching his arm in a hallway like I'd earned the right.
He's here. After four days of silence and unreturned texts and me staring at my phone during practice like a pathetic lovesick idiot, Kit Peralta is sitting in my gym watching me warm up.
Devon passes me the ball and I fumble it so badly it bounces off my shin and rolls toward the scorer's table. Marcus catches it and tosses it back. "Head in the game, East."
I nod and sink a warmup jumper that hits the back rim and bounces out. Devon jogs past me and picks up the rebound, spinning it back to me without comment, but his eyes linger a second too long.
The game starts and I am worse than I have ever been on a basketball court.
The opposing team's point guard blows past me on the first possession because I'm a half-step late on the rotation, my feet stuck while my brain keeps drifting to the bleachers.
Their shooting guard catches the kick-out and drains a three before I've even turned around.
"Cole, rotate!" Coach shouts from the sideline, smacking his clipboard against his thigh.
We give up two more baskets in ninety seconds. The opposing crowd picks up energy while ours goes quiet, that uneasy silence of a home team watching something go wrong. Coach calls timeout and gets in my face before I've even reached the huddle, his finger jabbing the air between us.
"Whatever this is, you leave it in the tunnel. I don't care if your house is on fire. When you're on my court you play my game. Are we clear?"
"Yes, Coach."
"Then act like it."
Devon hands me a water bottle as we break the huddle, his voice low enough that the rest of the guys don't hear. "You see him up there?"
He doesn't have to say who. "Yeah."
"Then either use it or put it away, because right now you're doing neither and it's killing us."
Second quarter I miss a wide-open three that I've hit a thousand times in practice, the ball clanging off the front rim so hard it bounces back to half court. Devon snags it and drives the lane himself, finishing with a layup and pointing at me as he runs back on defense. He’s not angry, more like a reminder that he's carrying what I'm dropping and he can't do it all night.
On the next possession Marcus feeds me the ball at the elbow and I pump-fake, drive the baseline, and get my shot swatted into the third row by a center who had no business getting there. Marcus pulls up beside me on the jog back. "Talk to me. What's going on?"
"Nothing. I'm just off."
"You're not off. Off is missing a couple jumpers. This is something else." He glances toward the stands and back. "Is this about Thursday? The hallway thing?"
"Marcus, drop it."
"I'm trying to help you."
"Help me by getting open."
On the next defensive possession I lose my man on a back-door cut and he gets an easy layup that puts us down twelve.
The crowd groans and I can feel Kit's eyes on me from the bleachers, the weight of his gaze pressing between my shoulder blades, and knowing he's watching me fall apart makes every mistake louder.
I drive the lane on the next possession and get stripped by a guard six inches shorter than me, the ball bouncing off my knee and out of bounds. Our bench groans. Coach's clipboard hits the chair beside him with a crack that echoes through the gym.
On the next play I set a screen and forget to roll, standing flat-footed while Devon tries to find someone who's actually moving, and by the time I realize my mistake the shot clock is at three and Marcus has to throw up a contested fadeaway that misses everything.
Coach calls my name before the ball is even dead. "Cole. Out."
I walk to the bench with my head down and sit at the end, away from the assistant coaches, and away from the guys waiting to sub in. My towel goes over my head and I lean forward with my elbows on my knees and stare at the floor between my feet.
The gym noise blurs into a wall of sound around me, the squeaking sneakers and the crowd and Devon calling out a play that I should be running, and all I can think about is Kit's voice in the athletics building saying we're not okay and the way his face crumbled when I reached for him and the four days of silence that followed.
We lose by nineteen. It's the worst margin of the season and I'm responsible for at least half of it between the turnovers and the missed shots and the defensive breakdowns that happened because my head was in the bleachers instead of on the court.
The buzzer sounds and I walk toward the tunnel without looking up, without scanning the crowd for Kit, because I don't deserve to look at him right now and he doesn't deserve to see me searching for him like a dog that can't learn its lesson.
The locker room is funeral-quiet when I push through the doors.
Guys strip out of jerseys and kick off shoes and nobody talks because the loss was bad enough to kill the usual post-game noise.
Devon sits in front of his locker staring at the wall.
Marcus runs a towel over his head with a roughness that suggests he's imagining it's something else.
Terrell hasn't even untied his shoes. The air smells like sweat and frustration and the particular brand of Alpha aggression that fills enclosed spaces when a team of competitors has just been humiliated on their home court.
I sit in front of my locker and pull my jersey over my head and wait for it.
It comes from Devon, the particular brand of blunt honesty that Devon uses when he's frustrated and doesn't have the filter to soften it. "You going to tell us what's going on with you, or are we just supposed to pretend that wasn't the worst you've ever played?"
I lean back against the lockers, my head hitting the metal as I close my eyes. "Leave it alone, Dev."
"I can't leave it alone. We lost by nineteen at home. You had six turnovers. Six!" He pulls his jersey off and throws it into the hamper hard enough that it thumps against the wall behind it. "Is this about the Omega? The one from the auction?"
The locker room goes still, everyone waiting for my response.
"Devon," Marcus says quietly, a warning.
"No, I'm asking. This is senior year for a lot of us and the last chance we have to show who we are before we get signed somewhere or thrown into the corporate world.
I watched that Omega scream at you in the hallway on Thursday and now you can't sink a free throw, and if your head is this messed up over some Omega—"
"Don't call him that."
The words come out of me, twisted up in a growl hard enough that Devon's mouth closes. Not some Omega. Not that Omega. Not the diminishing, dismissing framework that every Alpha in this room including me has used to talk about Omegas since we presented.
Kit isn't some Omega who scrambled my focus. Kit is the person I spent six months hurting because I was too much of a coward to do what my mother told me to do, which was ask for what I wanted and risk hearing no.
"His name is Kit," I tell them, my voice sounding different to my own ears, stripped of the usual performance. "And yeah, this is about him. All of it. The auction, the hallway, the last week, tonight. It's all about him."
Devon stares at me. "East—"
"I've been in love with him since September.
" The sentence comes out like I'm pulling a hook from my own chest. "Since the stairwell, since the first time I smelled him, since before any of the hallway shit started.
Every time I shoved him or made a comment or knocked his coffee out of his hand, it was because I wanted him and I didn't know how to say it without losing everything I thought mattered.
My image, my standing with you guys, my father's voice in my head telling me that Alphas don't chase.
" I look around the locker room and every face is turned toward me and none of them are laughing.
"I followed what I’ve been taught for Six months and it destroyed something that could have been good, and now he won't talk to me and I can't play basketball and I'm telling you all this because I'm done pretending.
I'm done choosing my image over the truth. "
Nobody speaks. The silence stretches and it's the loudest thing I've ever heard all fucking night. And then Devon breaks the moment. "Six turnovers," Devon says finally, his voice much quieter now. "That's what love does to your handles, apparently."
It's not forgiveness or acceptance but it's Devon making a joke instead of making it worse, and right now that's enough.
I pull on a clean shirt and leave without showering because the truth didn't stop at the locker room door and the person who needs to hear it most is sitting in a dorm room three buildings away.
The walk across campus takes four minutes and I spend every one of them dismantling the last of my father's voice. Alphas don't chase. I'm chasing. If they want you, they come to you. He's not coming and I don't blame him. You don't bend. I'm about to break.
Kit's floor is quiet when I step off the elevator.
His door is closed and the hallway smells like industrial cleaner and old carpet as I move to stand in front of his room with my hand raised to knock and realize that I have no speech prepared.
No playbook. No framework for what I'm about to do.
Just the truth, sitting in my chest like a grenade with the pin already pulled.
I knock. There’s no answer. I knock again, harder. "Kit, it's me. Please open the door." There’s no reason to even think Kit is here.
But I can smell him, faintly, black cherry bleeding through the crack beneath the door, and my Alpha reaches for it with a desperation that makes my hands shake.
"I know you're in there," I say, pressing my forehead against the wood.
"And I know you don't want to see me. But I need to tell you something and I need to say it now because if I wait I'm going to lose my nerve and I've been losing my nerve with you since September and it's cost both of us too much. "
Nothing. The door stays closed. I close my eyes and let my forehead rest against the wood and start talking.
"My mother was an Omega." There’s no good place to start, so talking about her seems like the best spot.
"She died two years ago. She died two years ago in a car accident that broke her hip and it caused some internal bleeding but by the time they knew it, it was too late.
The orthopedic surgeon was the last person who tried to save her and that's why I want to do what I want to do, in case you ever wondered.
She's the one in the photo on my desk. The one you looked at that first night in my room. "
I hear something shift behind the door.
"She was the only person who ever told me that being soft wasn't weakness.
She used to say that the bravest thing an Alpha could do was ask for what he wanted and risk hearing no.
My father is the opposite. His code is that Alphas don't chase, bend, or show need.
If an Omega wants you, they come to you.
And when she died he was the only voice left, so I ran his playbook because it was the only one I had. "
My voice is cracking and I don't care. There are footsteps at the end of the hallway, someone coming back from the bathroom or a study session, and I don't care about that either.
Let them hear. Let the entire floor hear.
Kit asked me to earn this publicly and I'm going to earn it even if publicly means crying outside his dorm room while a stranger walks past.
"The first time I saw you was in the stairwell.
You were carrying that ridiculous stack of textbooks and you smelled like black cherry and you looked up at me and I felt it hit me so hard I couldn't breathe.
And I panicked. Instead of saying something honest I made a crack about Omegas in the hallway and you looked at me like I was garbage and you were right. I was."
I'm pressing both palms flat against the door now, tears streaming down my face but the words keep coming because they've been locked behind my father's code for six months and the lock is broken now.
"Every shoulder-check was me reaching for you the only way I knew how.
Every comment was me trying to make you see me because the alternative was showing you what I actually felt and that meant admitting the playbook was wrong and if my father's code was wrong then he failed me and he failed my mother and she deserved a mate who was brave enough to reach.
She deserved better than the code he taught me and you deserve better than the version of me that followed it. "
I'm fully crying now, tears running into my beard, my breath hitching between sentences. Someone at the end of the hall has stopped walking and I can feel them watching but I don't turn around.
"I'm scared, Kit. I'm scared that I ruined this and I'm scared that sorry isn't enough and I know it isn't enough.
But I'm standing in your hallway saying all of it because you told me I don't get to be soft in private and act like it doesn't translate to the hallway, and you're right.
So here I am. In a hallway. Being the softest I've ever been in my life.
And everyone on this floor can hear me and I don't care because you deserved this from the first day and I'm six months too late and I'm sorry. "
The silence that follows is the longest of my life. Seconds tick by into minutes and for a moment, I’m sure that Kit isn’t going to open the door, that this is the end of whatever we had.
Then the lock clicks.
The door opens slowly, Kit standing there with his hair damp from a shower and his eyes red-rimmed and his arms crossed over his chest, his jaw set in the stubborn line I'd know from across any room on this campus.
He looks at my face, at the tears still wet on my cheeks, at the way I'm leaning against his doorframe like it's the only thing holding me upright, and his expression cycles through something too fast for me to track before it settles.
"That's a start," he whispers, his voice wobbling a little before he steps aside, leaving the doorway open behind him.