Chapter 22 #2
The curious, open-angled motion that I’m starting to recognize as the Oakley Torres version of tell me more—the physical expression of a man whose interest is genuine and whose patience is structural.
“When I was with Roman,” I say, and a laugh escapes—not the controlled, strategic laugh that I deploy to manage social situations, but something more real, carrying the specific, rueful amusement of a woman looking back at a dynamic that was absurd and knowing it was absurd and having been in it anyway.
“We didn’t date. God, no. Me and Roman’s…
thing…was not what you’d call a relationship. ”
I shake my head.
“It was rivalry on crack. We competed over everything. Scores, rankings, physical assessments, who could eat more in the cafeteria, who could stay awake longer during night drills. The only difference between those two personalities and alcohol is an extremely bad combination, because the moment we’d drink we’d just become two horny assholes. ”
The laugh deepens.
Genuine. The kind that makes my shoulders shake and my eyes crinkle and the monitoring apparatus that I usually run on social interactions completely disengage.
“Practically fuck standing,” I continue, because apparently the combination of a diner booth and a man whose scent makes me feel safe is enough to dissolve the filter I typically apply to personal disclosures.
“And finally admit we have a thing for each other. And then by morning, when we’re sober, we realize we hate each other’s guts and move right back to the scheduled program. ”
Oakley smirks.
The expression is warm—amused, but warm. Carrying the particular fondness of a man who is hearing about his packmate’s history with the woman he’s interested in and is not threatened but delighted.
“Aww,” he says. “You’re madly in love. Romantic.”
I laugh.
“Fuck off.”
“If that’s love,” he continues, his smirk widening, the hazel eyes bright with the mischief that lives beneath every serious thing he says, “then this is clearly marriage.”
The word lands in the booth like a dropped match.
Marriage.
I feel the blush before I can prevent it—the rapid, capillary-level heat rushing to my face with the speed of a woman whose brain has just processed an implication it wasn’t prepared for.
“What—you’d marry?”
The question comes out before my filter recovers. Half-formed. Incredulous. The vocal equivalent of a woman who has tripped over a word and hasn’t regained her balance.
Oakley doesn’t flinch.
Doesn’t backpedal.
He meets my eyes with the steady, unhesitating gaze of a man who said what he meant and meant what he said and considers the question an opportunity rather than a trap.
“If it’s important to you, yes,” he says. Simply. Like the answer was always there and just needed to be asked. “You’ve never thought about marriage?”
I think about it.
Not the social construct. Not the institutional framework—the licenses and the ceremonies and the legal architecture that the government uses to classify partnership for tax purposes.
The other thing. The real thing. The image that the word conjures when it’s spoken by someone who means it in a diner booth in October with his arm around your shoulders and his scent in your hair.
“Not really,” I whisper.
Because who would marry you, Hazel?
That’s the thought that lives behind the answer.
The quiet, corroded belief that has been sitting in the foundation of my self-concept since my former pack installed it there.
Who would marry the Omega who’s too competitive, too muscular, too independent, too old, too damaged, too everything-that-men-don’t-want and not enough of everything-they-do?
Who would marry the woman with the six-month countdown and the corkboard full of missing persons and the scars beneath the constellation tattoos?
Oakley moves his hand.
His fingers find the strands of hair that have worked themselves loose from my ponytail during the ride—the icy blue wisps that are framing my face with the kind of artful dishevelment that would take a stylist twenty minutes to produce and took a galloping palomino approximately three.
He gathers them. Gently. Moves them behind my ear with the slow, deliberate care of a man who is not fixing hair but creating proximity.
He leans in.
His lips press to my temple.
The kiss is light. Soft. The kind of contact that doesn’t demand a response but offers one—warmth, pressure, the particular intimacy of a mouth finding the thin skin at the side of the head where the pulse is close to the surface and the touch registers at a depth that handshakes and hugs can’t reach.
“You’d be a beautiful bride,” he says softly.
Against my temple.
The words vibrating through the bone and into the spaces behind my eyes where I keep the things I’m not strong enough to look at directly.
I blush.
“Really?” The word escapes with a vulnerability that I didn’t authorize.
Small. Hopeful. The voice of a girl who used to dog-ear pages in romance novels and imagine the dress and the flowers and the someone who would be standing at the other end of the aisle looking at her like she was the only thing in the room.
“I doubt I could pull off a wedding dress, though. Probably too muscular.”
“Now who told you that, Martinez?”
His voice drops.
A register shift. Not to the Alpha command frequency—to something lower.
Warmer. More dangerous. The specific, intimate modulation that Oakley uses when the playfulness recedes and the hunger surfaces, the two states exchanging positions with the smooth, practiced transition of a man who knows exactly how to move between them.
His breath is on my neck.
Hot. The exhalation landing on the sensitive skin below my ear with a warmth that my nerve endings process as event-level stimulus—the kind that makes the hairs on my forearms rise and my spine produce a shiver that travels from my cervical vertebrae to the base of my tailbone with the slow, undeniable certainty of a body recognizing what it wants.
I shiver.
His tongue.
Just slightly. A single, slow, devastating pass along the side of my neck—tracing the curve from the space below my ear to the junction where neck meets shoulder, the wet heat of the contact leaving a trail that the cool diner air immediately finds and converts into a sensation that is half temperature and half electricity and entirely responsible for the fact that I have forgotten we are in a public establishment.
I blush harder.
“I…just assumed,” I mutter, my voice operating on residual power while my body diverts all available resources to processing the fact that Oakley Torres just licked my neck in a diner booth at eleven in the morning. “Since everyone says I’m muscular and boyish.”
“Hmmm.”
The sound vibrates against my skin.
He kisses my neck.
Firmly. Not the featherlight brush of the temple kiss or the teasing ghost of his lips in the barn.
This is a kiss with intent—his mouth sealing against the curve of my throat with a pressure that is claiming territory it has decided belongs to it.
His lips are warm and sure and his scent is everywhere—the candied blood orange darkening to something richer, the caramelized sugar deepening to a note that I can only describe as want, the olfactory signature of a man whose arousal is no longer an undercurrent but a tide.
He sucks.
On the spot.
The suction is controlled—not aggressive enough to hurt, not gentle enough to be ambiguous.
The precise, calibrated pressure of a man who knows what he’s doing and is doing it with the deliberate, unhurried confidence of someone who has all the time in the world and intends to use every second of it.
The sensation travels through my neck and down my throat and into my chest and lower, lower, into the warmth that has been building since the barn and the lip tug and the gallop and the ninety minutes of sitting beside a man who smells like home.
I gasp.
Softly. The sound escaping through parted lips with the involuntary urgency of a body that has been running on suppressed desire for years and has just encountered stimulation that the suppression can’t contain.
He bites.
A tidbit. The barest pressure of his teeth against the skin he’s been working—not breaking, not marking, just the edge of sharpness that converts pleasure into something brighter, something that makes my breath catch and my thigh muscles tighten and my hand find his knee beneath the table with a grip that communicates everything my voice can’t manage.
His hand is already on my thigh.
When did it move there? Sometime between the temple kiss and the neck bite, his hand relocated from the booth’s backrest to my leg with the seamless, unhurried confidence of a man whose body knows where it wants to be and doesn’t negotiate with itself about the logistics.
His fingers grip—firmly, the pressure landing on the muscle of my outer thigh with the possessive, anchoring weight of a palm that has claimed its position and has no intention of relinquishing it.
He speaks against my neck.
His lips still touching the skin. The words forming in the warmth of his breath and traveling through my nerve endings before they reach my ears.
“Whoever called you masculine,” he murmurs, and the voice is dark, low, carrying the specific, controlled intensity of a man who is angry about something that was done to the person he wants and is channeling that anger into a delivery that is equal parts correction and worship, “is clearly projecting their own insecurities.”
His thumb strokes my thigh.
One slow, deliberate pass through the tights’ fabric.
“Because I’ve been struggling to think straight,” he says, “just from you wearing black tights and this damn crop top that makes your perky breasts so fucking hot.”
Perky breasts.
He said perky breasts.