Chapter 5 #2
The second his palms press flat against my sides, I'm soaked.
It isn't the slow warmth of reading dirty DMs at the library.
It's instant. A rush of wet heat between my thighs, slick soaking through my boxers so fast it clings to my skin, hot and undeniable.
The fabric goes heavy and damp where it presses against me.
My cock stiffens. My hands shake. The only word in my head is mate.
It hits me so hard I can't think around it. I know it the same way I know how to breathe. This man. This scent. This is what I've been aching for in my bed at night with my face pressed into an empty pillow, reaching for something I couldn't name. It's him. It was always going to be him.
Underneath Callum's scent—threaded through it like a confession—I catch something else.
Sharp and sweet and unmistakably mine. My own slick, my own omega scent spiking into the tiny bathroom, mixing with his until the air between us is something new.
It tells him exactly how turned on I am, as if the soaked fabric wasn't evidence enough.
Callum makes a sound low in his chest. His fingers dig into my waist, and I feel every one pressing in.
His jaw goes tight. A muscle ticks beneath his ear.
His eyes are locked onto mine, and the composure I've watched him carry for years is just gone.
Whatever careful, steady, good-guy Callum looks like, this isn't it.
He looks like a man who just got hit by a truck he can't fight.
He can smell it too. He knows.
My cut is still bleeding, slow and red, and his fingerprints are on my wrist in blood.
The faucet is still running behind me. My jeans are ruined, slick seeping warm against my inner thighs when I shift even slightly against the edge of the sink.
My hands won't stop shaking, and I can't look away from his face because his face is the only thing that exists right now.
I'm not pulling away. His palms are spread wide on my waist, his thumbs pressing into the soft space above my hip bones, and I'm not pulling away.
I should. I know I should. But I don't want to.
The wanting is so much bigger than the should.
I want him closer. I want his hands to stay exactly where they are. I want more of them.
I'm terrified. Ava is in the kitchen. Ava, who's been my friend since freshman year, who trusts me, who doesn't know that her brother has his hands on my waist and I'm soaking wet and the word mate is ringing through me so loud I can barely hear the water.
If she walks in and sees us like this, I don't just lose a crush—I could lose my friend.
And even now, even with his scent completely short-circuiting my brain, my first reflex is to figure out how to smooth this over.
How to make it okay for everyone else before I let it be real for me.
But the fear is nothing compared to the rest of it.
I've been wanting this man from across dinner tables and group chats for so long I stopped counting, and I thought that was it.
I thought that was as close as I'd ever get.
Turns out my body was reaching for him the whole time and I didn't even know it.
And now he's here with his palms on my hips and his scent in my lungs, and I couldn't walk away from him right now if someone paid me.
I'm not scared of him. I'm scared of how much I want this.
Neither of us moves. The water runs. The fluorescent light hums. Somewhere through the door, a wooden spoon clatters against a pan.
"You guys find the band-aids?" Ava's voice comes through the wood, cheerful and easy and from what feels like another planet. "Dinner's almost ready! I think the chicken actually worked this time!"
I watch something shift in Callum's eyes.
The muscles in his jaw clench so hard I can hear his teeth grind.
His fingers flex on my hips, pressing in and then loosening like he's trying to make himself let go, but his hands won't obey.
He takes a half-step back—or tries to. His body barely moves.
His throat works on a swallow that looks painful.
I see it all. The two instincts tearing him apart right there on his face: the part of him that would never hurt Ava, never cross a line she didn't know about, and the part of him that just found his mate and is being asked to take his hands off.
He can't do both. And right now, he's not doing either.
He's just frozen, fingers still denting the fabric at my waist, jaw locked, breathing like he's rationing air.
He doesn't move. I don't move. His hands stay on my waist. My blood is on his fingers.
The band-aids are still under the sink where neither of us has looked for them, the cupboard door closed and untouched.
My cut throbs with my pulse now that the initial shock is settling into a dull, insistent ache, and the edge of the counter digs into my hips where I'm braced against it.
Callum reaches behind me without looking, his eyes still locked on mine, and turns off the faucet with a jerky twist. The water stops. His hand comes back to my waist like it was never anywhere else.
Water drips from my finger into the basin. It drips, and drips, and drips.