Chapter 29 Mavi
Mavi
I wake up sore in the best possible way.
Every muscle carries the deep, delicious ache of nearly eighteen hours spent lost in heat and Sai.
My thighs tremble when I try to shift, and the tender places between my legs throb with a sweet reminder of how thoroughly he filled me.
The nest is a wreck of damp sheets and our combined scents, but I love it, especially the new connection to my Alpha.
I stretch slowly and feel the pull of it all settle into my bones.
Strong arms slide under me before I can even attempt to move.
Sai lifts me like I weigh nothing, cradling me against his chest as he carries me out of the nest and through the quiet apartment.
I rest my head on his shoulder and breathe him in, letting sandalwood and the faint trace of us fill my lungs.
His love for me pulses through the bond, warming me from the inside out and for the first time I see the obsession through his eyes. I truly am the center of his peace, the one thing that keeps him from the chaos in his head.
It’s much the same way for me, having someone who puts me first despite my flaws or needs. Sai runs his nose along my cheek just before sucking the curve of my ear into his mouth, tending to his bite before lowering me gently into the tub he has already started filling, and climbs in behind me.
Warm water rises around my body as he pulls my back to his chest and wraps his arms around my waist. He holds me there while the tub continues to fill, one hand slowly stroking over my stomach, the other resting over my heart.
My body relaxes fully for the first time in almost a day.
I sink heavier against Sai’s chest and let the water soothe the last of the ache from my limbs.
Then I feel it. A small flutter in my chest, easy to dismiss followed by an added hint of sweetness to my scent but one of the few signs that something is wrong.
Not wrong but definitely different.
I press my hand over the stomach without thinking, palm flat against the damp skin just below my navel.
It’s probably nothing. The intensity of the heat, the long hours without enough water, the sheer physical toll of eighteen hours of heat sex.
My body has been through a lot. Of course, I feel strange.
The flutter fades as quickly as it came.
I let my hand fall away and lean my head back against Sai’s shoulder instead.
He presses a soft kiss to my temple and tightens his arms around me, holding me closer in the warm water.
Whatever that was, it’s gone now but the worry has planted itself in my head.
“You okay, doll?”
“Perfect, Alpha. Absolutely perfect.” I mostly mean it.
I’m trying to get back into the groove of things when Sai’s voice drifts from the nest behind me.
He sits up against the wall, bare-chested and covered in the evidence of the last day and a half.
Marks bloom across his skin in shades of red and purple, fingerprints and teeth and the faint scrape of my nails.
I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing as he lies smoothly into the phone about why he had to move three photo shoots to next week.
His tone stays professional, almost bored, the way it always does when he talks to the outside world.
Only I know the way his free hand keeps drifting back to the collar now buckled around his throat, thumb brushing over the leather like it anchors him.
I turn away before the smile breaks loose and focus on pulling on a clean shirt.
The heat official broke after the bath, leaving me sore and loose-limbed and strangely light.
Sai ends the call with a quiet thank-you and sets the phone aside.
I glance over at him again and feel a fresh wave of warmth that has nothing to do with the heat.
He looks soft in my nest, marked up and relaxed in a way the rest of the world never gets to see. Then my gaze lands on the pile of his clothes from yesterday, still crumpled on the floor where we left them. He has nothing clean to wear and I’m not letting him walk naked across the hall.
“I’m going to run next door and grab you some clothes,” I say, already moving toward the door. “You can’t walk out of here looking like that.”
Sai tenses the moment the words leave my mouth. His shoulders tighten and his hand stills on the collar. Confused but curious, I cross the hallway alone for the first time. The door is open, the apartment frozen in time, only a mug out of place and his laptop still open from when I sent him a text.
Everything else, though, has a place. Just like the first time I came over here, it’s perfect.
Not one thing out of order. The sterile perfection settles around me like a held breath.
Awards hang on the west wall in perfect alignment.
Magazine covers sit in identical black frames arranged by date.
The books on the shelf stand in descending order of height.
I’m not sure how I never noticed before.
I head straight for the closet because that is why I came.
I pull open the door and find more of the same.
Everything faces the same direction. I choose a soft black button-down and a pair of dark jeans, then pause.
My eyes drift past the closet toward the open doorway at the far end of the hall.
I shouldn’t go in there. I know that. But curiosity tugs at me anyway as I walk down the short hallway and step inside.
It’s the room that’s settled across from my bedroom, the strange cutout of our building offering us windows that stare straight into each other’s apartment.
Most places would have the windows facing out at the street, which this room does, but the second one is parallel to mine, giving him a perfect view of every recording I’ve set up in my bedroom.
My fingers run across the several lenses along the table and the camera placed just so in the corner. Then I twist around, my gaze falling on the back wall and it stops me cold.
Several photographs cover it, maybe hundreds.
Every single one is of me. Taken through the window over weeks, through the gap between our buildings.
Me painting at the easel with morning light across my face.
Me stretching in the first rays that come through my bedroom window, crop top riding up.
Me laughing at something on my phone. Me in the blush lingerie, bent over the camera.
Me in an oversized shirt, yawning with a cereal bowl in my hand.
Me frowning at a canvas, tongue between my teeth in concentration.
Me eating cereal standing up at the counter, hair messy, expression soft and unguarded.
I stand there, heart hammering, and stare at the wall of me.
My family erased me the day I walked out at twenty.
They let me go without a single backward glance, like I had never existed in the first place.
My ex, Dorian tried to make me smaller every chance he got.
My other ex, Juno wanted a version of me that did not exist, the quiet, compliant Omega who would shrink to fit his idea of what I should be.
The cam audience watches my body and my performance and calls it love, but they never see the man underneath the lights and the lace. They see the show.
Nobody has ever paid this kind of attention to me.
Not the performer. Not the persona. Just me.
Mavi yawning. Mavi frowning at a canvas that isn’t working.
Mavi eating cereal standing up like a normal person on a normal morning.
Sai thought those ordinary moments were worth the same careful framing as the shots where I wear lingerie and perform for the camera.
Sai saw the real me in natural light and decided every version of me was equally precious.
I reach up to touch the bite on my ear, realizing just how far Sai’s obsession for me goes. It’s so much deeper than I thought. When he answered that he had been watching me forever, he wasn’t joking.
A sound slips out of me, and I press my hand over my mouth to catch it. Tears blur the photographs until the images swim together. I was never worth this kind of seeing to anyone else. But Sai saw all of me, the messy and the beautiful and the in-between, and he turned it into art.
I stand there for a long time, letting the weight of it settle into my bones. The man who cannot choose between three shirts spent weeks choosing exactly how to frame every version of me he could catch through the glass. And now he has given me the key to his heart with a bond that’ll never die.
And now I’ve just seen the most intimate part of the man I love.
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and take a shaky breath. The clothes for Sai are still clutched in my other hand. I turn away from the wall slowly, carefully, like it might disappear if I move too fast.
A small grunt tears my attention to the doorway, Sai standing there looking sheepish, his eyes darting to the wall and then back to me. No doubt he’s waiting for me to be mad and if I were anyone else, I might be.
However, knowing how my Alpha sees me is everything.
“Show me,” I say, voice thick. “Tell me what you see. Why me?” I step back against the wall, patting the one where I’m eating cereal, cross-legged on my bed.
Sai slowly crosses the room, stepping up against me before turning me to face the wall again. He steps in behind me, chest pressed to my back, arms sliding around my waist so I am held against him while the photographs surround us on every side.
His mouth finds my ear, tending to my bite for a few seconds before explaining everything.
“This one.” He reaches past me and touches a photograph near eye level.
It’s me laughing at my phone, afternoon light cutting across my jaw.
“You were laughing at something on the screen and the light hit your jawline exactly right. I couldn’t breathe.
I took six shots in a row. This was the one.
The others weren’t right because in this one your eyes are half-closed and you look like you forgot anyone might be watching.
That is the most beautiful thing about you. When you forget to perform.”
Sai’s hand moves to the next photograph without breaking contact.
Me at the easel, brush in hand, head tilted, frowning at the canvas.
“This one. You were frustrated with something on the painting. You kept stepping back and forward, trying to see it from different distances. I watched you for twenty minutes straight. The way your body moves when you work is different from how you move on camera. Less controlled. More honest. I have never shot anything more real than this.”
His body presses me closer to the wall. The photographs are all around us now, my own face staring back from every angle while Sai’s chest stays warm and solid against my back. His mouth brushes the shell of my ear again.
“And this one.” His fingers find the blush lingerie shot, the one that seems more worn than the others.
“This is the one I kept in the drawer. The one I held against my chest at night. You are looking at something I cannot see and whatever it is made you soft. Not the softness you perform for the camera. The real kind. The kind you hide from everyone else.”
I close my eyes for a second and feel the words sink into me.
Each description is specific, the language of a man who has studied me the way other people study masterpieces.
He’s not telling me I am beautiful. He’s showing me the moments I thought no one ever noticed and telling me they were the ones worth framing.
Tears slip down my cheeks as Sai keeps talking, each new photograph bringing another layer of me into focus. Every ordinary second, every quiet moment, he saw it all and decided it mattered.
Sai’s arms tighten around my waist. His mouth stays at my ear and his voice drops even softer, almost a whisper now. “You are the only thing I have ever wanted to keep,” he says. “Not the version you show everyone else. This one. The real one. That is the one I cannot stop photographing.”
I turn in his arms just enough to face him. My hands come up to cup his face and I kiss him slowly, tasting the salt of my own tears on his lips. When I pull back I rest my forehead against his. “You see me, Sai. All of me. And I have never let anyone do that before. Why me?”
Sai lifts his head and meets my eyes. “Because you are the only thing I have ever seen that I couldn’t capture. Every photograph I took is beautiful, but they are not you. They are light on paper. You are everything the light touches.”
I press my face into his chest so he can’t see my expression. If he sees it right now the power dynamic will never recover. My eyes burn and my throat feels too tight as I hold onto him like he is the only solid thing left in the world.
I am his.
Completely.