Chapter 27 Climb Me Up #2
The motion is practiced at this point. One arm slides beneath her knees, the other supports her back, and I lift her against my chest in a single fluid movement that barely disrupts her breathing.
She weighs nothing. Or next to nothing. Light enough that the effort of holding her registers closer to carrying a pillow than a person, and the realization sends a flicker of protectiveness through my ribcage that I choose not to examine at this hour.
Her head lolls against my shoulder. Her scent concentrates against the collar of my shirt, vanilla sugar and frosted roses pressed into the fabric with the warmth of her skin, and the proximity makes my pulse do a thing that I am going to attribute to the cold and not to the Omega asleep in my arms.
I carry her down the hallway.
The corridor is dark, the overhead light mercifully off, and I navigate by muscle memory and the faint glow filtering from the living room behind me. Her door is ajar, which saves me the acrobatic challenge of opening a handle with no free hands, and I shoulder it wider as I step inside.
Mae's room is small but personal. She has been here only a few weeks and already the space carries her imprint.
A handful of photos pinned to the wall above her desk, the faces too dim to identify in the dark.
A stack of textbooks on the nightstand, spines cracked from use.
The faint, lingering sweetness of her vanilla sugar scent embedded in the sheets, the pillowcase, the air itself, transforming the room into a cocoon of her fragrance that hits my senses with a warmth that makes my jaw clench.
I lower her onto the mattress.
Carefully. The way you handle things that matter.
Her body meets the bed with a soft exhale, her head finding the pillow with the instinctive precision of someone who knows the exact topography of their own sleeping surface.
The jersey rides up slightly with the transition, the hem inching along her thigh, and I reach down to tug it back into place because I am many things but I am not the kind of man who looks at an unconscious woman without adjusting her dignity first.
She stirs.
A small murmur escapes her lips, the sound halfway between a word and a sigh, her brows pinching as she turns onto her side. Her hand gropes blindly at the empty space beside her, patting the cold sheet with the dissatisfied rhythm of someone searching for warmth that is not there.
"Cold," she mutters.
The single syllable is thick with sleep, barely audible, delivered with the petulant frustration of a woman who has been deposited into a bed that does not meet her temperature standards.
I chuckle under my breath.
"I know. I am going to check the thermostat, since the two useless Alphas in the living room decided blanket theft and chair hibernation were more pressing priorities."
She swats at the air.
Her hand arcs through the darkness with the coordination of someone swinging at a pinata while blindfolded, missing me by approximately fourteen inches and connecting with nothing but cold air.
The gesture is clearly intended to smack some part of my body in sleepy retaliation, but her aim is so catastrophically off that I have to press my lips together to keep from laughing out loud.
"Your combat skills are terrifying," I whisper. "Truly. I feel threatened."
She grumbles in a language that might be French or might be gibberish and burrows deeper into the pillow.
I leave the room.
The thermostat is in the hallway, a small digital panel that glows blue when I tap it to life.
The display confirms my suspicion. The heat turned itself off at some point during the night, either through a timer I did not know existed or a malfunction that this aging university building has decided to spring on us at the worst possible hour.
The current temperature reads fifty-eight degrees, which explains why the apartment feels like the inside of a cooler.
I adjust the settings, cranking the heat to seventy-two and listening for the telltale hum of the system engaging.
It clicks on after a five-second delay, the vents in the ceiling beginning to push warm air into the hallway with the sluggish reluctance of machinery that resents being woken up as much as the rest of us.
It will take a while to warm the place.
I detour to the linen closet, pulling out a blanket. One of the thick ones, the kind the university provides that feels like it was woven from industrial carpet fibers but retains heat with the efficiency of a furnace. Not glamorous, but functional.
Mae's door is still open.
I step inside, and in the faint glow from the hallway, I can see her more clearly now.
She is curled on her side, the jersey clinging to her frame in a way that traces the curve of her waist and the line of her hip with a fidelity that the garment was never designed to provide.
Her legs are drawn up, her arms wrapped around herself in a self-embrace that is equal parts cold and habit, the posture of someone who learned to hold themselves because no one else was doing it.
She is stunning.
The thought arrives uninvited and unapologetic, settling into my consciousness with the casual permanence of a fact that has been waiting for me to acknowledge it.
Mae Rose, asleep in a hockey jersey that is three sizes too large for her, with messy hair and cold-flushed cheeks and bare legs tucked into a fetal curl, is the most attractive person I have ever shared breathing space with.
And I need to get a grip.
I need to tame the thing in my chest that accelerates every time she is close.
Need to remind my Alpha instincts that admiring an unconscious Omega is not the foundation of a healthy romantic narrative.
Need to quiet the primal voice in the back of my skull that keeps whispering mine in a possessive frequency that I have never experienced with anyone, not the hookups, not the one-night stands, not the Omegas whose names I forgot before my sheets were cold.
None of them made my pulse do this.
I unfold the blanket and drape it over her, tucking the edges around her shoulders with a care that surprises me. My hands, these big, calloused, hockey-roughened hands that have checked opponents into boards and thrown punches in scrums, move with a gentleness I did not know they were capable of.
She exhales beneath the warmth, her body uncurling by a fraction, her grip on herself loosening as the blanket absorbs the chill.
I should leave.
I should walk out of this room, close the door, and go to my own bed where I can process the events of today in the privacy of my own thoughts without the complication of proximity.
I turn to go.
"Cold."
Her voice again. Small and groggy and carrying a dissatisfaction that even the blanket has not resolved. I pause in the doorway, looking back.
Mae has turned over. Her eyes are half open, glazed with sleep, her hazel irises catching the faint hallway light in a way that makes them glow amber at the edges.
The pout is back. That devastating, bottom-lip-forward pout that she deploys with the precision of a weapon she has no idea she possesses.
She pats the pillow beside her.
Twice. The gesture is slow and deliberate, the universal invitation that transcends language and consciousness level, and the implication is so clear that my brain does not even bother pretending to misinterpret it.
I arch an eyebrow.
"You want me to sleep next to you?" I ask, keeping my voice neutral, because I need to hear her confirm it.
Need the explicit, spoken acknowledgment that this is her choice and not my projection, because I have spent enough years misreading signals and assuming interest where none existed to know that clarity matters.
She nods.
A single, sleepy nod that involves her entire head dipping forward against the pillow and then tilting back up, her eyes barely maintaining their half-open status, her lips still pushed into that pout that is simultaneously the cutest and hottest thing I have ever witnessed on a human face.
I do not say anything.
There is nothing to say. An Omega I am interested in has asked me to lie beside her, and every Alpha instinct in my body has unanimously agreed to comply without deliberation.
The need to fulfill the request is visceral, bypassing rational thought entirely, and I am self-aware enough to recognize that this is biological as much as emotional.
The Alpha hormones that have been circulating through my system since the moment I carried her off the couch are now actively orchestrating my behavior, rerouting my feet from the doorway back toward the bed with a purposefulness that leaves no room for second-guessing.
I pull back the covers and slide in beside her.
The mattress dips beneath my weight, adjusting to accommodate a frame it was not designed for.
Mae's bed is small, a twin pushed against the wall, and the addition of a six-foot-one Alpha reduces the available space to a margin that makes personal boundaries a mathematical impossibility.
My shoulder touches the wall on one side. Mae's warmth radiates from the other.
I lie on my back, staring at the ceiling.
Should I put my arm around her? The question circulates through my brain with the nervous energy of a teenager on a first date, which is absurd because I am twenty-two years old and have shared beds with enough people to fill a small lecture hall.
But those encounters were different. Transactional.
Bodies occupying the same mattress out of convenience or lust or the mutual agreement that being alone was worse than being next to a stranger.
I never cuddled.