7. Bee
Bee
By the fourth morning, I wake in my own bed with an alien prince wrapped around me like a royal security system and one of his thighs shoved diagonally across my mattress because he is too large for both the bed and my unresolved feelings.
This has become a problem.
Not the thigh specifically, though that is also a problem.
Skylor’s body was designed by a planet with more optimism about square footage than Queens can reasonably provide.
One shoulder nearly hangs off the mattress.
His feet are uncovered because my comforter gave up somewhere around his calves.
His arm lies heavy across my waist, warm and possessive, his palm spread over my stomach as if he fell asleep guarding the exact center of me from enemy forces, poor circulation, and common sense.
The problem is that I let him in again.
And again.
And again.
Every evening, I have left Layn Corporate with my laptop bag on one shoulder, my chin high, and the full intention of spending the night alone like a woman with principles, boundaries, and a working lock.
Every evening, I have gotten home, kicked off my shoes, told myself I am not waiting for him, and then stood very still when the knock came.
Not the buzzer. Not a command through the door.
A knock. Polite. Patient. Infuriatingly correct.
The first night after the morning-after reckoning, I opened the door and found him on the other side in a dark coat, eyes tired, ears held painfully still, hands visible at his sides like he was presenting himself to customs.
“Tell me to leave,” he said.
“I should.”
“That is not the word.”
I hated that. I hated how carefully he held the line. I hated how my body reacted to his scent before my pride finished drafting its rebuttal. I hated most that he did not smirk when I stepped back and let him in.
“This changes nothing,” I told him.
“I know.”
Then he came inside, closed the door, and made a ruin of that sentence with his mouth, his hands, and a knot that left me clutching his shoulders while my body voted against every emotional committee I had formed.
The next evening, the office had been so quiet around us that a paperclip falling would have needed a permit.
He called me Ms. Watson in a budget meeting, and the entire table stopped breathing.
I called him Mr. Ak Layn, and Loora covered her mouth with a folder, which might have been professionalism or prayer.
Martin from marketing dropped his pen. Twice.
Skylor never touched me. Never leaned too close.
Never let his voice darken in front of anyone.
But every time I shifted in my chair, his ears tracked the movement before he forced them still, and every time another man addressed me for too long, the air in the room developed teeth.
By five-thirty, the whole floor had the strained, glassy calm of people trapped in an elevator with a royal divorce, a mating fever, and a corporate restructuring memo.
Loora slid a snack cake onto my desk with the solemnity of a priest offering last rites. “For the record,” she said, “the building’s sexual tension has become a workplace hazard.”
“Noted.”
“No, legally. I may report the air.”
I told her to go edit something.
She told me to go hydrate, which was rude because she was right.
That night, when Skylor knocked, I opened the door with my arms crossed and my robe tied like body armor. “You cannot keep appearing at my apartment.”
“I can stop if you tell me to stop.”
“Do not be reasonable. I am not dressed for reasonable.”
His gaze moved over the robe, the bare legs, the mark at my throat, then came back to my face with enough restraint to qualify as community service. “What do you want tonight, Beatrice?”
“You.”
His pupils swallowed the gold.
“Only tonight,” I added, because apparently I enjoy shoving my hand into active machinery.
His jaw tightened. “I am learning not to argue with terms while standing in doorways.”
“Good.”
“May I come in?”
I let him.
The sex was slower that time. Worse, somehow.
The kind of slow that finds all the places anger cannot protect.
He did not demand truth. Did not ask me to name the bond.
Did not use pleasure like evidence. He asked what I wanted and gave it to me with such ruthless attention that I cried into his shoulder from the tenderness of it, which is frankly unfair.
I can defend myself against arrogance. I can defend myself against bossiness.
Tenderness comes in under the door like smoke and leaves everything smelling like surrender.
The morning after that, he was gone before I woke.
He left coffee on the counter, a folded note beside it, and his shirt tucked into the edge of my nest because the man may be learning boundaries, but he remains biologically incapable of leaving an Omega under-scented.
The note said: I did not leave because I wanted to. I left because you had not yet chosen waking with me.
I stared at that sentence for a full minute, then called him several creative names in two languages and one invented dialect composed entirely of spite. Then I drank the coffee.
At work, the stalemate worsened.
People did not whisper around us anymore.
They avoided breathing directly in our direction.
The copy team stopped using the conference room nearest his office after Skylor growled at a malfunctioning projector.
The projector had deserved it, but still.
Loora started referring to the entire floor as “the emotionally active zone.” Someone from accounting sent an email asking whether the thermostat was broken because the forty-seventh floor felt “strangely pressurized.” I deleted it before replying, which I consider professional growth.
Skylor behaved.
That was the most irritating part.
He asked before entering my office. He said please like the word had been extracted from his chest with pliers.
He kept his hands to himself, even when the bond hummed so loudly I could feel it against my ribs.
He listened in meetings. He deferred questions back to me.
He let me win an argument with the legal department without stepping in, though one of his ears twitched the entire time as if it might detach from his head and strangle someone independently.
At night, he came to my door.
At night, I opened it.
At night, all that careful daylight distance collapsed into skin, scent, mouth, knot, bite.
Not forgiveness. Not resolution. Not the grand romantic cleanup readers love in books because they do not have to deal with the real estate problems afterward.
But real. Real enough that my body stopped flinching from the word.
Real enough that when he held my hips and asked, “Now?” I could say yes without feeling like the yes had been stolen from me.
Real enough that by the third night, when he took his time licking the mark at my throat before sliding into me, I stopped pretending the ache in my chest was only biology.
Now it is morning again, and he is still here.
That is new.
I lie very still, listening to the soft radiator clank, the distant garbage truck complaining outside, the low, sleeping rumble in Skylor’s chest. His breath warms the back of my neck.
His cock is soft against my thigh, which should not feel intimate after everything we have done, but somehow does.
The mark on my throat pulses lazily. The bond lies quiet beneath my skin, not screaming, not clawing, not trying to drag me across the city by the spine.
Waiting. Patient. Smug. Like it knows something my common sense still has not agreed to sign.
Somewhere on Layn, I am apparently a wife.
A princess. A woman whose yes has been recorded by biology, family, law, and a bite mark I touch when I think no one is looking.
On Earth, I am still a woman with a tiny apartment, an ambitious magazine relaunch, a best friend who keeps emergency chocolate in three separate locations, and a husband I have not decided how to call husband without feeling like the word got there before I did.
Skylor shifts behind me. His arm tightens, then loosens immediately, as if his sleeping body remembers the rule faster than most men remember anniversaries.
“Bee,” he murmurs.
I should pretend to sleep. I do not. “Your leg is oppressing my blanket.”
His mouth brushes my shoulder. “Your bed is too small.”
“My bed is normal. You are the problem.”
“Yes.”
The easy agreement turns my head before I can stop it.
His eyes are open, heavy-lidded and gold-soft in the gray morning light.
His hair is mussed. One ear is folded against the pillow in a way that should be illegal for how much it undercuts his terrifying-prince brand.
He looks tired, satisfied, and too careful.
Careful Skylor is becoming almost as dangerous as tender Skylor.
“You stayed,” I say.
“You did not ask me to leave.”
“I didn’t ask you to stay either.”
“No.” His gaze moves over my face like he is reading a contract written in a language that keeps changing its alphabet. “I am learning the space between those things.”
That should not make my throat tight.
It does.
His hand lifts, then stops an inch from my cheek. Waiting. Asking without words. I turn my face into his palm because I want to, and his breath catches like I handed him a kingdom.
“We cannot keep doing this,” I say.
His thumb stills against my cheek.
I force myself to continue before his face can convince me to negotiate against myself.
“I cannot keep sneaking home like I am single, opening the door like I am not waiting, letting you knot me senseless, then pretending at work that the air does not know what we did. You cannot keep coming here every night like a husband I refuse to name, asking permission at the door and then freezing an entire office with your self-control by daylight.”