5. Vaughn
Vaughn
I'm awake.
The private room is quiet. Low amber wall sconces, black linen sheets, thick insulation that turns the main-floor bass into a distant, uneven thump.
My watch is on the nightstand. I don't remember taking it off or lying down.
I remember the knot releasing against the concrete floor.
A beta tapping my shoulder with professional kindness.
A blanket wrapped around me. A short walk down a corridor I've never been down before, since I've never been in any of the rooms at the end.
I remember the shower in the small attached bathroom here, the water hot, me using it quickly, not looking at myself in the mirror.
I remember pulling off the ruined shirt and leaving it in the sink. I don't remember getting into this bed.
I pick up the watch.
Four-forty-three.
I've been in this room for hours. I try to do my usual math, but it doesn't come.
My cab is gone. My cab is always gone; I book it for a specific hour, but I wasn't in it when it arrived.
I didn't reschedule or message the driver.
I've been doing this for eight years, and tonight I didn't message the driver.
I put the watch back down.
I don't get up.
The blanket on the bed is good. Weighted but not heavy, probably a spare from the club linen closet, tucked up to my bare chest. My legs are warm under it.
My cock is soft against my thigh for the first time in six hours.
My body aches in specific places: my hip where I hit the concrete, my shoulder where the shirt dragged, my jaw from holding a certain kind of composure for so long, my chest above my nipple where.
I turn my head.
He's asleep.
He's on his stomach, half-curled, one arm folded under his pillow and the other open on the sheet a foot from my hand.
His mask is still on; the club's rules stay in effect in private rooms, and the beta who moved us probably checked.
His bare shoulder is above the blanket. I can see the paddle bruise I put on his thigh, a dark flat color now, blooming purple under his skin.
I can see the nail marks his own fingers left on his arm when he was tearing at the restraints, four crescents that he won't know are there until they scab.
I can see the ones I put on his back, one wrapping around his side in this position, which I don't remember putting on him.
The rut had his head. I had mine. I did. I had mine.
He looks very young asleep.
His scent has changed. The dark, burnt-sugar musk of the rut is gone, faded to something lighter and steadier.
Warm dough. Clean skin. The sun-warm smell from the floor, the one that hit me across the club before I knew anything else about him.
He smells like a kitchen in the morning.
He smells like the kind of person who makes toast and eats it standing at the counter.
I didn't know that's what the scent was underneath everything.
I didn't know I'd want to keep smelling it.
I look at him for a long time. I try to do what I do.
The first step of what I do is catalog. I reach for it, and it's not there.
I reach again. The analytical frame I put on every person I meet, the fast confident sorting of traits into columns, the thing that lets me walk into a room and know what someone wants before they do.
I reach for it and my hand closes on nothing. I'm not cataloging. I'm looking.
Looking is what other people do.
I've been looking at him for what might be ten minutes.
The amber light hasn't changed. His breathing hasn't changed.
Nothing has happened. I'm just looking at a sleeping person and the machinery I've run over every surface of my life for eight years is not running, and I don't know how to make it run, and I don't want to.
The alpha is exceptional.
The phrase arrives from somewhere. I used it at the end of last night, pressed to his chest with my hand on his bruise, and it worked then.
It was a category. It slotted into place.
Now I hear it in my own head and it sits wrong.
The words are the same. The kid they're pointing at is a sleeping, sweet, enormous twenty-one-year-old with a paddle bruise on his pec that's already bloomed from red to purple.
The bruise my hand made. His teeth made the bite on my pec.
He marked me and I marked him, and the asymmetry of it — his teeth, my hand — is something I'll think about later, when I'm not lying in this bed looking at him.
I try to remember the man I had at the club two weeks ago.
Nothing.
I can't pull up his face. I can't pull up his scent.
I can't pull up a single piece of him. He existed.
I was here two Thursdays ago and I know I was here because my assistant blocks the evening.
I had a scene. I don't remember any of it.
I don't remember the cab home. I don't remember his build, his voice, whether I used the paddle or the crop. I don't remember if he thanked me.
The man before him I also don't remember.
I reach up. My hand, I notice, is not quite steady.
I wasn't aware of it being unsteady. I put two fingers against the bite on my pec.
The skin around it is hot and puffy, already scabbing at the edges.
The ridges of his teeth are visible at the rim of the mark.
It's an ugly bite. It looks like exactly what it is: a man in rut took his mouth to my chest and meant it.
I trace the edge of it.
The feeling is.
I try for a word. There isn't one. I'm quiet.
Suddenly, completely quiet in my own head, for the first time since I can remember.
The narration I usually run over the top of my life isn't running.
There's just my fingertips on a bite on my own skin, the low amber light, and a big sleeping kid a foot away.
Not my throat.
The thought comes from some underneath part of me.
He didn't go for my throat. A rutting alpha should have gone for the throat.
That's what my reading of alpha rut biology says, what a decade of this club says, what every pamphlet every new member gets tells you to expect.
He didn't. He went for my chest. Something in him skipped the throat.
I heard him do it. I felt him do it. His face was at the hollow of my throat and his mouth was moving, and then he passed, he went down, and his teeth found my pec.
I don't know what to do with this. I'm not filing it because I'm not filing anything tonight.
It just sits on the bed with me, next to the non-answer about why I'm still here, next to the watch reading four forty-four, next to the memory that keeps coming back from different angles like a tide going out and coming back in a slightly different place:
Nobody looks at me. You looked at me.
I don't repeat it in my head on purpose. It comes back on its own.
Teddy stirs.
His hand on the sheet curls once, opens. His breathing changes. I watch his eyes open behind the mask. I can tell by the shift, the way a person who was looking at nothing starts looking at a specific thing. He blinks. Does a slow check of where he is. His eyes find mine.
He stops.
He doesn't move. For a long second I think he's going to cry again. He won't. I don't know how I know that, but I know. Then his mouth opens slightly behind the mask and what comes out, soft, wrecked from last night, cracked at the edges:
"Hi."
My voice, when I answer him, is lower than I expect.
"Hi."
He blinks. His eyes drop to my bare shoulder, my bare chest, the bite on my pec, and go soft in a way I can see behind the mask. An expression I have never received in this room. Possibly not anywhere.
He says, even quieter: "You stayed."
Two words.
I don't have an answer for them. I have never stayed. I'm staying now. Teddy has named the thing that has been sitting on the bed with me for the last half hour, and there is no way to un-name it, and I can't answer it directly.
I find something sideways to say.
"The knot took an hour to release."
True. Not an answer to what he said.
Teddy smiles. I can see the corner of his mouth under the mask. Small. Tired.
"Okay."
He doesn't press. He doesn't ask me why I'm still in the bed six hours after the knot released, or why my cab is gone, or why I cleaned up with club soap and climbed back in beside him without getting dressed.
He's being careful with the air between us.
I haven't been received this carefully in a very long time. Possibly ever.
He lifts his hand. The enormous hand that lifted me off my feet last night. He doesn't go for my body. He goes for my hair.
I haven't let anyone touch my hair in over a decade.
I don't move out of the way.
His fingers slide in. Careful. Not gripping, not directing, just present at the back of my skull, warm, resting there.
The touch isn't asking anything of me. It is just contact.
The pads of his fingers against my scalp, the slow drag of them through my hair, the weight of his hand cradling the back of my head like something he's proud to hold.
Something in my chest pulls tight and lets go.
We shift toward each other without either of us saying go.
I roll from my side onto my back. Teddy moves over me, slow, huge, careful.
The sweet kid is back inside the alpha body, the one who was always there.
I understand this now. He settles between my legs without pushing them apart. I open them.
His hand stays in my hair.