Chapter 27 Climb Me Up #3
Cuddling requires vulnerability. Requires staying after the purpose of the proximity has been fulfilled, remaining in someone's space when the easy thing would be to leave.
Cuddling means choosing closeness when the option to retreat exists, and I have never chosen closeness.
Not once. Every Omega I spent the night with received the same experience: the physical act, followed by a calculated distance that widened with each passing minute until dawn provided the excuse to leave.
It always felt staged. Performative. Like two actors holding a pose for a camera that neither of them could see. The arms draped in approximation of tenderness, the spooning that lasted exactly long enough to avoid rudeness before one of us rolled away and stared at the wall until morning.
Not genuine. Not even close.
I turn my head to look at Mae.
She is staring at me.
Those half-lidded hazel eyes watching me from the pillow with the patient expectation of a woman who issued an invitation and is waiting for me to accept the full terms of it. The pout has not moved. It sits on her face with the permanence of a fixture, equal parts accusation and request.
I smirk.
"What does my MaeBell want, hm?"
"Cuddle," she mumbles. The word is a single, sleep-thickened syllable that she delivers with the blunt directness of someone who has no energy to be coy.
"Then why don't you?" I tease, because apparently I am incapable of accepting affection without first filtering it through sarcasm.
She pouts further.
The expression deepens to a degree I did not think anatomically possible, her bottom lip pushing out so far it nearly becomes a shelf, her brows pinching in a frown that carries the concentrated displeasure of a woman being asked to perform a task she does not have the manual for.
"I... do not..." She hesitates, the words catching on a vulnerability that even sleep cannot fully dissolve. "Well... hmmm."
I arch an eyebrow.
"You do not cuddle your boyfriend?" I ask, the question delivered with a lightness that contradicts the genuine curiosity beneath it.
Her frown deepens.
"I have never had a boyfriend."
The statement lands in the dark room with the weight of a confession that should not be surprising but is.
I knew, on some level, that Mae's romantic history was sparse.
The conversation earlier today, the admission about never being kissed romantically, the references to functional encounters stripped of emotional investment.
But hearing it stated plainly, hearing the absence framed not as a choice but as a circumstance, shifts the understanding from abstract to specific.
Mae has never had a boyfriend.
This fierce, brilliant, impossibly attractive Omega who can outskate trained Alphas and dismantle an argument with the precision of a surgeon has never had someone claim the title of hers.
Never had someone text her good morning or save her contact with a heart emoji or argue about whose turn it is to pick the movie because they have been together long enough to have a rotation.
"And I do not cuddle sex partners," she adds, the clarification arriving with a pragmatism that guts me. "No point when they are just going to leave by morning."
No point.
Two words that contain an entire worldview.
The learned behavior of a woman who stopped investing emotional energy in physical encounters because every person she allowed into her bed repaid the proximity with absence.
Why curl into someone's warmth when the warmth will be gone by sunrise?
Why memorize the shape of someone's body against yours when the space will be empty before the sheets cool?
My jaw tightens.
Not in anger. In recognition. Because I am the mirror image of what she just described.
Different circumstances, identical outcomes.
I have never cuddled my partners either.
Never stayed because I wanted to. Never allowed the physical closeness to persist beyond its transactional purpose because attachment to people who do not intend to stay is a vulnerability I could not afford.
We are the same wound wearing different faces.
Has Mae ever really dated at all? The question moves through my mind with a quiet ache.
This girl who deserves the full, ridiculous, embarrassing experience of dating, the hand-holding and the pet names and the fighting over restaurant choices and the falling asleep on someone's chest because you are safe enough to let go, has been navigating adulthood without any of it.
Surviving on necessity. Substituting connection with convenience.
Building a life that functions perfectly well on its own but functions alone.
Then again, I am not exactly the authority on traditional romance.
I have not officially dated anyone either.
The encounters I have had were exactly what Mae described from the opposite side.
Bodies in beds. Transactions completed. Mornings spent untangling myself from sheets and situations with the efficiency of someone who never intended to stay.
I told myself it was a choice. An Alpha preference for independence. A refusal to be tied down.
It was not a choice. It was a pattern. The same avoidance dressed in different clothes, and I am only recognizing the costume now because Mae just described her version of wearing it.
I pat my chest.
Lightly. Twice. The gesture is an echo of the pillow-pat she gave me minutes ago, a mirrored invitation that I offer with a softness I am not accustomed to displaying. My hand rests against my sternum, holding the space open, and my eyes find hers in the dim room.
"Climb me up, MaeBell."
She huffs, the sound carrying a drowsy indignation that makes the corner of my mouth twitch.
"You make it sound like you are a tree."
"Six foot one. Broad shoulders. Vertically imposing. The comparison is not entirely inaccurate."
"You are impossible."
"And you are stalling. Come here."
She huffs again, a second gust of theatrical protest, and then she moves.
Slowly, with the uncoordinated determination of someone operating on fumes and muscle memory, she closes the distance between us on the narrow mattress.
Her body unfolds from its defensive curl, her arm reaching across my torso, her head finding the space between my shoulder and my collarbone with the instinctive precision of a puzzle piece sliding into the only gap that fits.
She settles against me.
The contact is immediate and total. Her cheek pressed against my chest, her palm flat over my heartbeat, her leg draped across mine beneath the blanket.
Her body molds to the contour of my side with a willingness that tells me she has wanted this closeness all along, has been craving it behind the pouting and the deflection and the I do not cuddle disclaimer.
And the relief that floods through my body is staggering.
Not sexual. Not the charged, heated response I might have expected from having an Omega pressed against me in a dark room wearing my jersey and underwear.
This is different. Deeper. A loosening of tension I did not know I was carrying, a release that originates somewhere behind my sternum and radiates outward until my entire body softens against the mattress with a surrender I have never experienced in another person's presence.
Her warmth seeps through the fabric between us.
Her vanilla sugar scent concentrates against my neck, filling each inhale with a sweetness that makes the restless thing in my chest go quiet for the first time in longer than I can calculate.
Her breathing slows, each exhale a warm pulse against my collarbone, and I can feel her muscles relaxing incrementally, her body releasing the vigilance it maintains even in sleep, trusting me enough to go completely boneless against my frame.
This is unique.
Different from every encounter that came before it.
Different from the mechanical proximity of one-night stands and the performed intimacy of hookups that served a biological function without nourishing anything beneath the surface.
This is not transaction. This is not function.
This is a woman who has never had a boyfriend choosing to fall asleep on my chest, and a man who has never stayed until morning deciding that leaving is not an option he is willing to consider.
I stay.
Still. Breathing steadily. My arm curled around her back, my hand resting against the curve of her waist where the jersey bunches against her hip.
I dare to say I like this. The weight of another person against my body, not as an obligation to endure but as a comfort I did not know I was starving for.
The gentle percussion of her heartbeat against my ribs, slightly off-rhythm from my own, the two pulses creating a syncopation that sounds like the beginning of a song neither of us has learned yet.
Her breathing evens out.
Slow. Deep. The unmistakable cadence of someone who has crossed the threshold into real sleep, the kind that erases consciousness and leaves the body to its own quiet maintenance.
She is gone. Fully and completely, her grip on my shirt loosening as her hand relaxes into a warm, open palm against my sternum.
I stare at the ceiling.
The darkness above me is featureless, a blank canvas that my brain populates with the thoughts I have been avoiding all day. All week. All month, if I am being honest with myself, which apparently is the theme of the evening because honesty keeps ambushing me when my defenses are down.
Mae was right about me.
The admission settles into my body without resistance, sinking through the layers of denial and deflection I have spent years constructing until it reaches the foundation and finds a space that was waiting for it.
She was right about the silence being its own language.
Right about complicity wearing the mask of neutrality.
Right about the damage caused by standing in the presence of cruelty and choosing comfort over conscience.
And maybe the universe has been trying to teach me this for a while.
Maybe the loneliness I have been running from, the hollow ache that drove me to chase Rafe's approval and tolerate his cruelty and fill every quiet moment with noise and company and the shallow performance of belonging, was never the enemy.
Maybe it was the lesson. The universe's way of sitting me down and saying, you need to figure out what you actually want.
Not what Rafe tells you to want. Not what the team expects you to want.
Not what the Alpha playbook prescribes for a twenty-two-year-old man with a roster spot and a reputation to maintain.
What I want.
My likes. My interests. The things that make Cal Whitmore a person rather than a position on someone else's roster.
This is my shot to figure that out. To stop defining myself through proximity to louder, more confident people and start excavating the version of me that exists underneath the performance.
To discover what I care about when no one is watching.
What I choose when the pressure to conform is removed.
Who I am when the only person I need to impress is sleeping on my chest with her fingers curled against my heartbeat.
I press my lips to the top of Mae's head.
The contact is featherlight. Barely a whisper of pressure against her dark hair, carrying no expectation and no agenda, just the impulse to be close to someone in a way that is not performative or transactional but simply honest.
Her scent fills my lungs. Vanilla sugar. Frosted roses. The fragrance of an Omega who chose my chest over an empty pillow and trusted me enough to fall asleep before I could prove I deserve it.
I close my eyes.
The apartment is warming. The heater hums through the vents with a steady, drowsy rhythm that blends with Mae's breathing and the distant silence of a campus asleep beneath a winter sky.
The cold is retreating, chased from the room by the combination of mechanical heat and shared body warmth, and the blanket around us holds the temperature close, turning the narrow twin bed into a pocket of comfort that the rest of the apartment cannot touch.
I should overanalyze this. Should catalogue the risks and the complications and the hundred reasons why an Alpha with my track record has no business being this close to an Omega this vulnerable.
But I am tired of overanalyzing.
Tired of calculating exit strategies before I have fully entered the room.
Tired of treating intimacy like a chess match where every move is evaluated for its potential to cause damage.
Tired of being the man who leaves by morning because staying requires a courage I convinced myself I did not possess.
Mae makes me want to stay.
Not because of the jersey or the way it clings to her body or the bare legs or the biological pull that every Alpha feels toward an Omega in close proximity. Those elements exist, undeniably, humming beneath the surface with a heat I am choosing to acknowledge rather than act on.
But the wanting runs deeper.
She makes me want to examine the parts of myself I have been avoiding.
The insecurities I masked with bravado. The loneliness I drowned in noise.
The capacity for tenderness that I buried so deep I forgot it existed until a girl with freckles like constellations asked me to cuddle and I realized I had been waiting my entire life for someone to ask.
She makes me want to explore more about myself.