My phone buzzes, bursting the fantasy immediately. I shouldn’t even be entertaining it, my body not catching as Ispray all over my fist and my stomach. I sag back against the pillows before picking up my phone with my clean hand, Juno’s name lighting up the screen.
All residual pleasure dies immediately, so fast it hurts.
The irritation that hits me is so sharp it circles back around to funny, because of course it's Juno, the Alpha who slept with me three times, decided that constituted a relationship, and has been orbiting me since with the persistence of a satellite that can't process its own irrelevance.
I liked Juno fine for the nine total hours I spent with him, taxi rides included, and then I was done with him. The explanation was clear, both in person and written via text, which Juno received and simply chose not to believe.
I wipe my hand on the sheets and let the call ring out, though a text follows immediately because Juno is nothing if not predictable.
Miss you. Drinks this week?
I do not miss Juno, who exists in my memory as adequate hands, an above-average mouth, and the hollow personality of an Alpha who has been told he's charming so many times he never bothered developing anything underneath it. Juno grabbed. Juno assumed. Juno put his hand on the small of my back in public like he'd purchased the right to touch me, and when I removed it he gave me the look, the universal Alpha look that translates precisely to "I would find this so much easier if you weren’t so… much."
I set the phone face down without responding because the Alpha is not worth the calories it would take to type a reply.
The contrast is Juno who calls versus the neighbor who watches, Juno who demands attention versus the Alpha next door who wouldn't dare ask for it, Juno who grabbed my back in a bar versus a man who pays real money to look at me through a screen and has never once, in five weeks of living twelvefeet away, presumed he was entitled to a single word from my mouth.
I know which one I want and I've known for weeks, the wanting just waiting for the right moment to become something I act on.
I twist over to look at the separation between us, my bedroom window nearly 12 feet from his. “Do you ever look at me, Alpha? Not just on the camera, but here. Do you see the real me? Did you watch me fuck my hand to you, the thought of you beneath me, letting me having my way with you?”
Heat coils in my belly, another gush of slick slipping between my thighs as my scent perfumes through my entire bedroom.
I think the man on the other side of this wall might be the kind who knows how to hold something without breaking it. I think when the moment comes, he won't grab and he won't demand and he won't try to make me less. He will kneel and I will let him.
