Page 14 of Written in Scent

“Yes.”

I close my eyes briefly, reconstructing it. “Warm. Sweet, but not sugary. Citrus threaded through something deeper. Golden, almost amber… and vanilla.”

She exhales deliberately.

“That’s what I expected,” she says.

My chest tightens. “Expected what?”

“Elodie,” she says, sitting beside me now, close enough that our knees nearly touch. “That wasn’t dessert.”

I blink at her.

“What?”

“What you smelled yesterday,” she continues gently, “was an alpha.”

The meaning lands all at once.

I stare at her, waiting for her to amend it, soften it, explain it away.

She doesn’t.

“The scent,” she says. “That was him.”

“Him who?”

“The guy you ran into. Jamie Miller. He must have been in your orientation group. I noticed his scent tonight when you collided with him. It’s the same one you described.”

The room feels very still.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I say automatically. “It was too strong. I’ve been around alphas before. They don’t smell like that.”

“They don’t,” Sophie agrees. “Not usually.”

Usually.

My pulse stumbles.

“But you smelled it too?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “Just not the way you did.”

I look down at the carpet between my shoes. The fibers are a dull institutional gray, pressed into faint tracks where furniture must have been dragged across them before we arrived. I follow one of those lines with my eyes, tracing it as if it might lead somewhere more comforting than this conversation.

“He asked me out…” I murmur, “and I ran away from him.”

Sophie makes a subtle sound in confirmation.

Maybe coming here was a mistake.

A university packed with alphas, instincts layered over ambition, proximity layered over curiosity. I came here for lectures and labs and libraries, not for this sharp, unfamiliar pull under my skin.

I should feel relieved that I ran.

I should feel safer for it.

Instead I keep remembering the exact texture of his voice when he said my name, well not my name exactly, and the heat of his hands holding my arms. The scent that had wrapped around me, warm and golden and impossible to ignore.