Page 2 of Keep My Alpha

Milo snorts. “Did you just compare yourself to a baked good?”

“I compared all omegas to baked goods. It’s an equal-opportunity metaphor.”

A daisy is growing through a crack in the sidewalk, half-hidden by dandelions, and I stoop to pick it without thinking. My fingers find the stem and twist, gentle. It comes free clean: white petals, yellow center, a stem longer than I expected.

Milo has stopped walking. He’s watching me with his head tilted, but he doesn’t ask.

The bike rack is right there, a few steps ahead, one bike still locked to it. Someone’s late shift or library cram session, or maybe just a person who forgot they owned a bike three weeks into summer break and now it’s rusting in peace. The spokes are bare metal, nothing on them, and before I can talk myself out of it I’m kneeling on the pavement and threading the daisy through the front wheel. The stem catches once, bends, and I ease it through slower until the flower sits tucked against the rim.

“Hold on.” I fish my notebook out of my bag, tear out a corner of a page, and scribble I just wanted your bike to have a flower. I hope tonight’s shift ends soon. I fold it small and tuck it under the seat where the owner will find it.

Milo watches me with the patient expression of someone who finds me both adorable and clinically unusual.

“What?”

“Nothing. You’re just the most romantic person alive and you won’t submit your poetry to a festival. The contradiction is staggering.”

“The notes are easy. The notes are for other people.”

“And the poems?”

I cap my pen. “The poems are for me.”

“That’s exactly why they’re good.”

I bump my shoulder against his. Milo bumps back.

We link arms again and keep walking until we hit the split where his path usually veers left toward Callum’s and mine continues straight. But instead of slowing, Milo keeps walking beside me.

“You’re not turning?”

“I told Callum I was walking you to your bench.”

“It’s not my bench.”

“You go there a lot, Soren.”

“It’s not a lot.”

“Mhm.” He squeezes my arm. “Any new birds lately?”

My heart does its little skip-hop, the one it does every single time. Maybe, maybe...

“Not for a couple weeks,” I say. “But the last one was the best yet. A cedar waxwing. You know those little crests they have? He carved it so the tip curves back and you can feel each individual barb with your fingernail.”

“He?”

“They. The anonymous person of indeterminate gender. The mystery carver.” I pause. “He. It feels like a he.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know.” But I do, somehow. It’s in the birds themselves, the care in them. The scent, mostly. Pine resin and linseed oil and something warm underneath that I’ve never been able to name, something that makes my pulse go slow when I breathe it in.

Jude thinks it’s romantic. Benji ran what he called “a conservative labor estimate” and informed me my admirer has invested roughly four hundred hours in me, then told me, deadpan, that at minimum wage that’s about three thousand dollars of free bird, and I should probably put out.

“I love that you keep them together,” Milo says. “Like they’d be lonely if you separated them.”

They live lined up on my bedroom windowsill in the order I found them: Stumble the robin, Button the chickadee, Heathcliff the house finch, Snowdrop the junco, Bronte the bluebird, Fig the nuthatch, and Keats the cedar waxwing. A tiny pale-wood flock watching the parking lot. I named every one of them, and yes, I know that’s a lot, and no, I’m not taking feedback on it.