Page 22 of Keep My Alpha

“Yeah.” He pauses, looking a little distant for a second. Then he smiles, but I can tell it’s a little forced. “I’ve gotten used to it. Mostly.”

His room is at the end of the hall with the door already open, and when I step inside his scent is everywhere, thick and warm like sinking into a bath. This is his space. The walls are a soft blue, and books are stacked on the desk, piled on the nightstand, lined up on a shelf over the bed. A string of warm lights tangled around the headboard. A faded floral quilt that looks handmade, and…I carefully don’t think too much about this, but what looks like the beginnings of a nest.

And there on the windowsill, in a row, backlit by the afternoon sun: my birds.

“That’s my altar,” Soren says from behind me. I can hear the embarrassment in his voice. “That’s probably a weird thing to call it.”

“It’s not weird.” My voice comes out thick.

He moves to stand beside me. He touches the robin first. “This is Stumble. She was my first.” His finger moves along the row. “Button. Heathcliff. Snowdrop. Bronte. Fig. Keats.” He glances sideways at me. “I um, well you can probably tell where I got the names. I have a lot of time to spare, sometimes, in the library, so it’s fun to think up characters from my favorite books. Like, Heathcliff looks like a Heathcliff, right? You can totally see him brooding on the moors or something.”

He named them. Every single one. I have to put my hands in my pockets so he doesn’t see them shaking.

He likes them. I mean, I knew he did. Or at least, I suspected. But seeing them here, in his ‘altar’…

I’m not good enough for this. How could I possibly be? I’m the guy who ate cereal over the sink this morning and has a library fine he’s been ignoring since March. That’s a downgrade from mystery wood elf who leaves romantic gifts, right?

“I started finding them almost a year ago,” he says, oblivious to my crisis. “On the bench by the quad, the one under the big oak? Stumble was just sitting there under the armrest like she was waiting.” He picks up the robin and holds her to his nose. “They always smell like pine. And something warm, like wood oil.”

Linseed oil. Yeah. I know exactly what they smell like.

“Whoever’s been leaving them,” he says quietly, turning the robin in his fingers, “they know things about me. Where I sit. What I read. Which library carrel is mine.” He sets Stumble back in her place, adjusting her so the beak points toward the window. “It should be creepy, right? It should freak me out.”

“Does it?”

“No.” He looks right at me. “It feels like someone decided I was worth noticing before I did anything to earn it.”

His expression goes softer. More private. He runs his finger along Heathcliff’s tiny carved wing.

“Sometimes I think I don’t actually want to know who it is,” he says. “Like, what if the real person can’t live up to this version I’ve built in my head? The mystery is so...” He trails off, shaking his head. “It’s perfect, you know? And real people aren’t.”

Real people aren’t.

He’s right. He’s totally right.

“You earned it,” I say, and it comes out rougher than I meant it to. But he did, and if nothing else, he needs to know that.

He blinks. His ears go pink, and he turns away. “Come on, we should actually do some work or I’ll just stand here talking about my birds all day.”

We end up on the floor of his room. His desk is covered in books and his bed feels like territory neither of us is ready to acknowledge. He sits cross-legged with a pile of papers, me sitting across from him with my back against the foot of the bed, knees up.

We go through logistics first. His reading schedule and my display setup, which nights overlap, where to stage the tree. His fingers tap the calendar pages while he talks, and I try to focus on dates instead of the strip of skin showing above his waistband where his shirt has ridden up.

My palm itches to slide under that shirt. I remember how warm that strip of skin is. I want to know if I could get him to make that sound again, that little whimper. Find out if he’d shiver or lean into it.

“Okay,” he says, pulling out a sheaf of loose pages. “So my collection is called ‘Anonymous Gifts.’ It’s, you know. About the birds. About the person leaving them.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He shuffles the pages, not looking at me. “Professor Hannover says it’s the strongest work I’ve ever done, which is either a compliment or a commentary on everything else I’ve written being garbage.”

“Read me one.”

His head snaps up. “Seriously?”

Yes. No. Yes.

“I mean, you’ll be performing them in front of strangers. I’m sort of a stranger.”