Page 3 of Keep My Alpha

I only ever bring one with me, and it’s always Keats, tucked into a little drawstring pouch so I don’t scratch her beak, nestled against my notebook. Milo says this is “a lot.” Milo also has a pantry full of decorative cake tins, so.

I glance down at my bag. “That’s a very Milo way of thinking about carved wood.”

“Is it wrong?”

It isn’t, actually. I don’t say that part.

Ahead of us the quad opens up, wide and moonlit. The oak is enormous this time of year, its canopy so thick it swallows the streetlight, and the bench underneath sits in a pool of green-dark shadow. My bench. The one that means nothing to anyone except me and, apparently, whoever carves birds and leaves them exactly where I sit.

I remember finding the first one. I’d been sitting there reading something very romantic and feeling poetic about my whole entire life, and when I dropped my bag on the ground, there it was. A tiny robin, tucked under the armrest like it had landed mid-flight and stayed. I picked it up and my thumb fit perfectly in the curve of its belly.

That was Stumble. She started everything.

Then Button, then Heathcliff, and so on, until Keats, who’s currently tucked safe in my bag and who I’m going to pretend I don’t carry around like a security blanket. Security bird? Anyway.

I slow as we get close, and Milo slows with me.

Maybe tonight, maybe there’ll be—

The bench arm is bare.

“Oh,” Milo says, and somehow the gentleness of it is worse than just finding nothing.

“It’s fine,” I say, and sit down. “It’s not like there’s a schedule. They just appear when they appear.”

Milo sits beside me. Tucks his legs up under him on the bench, Callum’s hoodie pooling around him like a blanket.

Above us the oak rustles. I can hear the fountain in the courtyard two buildings over, that soft continuous pour of water over stone.

I run my fingers over the bench arm. And then I stop.

“Milo.”

“What?”

I lean closer. Press my nose to the slat and breathe in.

Pine resin. Linseed oil. And underneath, warm honey, faint but there.

“Someone didn’t just fix this bench,” I say. My voice comes out a little airless. “Someone made this slat. By hand. The same someone.”

Milo goes very still beside me. “You can smell it?”

“It’s the same scent. The exact same. Whoever carves the birds replaced the broken slat on my bench.” I sit back. My heart isn’t doing the skip-hop anymore. It’s doing something bigger, something kind of insane. “He fixed my bench. That’s not a gift you leave. That’s a thing you do when someone’s not looking because you noticed the wood was splintered and you didn’t want them to get hurt.”

Milo’s hand finds mine on the bench between us. He threads our fingers together and squeezes.

“That’s not a stalker,” I say. “Right? That’s a person who—“

“That’s someone who pays very close attention to you,” Milo says carefully. “And is very good with his hands.”

A laugh breaks out of me, bright and startled, and Milo grins because he absolutely meant it both ways and we both know it.

“Oh god.” I press my free hand to my face. “Oh god, Milo, what if it’s real? What if there’s an actual person out there who has been carving me birds for almost a year and fixing my bench in secret and what if he’s—“

I can’t say it. What if he’s mine? It’s too big a word. It’s the word that changed everything for Jude, for Milo, for Benji, for Shay, and I’ve been circling it for almost a year, wanting so badly to believe and too scared to say it out loud. Wanting something this much is the worst kind of superstition. Like if I name it, if I let the hope get that specific, the universe will hear me and take it back. Not you. Never you.

“What if he is?” It’s the gentlest possible dare.