Page 45 of Keep My Alpha

Milo’s whisk pauses for a moment, then keeps going. “Okay.”

“He told me while we were together. He let it all come out. Every bird. The bench he fixed. Everything.”

“How did it feel?”

“Like getting hit by a truck made of feelings.” I dig my thumbnail into the table. “I’m not exactly angry. I get why he hid. He’s scared he’s not enough without the things he makes. I’ve seen that in him. But knowing why someone hurt you doesn’t make it stop hurting, you know? And now I’m sitting here with his bite on my neck and his birds on my counter, and I can’t tell if I’m upset or embarrassed that I wanted it so much I couldn’t see what was right in front of me the whole time.”

Milo pours the batter into a pan, slides it into the oven, and sets the timer. Then he pulls out the chair across from me, sits down, and folds his hands on the table.

“Can I ask you something?”

“You’re going to anyway.”

His mouth twitches. “If Wren had come up to you last fall, before any of the birds or anything else, and said, ‘Hey, I think you’re amazing,’ would you have believed him?”

I open my mouth, then close it.

“Or would you have panicked?” Milo asks gently. “Would you have told yourself it was too good to be true? That he’d get bored? That you’d want it too much and scare him off?”

His question hangs in the air.

“I would’ve panicked,” I admit, my voice small. “I would’ve thought he was messing with me, or that he’d realize I’m too much and leave.”

“So he found another way in,” Milo says. “A slower way. He let you fall in love with being loved before you had to face the person loving you.” His eyes are steady and warm. “It doesn’t make it okay that he didn’t tell you. He should have, much sooner. But the devotion behind it? Soren, that man carved you individual feathers on a bird small enough to fit in your pocket. He’s not hiding because he doesn’t care. He’s hiding because he was scared the real him wouldn’t measure up to the version you imagined.”

My eyes burn. That’s what I’ve been circling for nineteen hours—laundry, moving birds, rereading my own poems like they might hold some answer.

“And your jinx thing,” Milo continues, kindly. “This idea that wanting something too much keeps it away. You know that’s not real, right? That’s just fear in disguise.”

It hits differently when someone you trust says it out loud. The jinx was never fate. It was me, flinching before anything could hurt me first.

“Look at us,” Milo says. “Look at everyone. Jude wanted Rhys so much he almost went into heat in a lecture hall. I wanted Callum so much I nearly ruined my friendship with Ava. Benji wanted Knox back so badly he punched a wall. And Shay, who built his whole personality around not wanting anything, fell so hard for Declan he reorganized the man’s bar inventory as a love language.”

I almost laugh. Almost.

“None of us got our person by wanting less,” Milo says. “We got them by wanting enough to stay when it got scary. Your wanting isn’t a curse, Soren. It’s what kept you on that bench. It’s why you carry birds every day. It’s why you wrote poems about a man you’d never met and meant every word. Hiding from it is the only thing that actually keeps it away.”

“But what if—“

“There’s no jinx.” His voice is firm now, all Milo. “There never was. You got so scared of losing something beautiful that you convinced yourself wanting it was the danger. And Wren got so scared of being ordinary that he convinced himself the birds were better than the man. You’re both wrong. And you’re both here.”

I look down at my hands on the table. There’s an ink stain on my left index finger from yesterday’s pen leak. There’s a faint groove on my ring finger from rubbing Keats’s belly for weeks, a tiny indent made by a wooden bird small enough to lose in a pouch.

“I love him,” I say, and the words come out easily, like I’ve finally stopped holding my breath. “I love him. The real him. The one who walks into door frames, can’t make eye contact when he’s emotional, and puts himself between me and anything that might hurt me. I love the birds and I love the man, and what hurts is thinking he doesn’t know that. That he thinks I only wanted the mystery.”

“Then that’s what you tell him.”

“What if I mess it up?”

“You won’t.”

“Milo—“

“You won’t. Because you’re not going to give a big speech. You’ll just tell him the truth, like you always do—honestly, probably while crying a little. And he’ll hear you, because that man has been listening to you from fifty feet away for a year. Imagine what happens when you’re right in front of him.”

The oven timer goes off. Milo gets up, pulls out the brownies, and sets them on the cooling rack. The apartment fills with the smell of dark chocolate and melted butter, warm and rich over the lavender from my candle.

I pick up Keats from the counter and turn her over in my fingers. There’s a tiny imperfection on her underside, a spot where the knife slipped. I’ve felt it a hundred times. I always thought it made her more real.