Page 48 of Keep My Alpha

“What else?”

So I show him. All of it.

I grab my sketchbook first. My hands are shaking a little as I pull it off the shelf and open it on the workbench. It’s just page after page of his face. Mostly quick sketches. The angle of his jaw from across the quad. His profile at the library desk. His hands wrapped around a coffee cup. There’s one that’s more finished, him sitting on the bench by the oak tree, reading, with the light catching his hair.

Soren stares. His finger hovers over the bench drawing but doesn’t touch it.

“Your fingers caught on a splinter. I saw you pull back.” I swallow. “It took me twenty minutes to fix it. I sanded it smooth and rubbed it with linseed oil so the grain would stay put.”it with linseed oil so the grain would hold.”

“I noticed it was fixed. I just thought campus maintenance finally got around to it.”

“I am campus maintenance.”

Half a laugh, half something else. “Right. God, Wren.”

“I bought another copy of that Mary Oliver book, too.” I nod at the dog-eared paperback on the shelf. “You returned the library one before I could get in line behind you, and—“ I shrug. “I wanted to see what you underlined.”

For a second, I almost show him the bookshelf design. The measurements are scribbled on a piece of plywood leaning against the wall. It’s a shelf with a ledge, just the right size for all seven birds. My mouth wants to say, I can build you this, let me be useful, let me earn it. But that’s the old move. Lead with a project, hope he keeps me around for what I can make.

“There’s a bookshelf design over there,” I say, nodding at the wall. “Started it after I saw your room. But I’d rather talk to you about it first. If you want one. Later.”

I could build him a table that would last longer than both of us, but ask me to say I love you and suddenly I can’t speak. For once, I need to try words first.

Soren glances at the plywood, then back at me. His face shifts. Maybe he gets it.

By the time we’ve made it around the shop, Soren’s clutching the sketchbook to his chest like he’s trying to soak it in. His eyes are bright and his knuckles are white on the cover.

“I know it was wrong,” I say. “Not telling you. Letting you think they were from some ghost. Some fantasy guy who was better than me.”

“Wren—“

“I needed you to know I could make you happy before you saw me. The real me. Because the real me is—“ I wave at the shop. At myself. Sawdust in my hair, calluses on my hands, a guy who’s better with a knife than with words. “This. I’m just this.”

Soren sets the sketchbook on the workbench. Carefully, next to the ruined finch.

“Can I tell you something?” he says.

I nod.

“The birds made me so happy. Every single one. I carried Keats in my pocket everywhere, I lined them up on my windowsill, I wrote poems about the hands that made them.” He takes a breath. “But I didn’t fall for a wooden bird, Wren. I fell for the person who carved them. For the fact that someone saw me. Really saw me. And cared enough to show me, even when he was scared.”

My eyes sting.

“And then you stepped between me and Derek, and you smelled like pine and safety, and you asked if you could kiss me like it was the most terrifying thing you’d ever done.” His voice wobbles but holds. “I fell in love with that. The guy who fixes benches and gets between me and a bad alpha and worships me with his hands and his mouth and can barely string three words together but every single one counts.”

My cock twitches at the words worships me with his mouth, and my bite on his neck throbs like a second heartbeat. Mine. My omega.

Me. All of me.

“It was you the whole time,” Soren says. “Not just the birds. You.”

The lie I’ve been dragging around, the one that says I’m only worth what I can build, goes quiet. For the first time in years, it shuts up.

“I should have told you sooner,” I manage. “I should have used my mouth instead of my—“

“Your mouth is extremely talented,” Soren says, and a startled laugh punches out of me, wet and helpless.

“I’m serious.”