Page 6 of Keep My Alpha

“What about them.”

“You carved another one, didn’t you? Which one this time?”

I hesitate, but there’s no point in resisting. He’ll only keep poking at me until I tell him. “A cedar waxwing.”

“A cedar waxwing.” He says it slowly. “And why a cedar waxwing, specifically?”

I take a drink of my coffee. “They’re interesting birds.”

“Uh huh. Nothing to do with the guy.”

“Their crests have good lines. Architecturally.”

“Architecturally.” Aaron drops his head onto his textbook and actually thunks it. “Wren. You are the most hopeless person alive. Like, genuinely, as a species, you should not have made it. Natural selection had a whole plan and you just walked right past it carving a cedar waxwing.”

“And yet here I am.”

“Here you are. Carving birds for a stranger—“

“He’s not a stranger.”

Dammit.

Aaron’s eyebrows go up.

“Oh, he’s not? So you’ve talked to him? Introduced yourself? Gotten his number? Had a single conversation that wasn’t you leaving a bird somewhere and running away?”

I wrap my hands around the cup. Open my mouth—

“And don’t say you aren’t doing that. You strategically relocate. It’s running away with extra steps.”

“It’s not—“ I stop. Take a deep breath. “They’re just things I make. He seems like the kind of person who’d appreciate them. That’s all.”

Aaron just looks at me. Long enough that I have to stare at the table instead.

“Wren.” His soft, concerned voice is worse than his teasing. “You’ve been doing this for too long. You’ve carved him a literal aviary at this point, and I know you try to coordinate your shifts with maintenance around where you know he’ll be. You told me about the library last month.”

“The card reader kept breaking.”

“And that was an emergency requiring multiple repair jobs, because? You made up reasons to go back.”

I don’t say anything. I run my thumb along the edge of the table.

“You can’t keep hiding behind the gifts instead of being a real person to him,” Aaron says. “Like, with your mouth. Using words. The birds are you at your best, I get it. But he doesn’t know that. He’s falling for a ghost.”

“I know what words are.”

“Do you? Your last text to me was ‘fine.’ I get more emotional depth from a parking meter.”

“Parking meters don’t text.”

“My point exactly.” He leans forward, elbows on the table. “I’m serious, man. The birds are incredible. You’re the most talented person I know, and I’ll deny I ever said that. But he can’t fall for the gift if he doesn’t know who gave it. At some point you actually have to—“

The bell over the door chimes.

Warm air blows in from outside. And with it, laughter, bright and layered, two other voices tangled up with one that drops my stomach through the floor.

I look up.