Page 8 of Keep My Alpha

It can. It absolutely can. Because Soren’s at the counter now, his back to us. He orders, I can’t hear what, just the soft cadence of his voice, and then he laughs at something the barista says. Easy. Open. Like laughter is something he does with everyone he meets.

I shift in my chair, trying to think about literally anything other than the way his shoulders move under that cardigan. Sandpaper grits. The fan in my workshop. Three beats smooth, one beat catch. The way his throat would look with my mark on it.

Doesn’t work.

Aaron kicks me under the table. Hard. “Go. Now. While his friends aren’t looking.”

“I’m not ambushing him at a coffee counter.”

“It’s not an ambush, it’s a greeting. Humans do it. You’re technically one of those.”

“Technically.”

“Wren—“

“What am I supposed to say? ‘Hey, I’m the guy who’s been leaving you carved birds because I watched you read a poem on a bench once and thought you were the most beautiful person I’d ever seen and it broke my brain’?”

Aaron pauses. “Okay. Maybe don’t lead with that exact sentence.”

Soren gets his drink and turns. For half a second he faces our direction, his eyes scanning the room, and I raise the textbook again. Lavender and ink drift past when he walks by, close enough that my fingers twitch on the cover, and every instinct I have says follow him.

A few seconds later, the door chimes.

Gone.

Around us the coffee shop fills back up with normal sounds: the espresso machine hissing, someone’s laptop playing a video too loud. Aaron’s quiet for a long time. He takes his textbook back from me and sets it on the table.

“You know,” he says, not teasing at all, “at some point the birds aren’t enough. You have to actually be the guy who made them.”

I drink the rest of my coffee. It’s cold and it tastes like the inside of a cardboard box.

“I know.”

I’ve known for a long time. Since the first one. Since I left that little robin on the bench and watched from across the quad as he picked it up and held it to his chest like it was the most precious thing he’d ever seen.

I knew then. And I want to keep him.

Aaron kicks me under the table one last time, softer, and I let him.

Soren

I’ve been hiding in the poetry section for an hour, which is longer than reshelving usually takes, but the lights hum at a nice frequency back here and nobody bothers me. Nobody cares if I hum under my breath, or sit cross-legged on the floor and doodle in my notebook. Or study, which I should probably be doing...

Professor Hannover appears between the stacks like she was summoned by the sound of my procrastination.

She’s got her reading glasses shoved up into her gray-streaked bun, silver rings on every other finger, and one of those deliberately paint-stained linen shirts that says tenured and thriving.

I catch sight of what’s in her hand, and I want to crawl into the stacks.

“Soren.”

“Professor Hannover. Hi. I’m...” I slide a battered Neruda between Nye and Oliver, slowly, like I can delay the inevitable. “Working.”

“You’re touching up an already alphabetized shelf at a speed that screams avoidance.” She brandishes the flyer for the Festival. “Now, you know what I think. That last series you read at workshop? The sequence about the birds?”

My stomach drops. “Those were for class.”

“They were for class, sure, but they were also the most honest confessional work I’ve seen from a student in years.” She taps the flyer against my chest until I take it. “This festival eats that kind of thing alive. It’s all narrative-driven, emotionally specific, performed live. Your set would be perfect.”