“Don’t worry,” I assure him. “I won’t be asking you to bite me anytime soon.”
“Okay,” he says evenly, his brow still furrowed. Maybe he’s not convinced I won’t mate him against his will. “Right.”
I laugh at the thought, nuzzling his chest and smiling at the absurdity of it. I mean, it was just sex, after all. “Go to sleep, Dr. Taylor,” I tease. “You have a morning shift tomorrow.”
I feel a barely-there kiss at my hair paired with his quiet agreement, and I close my eyes as fatigue seeps in, lulled by the satisfied quality of my limbs and the pleasant throbbing of his knot still inside me, the fullness eliciting a faint pleasurable sensation, even now.
I smile again as I yawn, thinking once more how silly it is that so many people might lose their minds after getting a taste of something like this. Sure, it was mind-blowing, but turning your whole world upside down for a great lay? Utterly ridiculous.
I feel his knot pulse slightly, sending a shiver down my spine as I squeeze my eyes shut, focusing instead on the steady thump of Noah’s heart against my ear as I will myself to sleep, to not let things get weird.
Still, I think absently as I start to drift. A girl could definitely get used to this.
10
Noah
It takes me a moment upon waking to remember where I am.
The sheets are brighter than mine—soft, lavender linens beneath a plush, plum comforter. I don’t immediately open my eyes; the events of last night and every moment of what Mackenzie and I have done plays in full HD behind my eyelids, and every worry and cause for hesitation that I’d thrown out the window when she’d kissed me comes rushing back with the clarity that morning brings. Despite the admittedly incredible night I had, I can’t help but worry about how complicated things will be now.
I open my eyes slowly, warily, reaching to my left until my hands meet cold sheets. I blink up at the ceiling in surprise for a moment before lifting my head to find the bed empty. I sit up slowly to glance around Mackenzie’s tiny studio, seeing no trace of her in the living room or the kitchen and realizing I’m alone.
What the hell?
Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, my feet hit the wood floor briefly as I bend to snatch up my pants and fish out my forgotten phone from the pocket. I still have an hour until my shift starts, which is plenty of time, really, but it’s unlike me to sleep in this much. Honestly, I can’t think of a single time in my life when I slept as well as I did last night, and I can’t pretend that my restful night isn’t one hundred percent because of the brazen omega whose mouth I can still taste and whose body I can almost feel still pressed against me.
My entire adult life I have given little thought to the more explicit bits of my biological makeup—I mean, it’s hard to miss the idea of knotting when it can only be done with some near-mythical counterpart. One I have near zero chances of meeting, anyway. I assumed it was all just some hormonal nonsense that was made to sound much better than it actually was, probably.
That is . . . until Mackenzie Carter fell into my lap. Literally. Fuck. I can still feel her when I close my eyes, still hear the soft sounds she’d made when I’d buried myself inside her. I can honestly say that there is nothing in my life that can compare to it.
And I think it’s exactly that fact that has me so concerned.
There’s no chance that we can carry on our simple agreement after a night like that. It seems impossible to me that we could spend time together ever again without feeling some urge to succumb to our baser selves now that we’ve both had a taste for it, and won’t that make everything we’re trying to accomplish that much harder? I can barely even think right now without flashes of a soft, naked Mackenzie panting beneath me, her scent haunting me even now.
Surely she must be in a similar predicament. That has to be why she’s made herself scarce before I could even wake up. She must be out of her mind worrying that I’ll get caught up in some primal alpha ridiculousness, that I’ll start stalking her in hallways asking her to take my last name or something. Christ. She’s probably going to call the whole thing off. She’s going to delete my number and pretend we never met. She’s going to—
“Morning,” the omega in question calls brightly from the other side of her bedroom, stepping out of a door I hadn’t noticed before with a towel wrapped around her hair. “Thought you were going to sleep all day. I was wondering how many heart attacks you would cause and then have to fix when you showed up late for the first time ever.”