The Bully Alpha's Fake Alpha Mate (BL)-Chapter 86: I Miss You
REED
I found him in the kitchen. I had told myself when I walked out of that corridor after ending the call that I was just going to find him, stand somewhere near him and that was all.
Close enough for the bond to settle and the restlessness living in my chest to finally have somewhere to go. Nothing that violated Voss’s conditions and nothing that made things harder for him than they already were, that was the plan.
Then I pushed open the kitchen door and everything stopped.
He was at the far sink with his sleeves pushed up to his elbows, working through a stack of dishes with his back half turned to me. The kitchen was winding down for the evening, the other staff moving around him with the tired efficiency of people finishing a long shift, the clatter of pots and the hiss of running water filling the space with ordinary noise.
Asher was in the middle of all of it, completely unaware that I was standing in the doorway and he was laughing.
Something one of the kitchen staff had said had caught him off guard and the laugh had broken through everything, completely real, his head tipping back slightly, and his whole face doing something open and unguarded that I hadn’t seen in two weeks.
Two weeks of careful composure and quiet endurance and keeping himself together under the weight of everything he had chosen to carry and here in the kitchen at the end of a long shift with soap on his hands he was laughing.
My heart did something I was completely unprepared for, not the bond pulling at me and not the Alpha instinct that had been coiled tight in my chest since the exposure.
Something quieter and more fundamental than either of those things. Something that sat in the very center of me and looked at Asher Scott laughing over a sink full of dishes and said with absolute certainty and no room for argument—
You are gone for this person. Completely, entirely and irreversibly gone.
I had felt it building. I wasn’t blind to it. In every dropped rake I’d picked up and every heavy pot I’d steadied and every night I’d lain awake tracking the quiet pulse of him sleeping on the other side of the building. But knowing something is building and having it arrive fully formed are entirely different experiences and it has arrived now, in a kitchen doorway, without warning, and without ceremony. I liked him.
Not the wanting that had always been there, tangled up with possession and the bond and everything complicated between us. Not the needing that had grown from the mate connection until it had roots I couldn’t pull up. I genuinely, simply, completely liked him.
The way he moved through hard things without asking anyone to carry them for him. The way he’d walked into that classroom and made the hardest choice of his life with his hands open and his chin up. The way he laughed when he thought nobody was watching.
The way he was laughing right now and I had been standing at the correct distance for fourteen days because I had agreed to and every one of those days had cost me something I was only now understanding the full price of.
I was done paying it. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺
I crossed the kitchen before I finished deciding to. The head of the kitchen staff looked up when I came through and opened his mouth and I gave him the look that had been closing conversations since I was fourteen and he thought better of whatever he’d been about to say.
"I need him for the evening," I said quietly. "I’ll clear it with Voss."
The man looked between me and Asher and made his calculation and wisely said nothing further.
Asher turned at the sound of my voice. The laugh disappeared instantly.
His eyes went wide. His wet hands hovered over the sink, a plate still in his grip, his whole body caught between the motion he’d been making and whatever was happening now.
"W-what are you doing here?" His voice came out unsteady and too high and he looked around the kitchen like he was checking whether anyone else was seeing this.
I reached over and took the plate from his hands and set it in the rack without a word then I took his wrist.
"Reed—" He looked at the staff, at the door, back at me. "What are you doing, my punishment isn’t finished, Voss will—"
"I’ll handle Voss."
"You promised him." His voice was urgent and low, pitching under the kitchen noise so only I could hear. "You stood in that office and you promised him and if you break that now everything you argued for means nothing and I will not let you ruin what you built in that office because of me—"
"Asher."
He stopped.
"I am doing what I should have done before now." I kept my voice quiet and looked at him directly. "So please. Follow me."
He went still at the please and I watched it move through him, the small involuntary thing that happened behind his eyes when I said something he hadn’t braced for. The protest forming behind his expression lost its momentum. His mouth closed and he followed me.
My room was quiet when I shut the door behind us. Asher stood in the center of it and looked around slowly, taking in the space with the expression of someone recalibrating. Like the room was both completely familiar and somehow foreign after two weeks away from it. His eyes moved across my desk, the window, the bed, the small details that hadn’t changed, and came back to me with his arms slightly crossed over his chest and his jaw set in the particular way that meant he was preparing a reasonable argument.
"Why are we here?" His voice was careful and controlled. "Reed, why did you bring me to your room?"
I crossed the distance between us. I didn’t say anything. I pulled him into me.
Both arms wrapped around him completely, his back against my chest, my chin dropping to the top of his head. Not demanding, not taking anything, just holding him the way I had been wanting to hold him for fourteen days with nowhere to put the wanting and no way to make it stop. He went rigid instantly.
"Reed—"
"I miss you."
The words came out rough and low and completely stripped of everything I normally kept between myself and things I actually meant. No management and no distance, just the truth of it, plain and undecorated.
He stopped trying to pull back and I felt it, the exact moment the instinct to argue ran out of fuel.
"Staying away from you has been killing me." My arms tightened slightly. "Every single day. Standing at windows watching you cross courtyards. Tracking you through the bond at night and feeling you fall asleep the moment you reach your room because you have nothing left." I pressed my face into his hair and breathed him in properly for the first time in two weeks and felt something in my chest unclench that had been locked tight since the day Voss set his conditions. "I miss you close to me. I miss you in this room. I miss your weight on my bed and your scent in my sheets and I miss waking up and feeling the bond the way it feels when you are near enough to touch." My voice dropped further. "I miss everything about you. Every single thing and I am done pretending I don’t."
My heart was beating too fast against his back. He could feel it. I knew he could feel it through the bond and through the simple physics of being pressed this close to me. I didn’t care. I had spent two weeks being careful and measured and it had gotten me fourteen days of watching him from windows and lying awake at night with too much feeling and nowhere to put it.
I was done being careful.
"So please," I said quietly into his hair. "Just tonight, stay with me. I am not asking for anything. I won’t touch you beyond this. I just want you beside me, that is all, just close to me and here and real." My arms held him tighter. "Please don’t say no. Just stay."
A silence settled over the room, long enough that I heard both of us breathing.
Then his voice came, small and careful and doing its absolute best to be the reasonable one.
"I can’t." He swallowed. "Voss will find out and he will be furious and Reed you promised him. You stood in that office and argued for me and made promises and if this breaks all of that then everything you did means nothing and I won’t let that happen. I need to go back. I need to finish the punishment properly. I need to—"
"The punishment can go to hell."
He went completely still.
"I have been patient." The words came out low and final and from somewhere past the boundary of negotiation. "Two weeks. I have stood at every correct distance and kept my hands to myself and watched you carry all of it alone and I have been patient and I cannot do it anymore. I have reached the end of it." I turned him gently until he was facing me and I held both his shoulders and looked at his face properly. The exhaustion still living around his eyes. The softness that had been emerging over these weeks. The mouth that was trying to form another protest and losing the fight. "I will handle Voss. That is my problem and not yours. You let me worry about the rest." I pulled him back against my chest. "Just stay. Just be here tonight. Just let me have this." My voice dropped to almost nothing. "Please. I miss you. I have missed you every day and I am asking you. Please."
The room held its breath. I felt the moment he stopped fighting, not dramatically, just a slow release, breath by breath, the rigidity dissolving degree by degree until his forehead dropped forward and rested against my collarbone and his hands came up slowly and found the fabric of my shirt and held on without letting go.
The bond flooded with warmth, deep and full and settled in a way it hadn’t been for two weeks, like something that had been held at a distance had finally been allowed to come home.
I closed my eyes, pressed my lips to the top of his head and stood there in the quiet of my room holding him while everything else, Voss and the punishment and my father and the semester counting down and every impossible thing waiting on the other side of all of this, existed somewhere far outside the door where it could wait.
He was here.
His hands were in my shirt and his forehead was against my chest and the bond was singing quietly between us and he was here.
For tonight that was everything and for tonight that was enough.
