The Bully Alpha's Fake Alpha Mate (BL)-Chapter 88: Just Say Yes

REED

The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.

"Go on a date with me tomorrow, Asher Scott."

I heard myself say it and felt no desire to take it back and Asher stopped.

His hand was still on the door handle, his back to me, and the words sat in the air between us like something that had been building pressure for a long time and had finally found a way out. Neither of us moved for a moment that stretched longer than it had any right to.

Then he turned around and the door swung closed behind him.

He looked at me from across the room and for once, for the first time in as long as I could remember, the careful construction was completely gone, no composure and no deliberate blankness. Something underneath all of that had surfaced, something the words had found before he had time to cover it, and I looked at it and felt something in my own chest respond to it with a certainty that arrived without warning and without any intention of leaving.

’You are completely in love with him.’

The thought didn’t announce itself. It simply settled into the center of me the way truths do when they have been true for long enough that the only thing left is acknowledgment. Not the bond pulling at me. Not possession or obsession or any of the labels I had been applying to avoid the real one.

Love.

I was in love with Asher Scott.

I had been for longer than I had admitted to myself. It had started somewhere I hadn’t been paying attention and grown in the dark without my permission and by the time I had noticed there was nothing left to do about it.

What had begun as something I told myself was convenient and physical and manageable had quietly become the thing I measured everything else against without realizing I was doing it and he was standing across the room with hurt living quietly behind his eyes, hurt I had put there, and I was going to spend whatever time it took making sure it didn’t live there permanently.

I didn’t say any of that out loud but I crossed the room and I took his hand and I looked at him properly.

"What?" His voice came out smaller than I had ever heard it. "What did you say?"

"I said go on a date with me." I kept my voice even and held his hand and said it without the careful management I usually applied to things that actually mattered.

"Not as friends, not as the complicated unnamed thing this has been since the beginning and not as fuck buddies navigating a bond neither of us asked for." My thumb moved once across his knuckles. "As lovers. A real date just you and me, outside this academy, for one evening."

Asher looked at our hands, then at my face, then at our hands again and he opened his mouth.

"Reed this isn’t— this is— I don’t even—" He stuttered. I stood there and watched Asher Scott, who had outrun an entire academy on composure and quick thinking for a year plus, stand in front of me with absolutely nothing. Not one word. Not one constructed response.

The speechlessness moved through him visibly and I watched every second of it and felt the thing sitting in the center of my chest pull warm and tight in a way that had nothing to do with the bond and everything to do with the simple fact of him.

’There you are,’ I thought. ’Under all of it. There you actually are.’

"Don’t say anything yet," I said. "Just say yes. Give this a chance, let’s try and actually make this work, Asher. Just say yes."

He stepped back until his back was against the wall. His jaw set, his arms came up and crossed over his chest in the particular way that meant he was building something.

"Can you give me time to think about it?" he asked and I shook my head.

"What is there to think about?" I asked.

"Reed—"

"Tell me specifically what needs thinking about and I’ll address it right now."

He looked at me steadily. "Your father."

"Is not in this room."

"He doesn’t need to be in the room to matter."

"I called him yesterday," I said. "I told him to bless us or watch me walk away from everything he built, his title and his pack. All of it." I held his gaze. "Does that sound like someone who is about to hand his father a victory?"

Something moved in his eyes and he quickly looked away.

"Words," he said quietly.

"Then let me show you," I said. "One date that is all I am asking of. One evening outside this building where we are not dealing with punishment or Voss’s conditions or my father or any of it. Just one evening where you let me show you what I mean instead of asking you to take my word for it."

"And then what?" He looked back at me. "What happens after the one evening when nothing has actually changed? When the semester still ends and you still go home and he is still standing there with everything you were raised for?"

"You don’t know what I’ll do."

"I know what fathers like yours do," Asher said. "I know what packs like yours require. I know what Alphas like you choose when it comes down to the actual moment of choosing." His voice was quiet and direct and it landed exactly where he meant it to. "You hesitated, Reed. When your father gave you that ultimatum. I watched it happen on your face when you told me about it. Three seconds, maybe four but I watched you weigh it." He held my gaze without flinching. "I counted every one of those seconds and I have not been able to stop counting them since. That is why I cannot just say yes."

The room went very quiet and I looked at him and felt the full weight of what he had just put down between us and I didn’t try to step around it. He wasn’t wrong. He had watched something real happen on my face in that room and he had been carrying it ever since and no amount of words was going to reach back through time and change what those three seconds had looked like from where he was standing.

"You’re right," I said and he blinked. I guess he was surprised for me admitting the truth.

"I hesitated," I said. "I’m not going to tell you I didn’t. I stood there and felt the weight of everything being threatened and I hesitated and you saw it and you have every right to hold that." I took one step toward him. "But here is what else is true. I have not hesitated once since that moment. Not when I rejected your rejection. Not when I stood in that hallway and told everyone in earshot exactly what you were to me. Not when I sat in Voss’s office and fought to keep you here. Not when I called my father yesterday and told him the truth." I kept my voice steady. "Every single thing I have done since that hesitation has pointed in one direction. You want to tell me that means nothing?"

Asher’s arms were still crossed but the pressure behind them had shifted.

"It means something," he said carefully. "It doesn’t erase the hesitation."

"I’m not asking you to erase it," I said. "I’m asking you to let me build something past it. One date. Not a solution to everything. Not a guarantee about every future thing. Just one evening where I get to show you that you are not something I am ashamed of or keeping complicated or hiding behind closed doors." I looked at him directly. "One evening where you are just mine and I am just yours and none of the rest of it exists for a few hours. That is all I am asking for."

He stared at the floor and I watched him turn it over the way he turned everything over. Picking it up, examining it from every angle, looking for the crack, and the place where it broke under pressure if you applied enough of it.

"What if I say yes," he said quietly, "and let myself—" He stopped. His voice had lost the argument and become something quieter and more honest underneath it. "What if I say yes and it goes wrong anyway."

Something moved through my chest at that.

Not the bond just the plain, undecorated ache of hearing him say it. Of understanding exactly what he was actually asking underneath those words.

What if I open the door and you walk through it and then you leave.

"Then it goes wrong," I said. "But Asher, look around. It is already going wrong in every direction it can go wrong. The only question that is actually in front of us is whether we go through the rest of it together or not."

He looked up at me, I looked back and said nothing more and waited. He didn’t answer.

He stood against the wall and held the line and I tried one more angle and he held it again and I tried again and he gave me the same quiet, exhausted resistance and I kept going because I was not ready to stop and he kept resisting because he was Asher and resisting was what he did when something mattered enough to be frightening but eventually I understood.

He was not going to be pushed. There were no right words that were going to unlock this. There was only space and the choice he made when he had enough of it to breathe properly.

I exhaled and then let go of his hand. I took a full step back, gave him the room and looked at him from the new distance with my hands at my sides and kept my voice even.

"Think about it," I said. "Take all the time you need. When you know your answer, give it to me." I held his gaze one final time. "I will be patient."

Something shifted in his expression.nHe looked at me for a moment that felt like longer, then he reached behind him and opened the door, and stepped through it. He pulled it almost completely closed.

I stood in the middle of my room and looked at the gap in the door and felt the bond pulse once and stood very still and waited.

One beat.

Two.

Three.

Four.

"I’ll go on a date with you tomorrow. Text me the time and location."