The Wolves' Captain And Me

Chapter 5

Chapter 5: Slipping Out

I woke before the sun did, my heart already pounding before my eyes had fully opened.

For one disoriented second, I forgot where I was. The ceiling above me was wrong, too high, too unfamiliar, the light filtering through unfamiliar blinds instead of the thin curtains in my dorm room. Then Kaiden's arm shifted against my waist, heavy and warm, and every detail of the night before came crashing back at once. The bar. The bet I'd made with my own broken pride. The way he'd touched me like I was something worth being gentle with.

I lay frozen, staring at the ceiling, listening to his slow, even breathing, counting the seconds like they might tell me what to do next. Somewhere outside, a car door slammed, and I flinched hard enough that I was sure it would wake him. It didn't.

This was the part where I was supposed to feel triumphant. Derek's idol, the boy no one on this entire campus could get close to, had spent the whole night proving just how badly I'd been underestimated by the person who was supposed to love me. This should have felt like winning.

Instead, panic crawled up my throat, sharp and immediate.

Because it hadn't felt like revenge at all. It had felt real. And real was so much more dangerous than anything I'd walked into that bar expecting.

I knew exactly what Kaiden Voss was. Everyone did. The girl who thinks she's different, the girl who thinks one good night means something more, always ends up humiliated twice in the same week. I refused to be that girl. I refused to let this become one more story where I waited around hoping to be chosen by someone who had already made it clear, through months and months of reputation, that he didn't choose anyone twice.

So I did the only thing that made sense. I left.

The room was still dim, the kind of gray, half-formed light that comes before a proper sunrise, and everything in it looked softer than it had the night before, less like a stranger's apartment and more like a place I'd already started to memorize without meaning to. I hated how easily I'd noticed the small things. The stack of textbooks on his desk, spines cracked from actual use. A single photograph on the shelf, too far away to make out clearly, of a woman who might have been his mother.

I eased myself out from under his arm one careful inch at a time, holding my breath every time he shifted in his sleep. My clothes were scattered across the floor from the night before, and I gathered them as quietly as I could, wincing at every small sound, certain any second he was going to wake up and catch me sneaking out like the coward I currently felt like.

He didn't wake up. His face, usually so guarded and controlled, looked almost peaceful in sleep, and for one unguarded moment I let myself really look at him. The sharp line of his jaw. The faint scar along his forearm I hadn't noticed until now, pale and old. Whatever story that scar told, it wasn't mine to ask about. Not after one night. Not after a bet born out of heartbreak.

Part of me wanted to stay long enough to see what he looked like waking up, whether the coldness everyone talked about would return the second his eyes opened, or whether last night had been real all the way through. I didn't let myself find out. Curiosity like that was exactly the kind of trap girls like me fell into, the kind that turned one reckless night into months of waiting by a phone that never rang the way you hoped.

I finished dressing in the hallway, my shoes in my hand so my footsteps wouldn't wake him, and let myself out of his apartment as quietly as I'd entered it hours before. The lock clicked behind me louder than I expected, and I stood frozen in the hallway for a full ten seconds, certain he'd wake up and catch me. He didn't come after me. Of course he didn't.

The walk back to my dorm felt endless. The sun hadn't fully risen yet, painting the sky in pale gray, and the campus was eerily quiet, the kind of quiet that only exists in the hour after a party has ended and before the world has properly woken up.

A few early risers jogged past me on the path, headphones in, none of them sparing me a second glance. I was grateful for it. I didn't have the energy to explain the smudged makeup, the wrinkled dress, the walk of shame written all over me for anyone paying attention to see.

My phone buzzed the second I turned it back on. Forty-three missed messages, most of them from Jasmine, a few from numbers I didn't recognize, and three from Derek that I deleted without reading.

Jasmine was waiting outside my dorm building when I arrived, wrapped in a blanket, clearly having not slept at all.

"Where have you been?" she demanded, relief and anger warring across her face. "I thought something happened to you."

"Something did happen," I said, my voice cracking despite my best effort to keep it steady. "Just not the something you think."

I told her everything on the walk up to our floor. The bar. Kaiden. The reckless, impulsive decision that had felt like justice at midnight and felt like something else entirely by dawn.

Jasmine's mouth dropped open somewhere around the part where I said his name. "You slept with Kaiden Voss? THE Kaiden Voss? Mia, that man doesn't do repeats. Ever. There are actual rumors about girls stalking his apartment building hoping for a second shot."

"I know," I said. "That's exactly why I left before he woke up. I'm not going to be one more name on that list, waiting around hoping he changes his mind about me."

"Smart," Jasmine agreed, though something uncertain flickered across her face. "Probably smart."

"You don't sound convinced," I said.

She hesitated, chewing her bottom lip the way she always did when she was deciding whether honesty was worth the risk. "It's just, I've heard things about him. Not bad things exactly. Just, girls talk about him different than they talk about other guys. Like he's a puzzle nobody's solved yet." She shrugged. "Doesn't matter. You made the right call getting out before it got complicated."

"It's not complicated," I said, mostly to convince myself. "It was one night. People have one night all the time."

"Sure," Jasmine said, in the tone of someone who clearly didn't believe a word of it but loved me too much to argue.

I wanted to believe that too. I wanted to believe that walking away clean, before either of us could complicate something that was only ever supposed to be one reckless night, was the wisest decision I'd made in the last twelve hours.

But as I closed my dorm room door behind me, sank onto my bed, and finally let the exhaustion of the entire night catch up with me, I couldn't shake the memory of his voice, low and certain, warning me before we'd even left the bar.

If I say yes to you, it isn't going to be that simple at all.

I told myself he was wrong. I told myself this was already over, a closed chapter, a wild story I'd tell Jasmine years from now and laugh about.

I had no idea, curled up alone in my bed with the morning light finally creeping through my window, that Kaiden Voss did not take kindly to being proven right.