The Exiled Alpha's Human Mate

CH.11 - Saturday

Anna's POV

Saturday comes the way things you're dreading always come, too fast and too bright.

Liam picks me up at noon and he's made an effort, I can tell. Clean shirt, hair he's clearly tried to do something with, a nervous energy coming off him that's honestly sweet. He's got the whole day planned. The pier first, the good one with the arcade and the food stalls, then the headland walk if the weather holds, then dinner somewhere that isn't a chip van, which for two broke swim-team kids counts as fancy.

"You look nice," he says, and goes red saying it, and I feel like the worst person alive.

Because I do look nice. I put effort in too, and the whole time I was getting ready I was lying to myself about why, telling myself it was for Liam, for the date, for the normal sweet day I keep insisting I want, and not once letting myself finish the thought that kept surfacing, which is that some stupid part of me was hoping a certain someone might see me looking like this and regret walking off down that corridor.

He didn't see. Of course he didn't. He's not here. That's the whole point of Liam.

"Thanks," I say. "You look nice too."

The pier is good. I'll give the day that. Liam is easy to be with in a way Evan is the exact opposite of. There's no undertow with Liam, no thing pulling at my chest, no sense of standing at the edge of something I can't see the bottom of. He's just a nice boy who likes me, who wins me a stuffed shark at the ring toss and presents it with a flourish, who laughs with his whole face, who tells me about his little sister and his mum's terrible cooking and the swim scholarship he's chasing same as me. It's lovely. It's genuinely lovely.

And I feel nothing.

Not nothing, exactly. I feel fondness, warm and real. I feel the comfortable ease of good company. But under it, where the pull should be, where a whole day with a boy who clearly adores me should be lighting something up, there's just the same low ache that's been living in my chest since the water, straining in a direction that isn't Liam, that has never once been Liam, no matter how much I want it to be.

I hate it. I hate that I can't make myself feel the thing I'm supposed to feel for the boy who deserves it, and feel it instead for the one who told me to leave him alone.

"You went somewhere again," Liam says, gentle, over dinner. We're at a little place near the harbor, cheap and warm, and he's been watching me drift for the last ten minutes. "You keep doing that. Going somewhere."

"Sorry." I put my fork down. "I'm here. I'm sorry, Liam, I'm just tired. Long week."

"Is it the party thing? The fight?" He picks at his food. "Because I'm fine. My pride's more bruised than anything. That guy just, I don't know. He wasn't normal. The way he moved." He shakes his head. "Don't worry about it."

"I'm not worried about the fight."

"Then what?"

And there it is, the opening, the moment where a good and honest person would say, Liam, you're wonderful, and I don't feel the way you want me to, and it's not your fault, it's mine. That's what a decent person does. That's what he deserves.

I don't do it. I'm a coward, at least about this, at least tonight, sitting across from a boy who won me a stuffed shark.

"Nothing," I say. "I'm just tired. Ignore me."

He smiles, relieved, and lets it go, and we finish dinner and it's nice, and I feel like I've swallowed a stone.

He walks me home after. The harbor road is quiet and dark, the boats knocking gently at the dock, the same walk I've done ten thousand times, and Liam's hand brushes mine once, twice, testing, and I let him take it because I can't figure out how not to without it being a whole thing, and his hand is warm and dry and perfectly nice and it does absolutely nothing to me at all.

"I had a really good time," he says, at my gate, still holding my hand, his thumb moving over my knuckles. "Anna. I mean it. I've wanted to do this for a while."

"I know." My voice comes out soft. "Liam I ..."

"You don't have to say anything." He's looking at me with so much open hope it's almost unbearable. "I just. Can I see you again? Like this?"

And I'm opening my mouth to answer, and I honestly don't know what I'm going to say, when the back of my neck prickles.

Someone's watching.

I know it the way you know it in a dark house when a room isn't empty. I turn my head toward the dock, toward the shadows past the last streetlight, and there, leaning against the rail exactly where a certain boat is tied up, is a shape I'd know anywhere now.

Evan.

He's not hiding. That's the thing. He's just standing there in the dark by the water, watching, and even from here I can feel the weight of it, the flat cold fury coming off him in waves. His whole body is still in the dangerous way. His eyes are on Liam's hand, still wrapped around mine.

My heart slams. The pull in my chest goes tight and hot, snapping toward him like it's been waiting all day to do it, and something in me lights up that has been dark since noon.

"Anna?" Liam follows my gaze, and his face changes when he sees who's there. "Is that what's he doing here?"

"I don't know," I say, and it's true.

Evan doesn't move. Doesn't call out. He just holds my eyes across the dark, and there's a whole argument in the way he's standing, in the way he keeps looking at Liam's hand around mine like it personally wounds him. He told me to leave him alone. He cut the thread clean in that corridor and walked off and told me to enjoy Saturday, and now here he is on my dock in the dark like the enjoying was more than he could stand to imagine.

Slowly, deliberately, holding his gaze the whole time, I take my hand out of Liam's.

I tell myself it's because it isn't fair to Liam. That's the true reason. But I'd be lying if I said the way Evan's whole body changes when I do it, the way the fury drops for half a second into something rawer, isn't the best thing I've felt all day.

"I should go in," I tell Liam gently. "Thank you. Really. I did have a good time."

He's still looking between me and the boy on the dock, and he's sweet but he's not stupid. "Yeah," he says, quiet. "Okay. Night, Anna."

He goes. I stand at my gate and Evan stands at the dock and neither of us moves, the length of the dark road between us, the pull stretched taut across all of it like a wire humming in the wind.

Then I do the thing I've been wanting to do all day.

I walk toward him.

He doesn't move as I close the distance, and the nearer I get the more of him the dim light gives up. He's tall, taller than Liam, broad through the shoulders, and there's a stillness to the way he's leaning against the rail that isn't relaxed at all. It's coiled. A stillness with something held down underneath it, like a held breath, like a wave that hasn't broken yet. Dark hair falling over his forehead, damp at the ends from the sea air. A hard line of jaw. And he's watching me come with an intensity that would frighten me if it didn't feel, in my chest, like the opposite of fear.

Then I'm close enough to see his eyes, and I stop dead.

I've never seen them properly before. In the hallway it was too fast, on the boat too dark, in the ring too far. Up close, in the wash of the last streetlight, they're the strangest color I've ever seen on a person. Pale. A silver-grey so light they're nearly colorless, catching what little light there is and holding it the way still water holds the moon. Not blue. Not grey, exactly. Something in between that I have no word for, that doesn't look like it belongs on a human face at all. For a second I forget to breathe, because I've spent a week trying to work out what it is about him that doesn't add up, and part of the answer is right here, looking back at me, lit from somewhere behind.

"You should be inside," he says. His voice is low, rougher than in the hallway. "It's late."

"You're on my dock."

"I know."

"You told me to enjoy Saturday." I stop a few feet from him, close enough now to catch it, a scent that isn't the harbor at all, cedar and cold air and something clean and wild underneath, and it winds straight into the pull in my chest and pulls it tighter. I watch his nostrils flare, like he's caught something off me too, and his jaw tightens. "And then you show up in the dark to watch me not enjoy it. That's not staying away from me. That's the opposite."

"I know that too." He drags a hand through his hair, and those impossible pale eyes come up to mine, and there's something wretched in them. "I can't seem to do it. Stay away. I've been trying for a week and I keep ending up wherever you are."

The pull between us goes tight enough to hurt.

"Then stop trying," I say, before I can think better of it.

For one second, standing on the dark dock with the boats knocking and the water going on and those strange silver eyes fixed on mine, I think he might. I think he might close the last of the distance and finally let whatever this is happen.

Instead he goes rigid. His gaze cuts past me, sharp, to the dark stretch of road beyond my house, and his whole body changes, the coiled stillness snapping into something alert and hard.

"Get inside," he says. Low. Fast. Not cold now, urgent. "Anna. Now."

"What? Why-"

"Someone's out there." His silver eyes are scanning the dark past the streetlights, and there's a sound in his voice I've never heard from him, something protective and dangerous at once. "Watching. Get inside and lock the door."

And the night, which a second ago held only the two of us and the water, suddenly feels very large and very full of things I can't see.