Soccer Alpha Begs Me Back

Stalker Creep

“Do you have a death wish?”

The words were small in the room and enormous in my skull. He said them like a fact you could trip over something both courtly and deadly.

My body moved before I decided it should. I stepped back and my shoulder slammed into the cold metal partition. The hook bit into the soft place beneath my scapula. I wanted to laugh because it hurt and because the world had become a bad joke I hadn’t auditioned for. Instead my hands went up, useless.

He kept coming.

It wasn’t a run or a lunge; it was a steady taking of space, a deliberate swallowing of inches until his shadow filled the stall and my chest felt too small. His scent was like rain on pavement, cedar wood, something like iron rolled over me and made my wolf pop to attention. She whimpered, quiet and animal, and I wanted to sink through the tile at how exposed that sound made me feel.

His fingers landed at my throat. Not violent enough to stop me breathing. Not soft enough to be anything but a warning. The grip was clinical, precise; he had the kind of strength the world gave men like him without asking. For a second time slowed down to the scrape of my fingernails on his cuff. I felt ridiculous, small, and dangerously aware of how loud my heart sounded in my ears.

My wolf pressed against me like a living thing that needed to be soothed. The sound she made a tiny, involuntary whine went through me. It did something to him: his jaw tightened as if he’d bitten a tongue and then his hand dropped, as though someone had slapped his palm. He didn’t look away; he simply stepped back and his face reacquired the blank mask he’d worn since the day he’d first been mentioned around campus.

For the first time since the Blood Moon, something in him had looked like regret or shock, and that knowledge felt like gasoline tossed on my chest. I swallowed and rubbed the hitching place at my neck where his fingers had pressed. My throat burned.

“I don’t—” I started, voice thin. “Forget it. I don’t need your damn jacket—”

The jacket landed across my shoulders before the sentence fell flat. Heavy, warm, smelling like the storm. No explanation. No soft “sorry.” Just action, the kind that said more than any apology could. My hands flinched against the collar, then closed because it was warmer than the tile and because the cotton smelled of him and because my dignity had already been stolen twice that week.

He shoved open a locker with one practiced kick and flung a pair of black joggers toward me. The fabric slapped my forearm and slid into a puddle at my feet like some wealthy god had tossed down a life preserver and expected me to be grateful.

I could have been grateful. Instead, my mouth quirked. So… choke first, play dress-up later? Is this a hobby of yours? I thought, acid in the back of my throat. I didn’t say it. I thought it hard enough to taste it.

Before I could even get my fingers to the waistband, the murmurs outside ballooned into a bellow. Voices hit the locker room door like fists. I heard one of his boys, the sound of him trying to be the armor to Xavian’s sword. “This isn’t a good time, Cap—” the voice said, thin.

Another, barking: “You sure you want—”

And then the door crashed open.

Phone light flared like a flock of startled birds. Flashbulbs popped in quick, bright bursts that burned afterimages behind my eyes. The air filled with the squeal of delighted girls and the click of a hundred shutters. Lydia led the charge, ponytail perfect, lips an immaculate red s***h, flanked by two girls who looked like they’d been carved to parry sympathy. Next to her, Nancy never went anywhere without that camera. The one who treated our campus like a runway and us like props. Her fingers were already working the button.

Someone laughed, mean and small. Another voice, higher, called, “Oh my God, she’s actually here. Look at her pants!”

They had my life on display in ninety seconds flat.

Xavian moved.

Not toward the door. Not toward Lydia or Nancy or the yelling crowd. He pivoted in front of me like a shield, broad shoulders cutting the line of cameras. His back became a wall. The movement was instinctual and absolute; I felt it as much as I saw it. For a breath I thought maybe, maybe he’d choose something other than cruelty.

But the lenses had already done their work. A dozen pictures were taken before fabric even covered the place it should have. I pulled at the joggers as if clothing could stitch together my dignity. The waistband slipped up my legs. I hiked them into place with shaking fingers, cheeks combusting with heat. Every shutter click felt like a hook in my gut.

“Snap a few more,” someone called out, gleeful. “Get the angle—she’s practically a meme.”

Lydia’s voice floated, honeyed and malicious. “Don’t worry, we’ll make sure the campus knows who the stalker was.”

My feet found the floor and I ran. I didn’t think about where I was going; I only knew the hallway swallowed me and the jacket dragged at my shoulders like an anchor and the photos would follow until even my nightmares wore their pixels.

Hallways became a blur of faces and lit screens. People didn’t even look at me; they looked through me to the rumor they wanted to stitch together. Wordless labels hung above heads: stalker creep, desperate fan, shameless Omega. The words weren’t shouted. They didn’t have to be. They saturated the air like a smell you couldn’t scrub out.

I hit the dorm like someone who’d been pushed to the surface after drowning. The oversized joggers were a shield and a mockery. I slammed the door behind me and leaned into it until the wood held me upright. The jacket was heavy with him; I shrugged it off into a corner like a used prop.

Voices floated from the next room — Darcy’s, pitched tight, and another voice, raw and assertive: Zack. The two of them were locked in the kind of argument I’d seen too many times in the eyes of wolves whose bonds were tearing at the seams.

“…I can’t—” Zack was saying. “I won’t give you up. The bond—”

“The bond or your family?” Darcy spat back. “Your family wants ascendancy, Zack. They can’t have that with a mate who drags shame into their name. There are ways to grow without being reckless.”

I pressed my forehead to the cool wood and let their words land. I had been inside that conversation more than once. I had watched people I cared about barter pieces of themselves on altars that never belonged to them. Zack’s voice, the way it cracked when he tried to be brave hit me like a fist. I knew the map of that pain: the shame of choosing survival for others, of anger folded into resignation.

I almost stepped inside, to be the shoulder, to offer the flattest of comforts, but I had no right. Darcy’s family was carved from stone and Zack’s people moved like chess pieces. My entry would be an intrusion. So I stayed in the hall and let them fight with the door between us, their words muffled but heavy.

I left them scraps of that fight on my skin and walked.

I had a mission. As practical and pathetic as it sounded: my bag. The amphitheater. My notes, the tiny hard things that tethered me to any usual life. If I could get them, I could pretend to be normal for a while. Normal with a backpack and a schedule. Normal with coffee that didn’t taste like humiliation.