“AMANDA, TELL ME TO STOP.”
1210 Words
~AMANDA~
(Some things you don't let yourself want until they're already standing too close.)
Priya texted at noon. “You okay?? Called in sick after that guy carried you out. Spill EVERYTHING.”
I typed back: “I’m fine, I promise. I’ll explain on Thursday.”
“…the fine one had his hands all over you btw just saying.”
I put my phone face-down on the desk and pretended my face wasn’t doing anything. How would she act when she realises there are three of him?
Coir took me to lunch at a place three streets from Noscoir that had no sign on the door and served food that made me actually close my eyes on the first bite.
He sat across from me and ate quietly like royalty that he was. Sometimes, I forget Coir was a full ass Alpha that could take on hundreds of wolves alone and tag it as an exercise. His large frame made me feel so tiny sitting opposite him.
Although he was quiet, his eyes frequently went from my food to my mouth, following the direction of my spoon and trying not to make me notice.
“You enjoy being fed,” he said at one point.
“That’s a very strange thing to say.”
“I mean it as a compliment. Most people eat like it’s administrative.”
I looked at him over my glass. “Are you always this odd?”
“Always,” he said. And there it was, that rare, slow smile, the one that changed his whole face. He doesn’t smile often, none of them does, and every time he does, I don’t want it to go away. Symptoms of the bond I suppose.
My phone buzzed. Long. Again.
He’d been texting me since he left our house, begging and asking us to get back together. According to him, he now lives with the humans because of me. He said he would do anything for me to leave the Alpha’s. The desperate pleas were only words commanded by someone who wants my life gone, Long was just a loyal dog.
I hid the fact from the Alphas because I needed to feel Long’s desperation and make him really see what he’d dumped.
On the way back, a woman in a white blazer stopped in front of us on the pavement.
Elegant and beautiful, careful posture, eyes cataloguing everything in under a second.
She looked at Coir. She looked at me. Her smile didn’t reach the top half of her face.
“Coir,” she said, like his name tasted like something she was owed. “I didn’t know you were…entertaining.”
“Nadia.” He said it flat. Not rude, not warm. The exact temperature of a closed door.
She looked at me again, and this time her smile disappeared completely, replaced by something calculating. I held her gaze. I’d been measured by women who’d decided I didn’t matter since I was fourteen years old and I’d learned not to flinch.
I’ve been so centred on my life that I never thought about the three Alphas having their own love interest. Jealousy preeked my stomach, I shifted uncomfortably.
Ninety per cent of me wanted to know how Nadia knew Coir, if she was human or wolf, and what connection they’d had.
“We should catch up,” she said to Coir.
“We shouldn’t,” he said pleasantly, and put his hand at the small of my back and guided me past her.
The fire in her eyes flamed all over me as she watched Coir tenderly lead me out.
His hand stayed there until we reached the building. Light. Steady, like it had always been there and was not making any particular statement about anything at all.
I thought about that hand for the rest of the afternoon.
Three weeks later, it happened.
Noir and Soir barely spoke to me for whatever reason and it brought peace, strangely. I got to spend more time with Coir.
Three weeks constantly with Coir and something had begun to build, something we both weren’t sure of but kept building anyway.
He came to the restaurant on my shifts, sat at the counter, ordered the same thing every time and talked to Priya like she’d known him for years.
He left books on my bed, not gifts, exactly, just: I thought you’d want this—and I read them and left annotations in the margins because I couldn’t help myself. And he’d come back with responses written under mine in handwriting that was surprisingly gentle for someone so physically enormous.
The sky fell dark and everywhere slowly became quiet. Coir wasn’t back home. I realised after I’d finished cooking dinner.
Neither of them was.
The only explanation was that he was working late, so I took my car and went to Noscoir. In the dark of the night, I found him working late in his office which I have slowly gotten accustomed to.
I brought his dinner because it was past nine, past his dinner time, and found him with his head bent over blueprints of the old eastern territories, hair a little undone from running his hands through it.
He looked up when I came in. Something shifted in his face.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he said.
“You didn’t have to not eat.” I set the plate down beside the blueprints.
He turned his chair and looked at me for a moment, and then said quietly, “Come here.”
I shouldn’t have. I knew I shouldn’t. The bond had grown thick but it was Noir’s, the situation was complicated, my whole life with the Alphas was complicated, and Coir was not someone you lean into without understanding that you might not want to lean back out.
I came here anyway.
He reached up and tucked a loose braid behind my ear. Slower this time. His thumb traced the line of my cheekbone, barely a touch, almost like he was asking for permission.
“Amanda,” he said. His voice was lower. “Tell me to stop.”
I didn’t.
I sucked in a breath when I leaned forward and his lips touched mine. I jolted on contact. It became hard to breathe. His hands circled my back before settling on the back of my neck.
The kiss was nothing like I’d ever expected. No urgency, no performance. Just the unhurried weight of someone who’d decided, quietly and completely, and wasn’t in any rush to prove anything.
His hands cupped my face and he took his time like I was so delicate, like he wanted to explore every part of me…to understand.
I forgot about everything. I forgot about the bond, the rank I didn’t have, Long, the witch…
I was just a person, being kissed by someone who meant it.
When he pulled back, he rested his forehead against mine. His breath shaky. His thumbs were still tracing small arcs against my jaw.
“Coir,” I heaved.
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
And somehow that was the most honest conversation we’d ever had. I wondered if he would stop here or take me as dinner.
- Writer
