Moonlit Bite: Forbidden Howls

Chapter 2: Forced Proximity

Dawn came in grey and slow through the blinds and I had not slept more than an hour total. I was aware of every small sound in the room. The shift of fabric when he moved. The quiet rhythm of his breathing when he finally slept. The way his scent had settled into the air and was not going anywhere.

When the light was bright enough I sat up and looked at him.

He was awake. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, back against the wall, watching me with the same calm expression he'd had at three in the morning. Like he had all the time in the world and nothing I could do would change his schedule.

"You didn't sleep," he said.

"Neither did you."

"I slept a little but not for too long." He tilted his head slightly. "You were restless."

"I had a rough night before you showed up."

"Yeah." Something shifted in his expression. Still calm, but softer around the edges. "I heard. The forest thing."

I pulled myself upright and moved to the window. The academy grounds were quiet below, mist sitting low over the training field. Classes started in two hours and I needed a shower and something to eat and ideally a different brain.

"Look," I said, without turning around. "I don't know what my mother told your father or what the expectation is here. But I'm going to be honest with you. I'm not in a great place to be welcoming right now."

"I'm not looking to be welcomed." He said it without any edge to it. Just a fact.

"Good." I turned around. "So we're clear."

He looked up at me from the floor. The morning light caught the silver of his brow ring. "We're clear," he said, and somehow it didn't feel like agreement. It felt like something else.

I went to shower.

The common bathroom at the end of the floor was empty at this hour. I stood under the water for a long time, letting it run hot until my skin went red, trying to scrub the previous night off of me. It didn't really work. The image of the clearing kept playing back on a loop. Lila's voice saying it just happened. Marcus not looking at me.

When I came back to the room with a towel around my waist, Jax was standing at the window with his arms folded, looking at the grounds below. He had changed while I was gone. Dark jeans, a black shirt with the sleeves pushed up to show the tattoos. He looked at me over his shoulder and then looked away again.

"You can use the bathroom," I said.

"Already did." He nodded toward the second door that connected to the small en suite I had apparently not checked. "Your mother has a bigger room situation than you do."

"Great."

I got dressed with my back to him and tried to ignore the continued, irritating awareness of where he was in the room.

We ended up at breakfast at the same time without discussing it, which meant we walked across campus together in a silence that was not quite uncomfortable. He walked like someone who expected the space he was taking up, unhurried, not particularly interested in being noticed or in avoiding it. A few people looked at him. Some of them knew who he was already. Word spread fast here.

Mara from my pack history class caught my eye across the courtyard and gave me a look full of too much sympathy and too little subtlety. I looked away.

We sat at opposite ends of the same table because the other tables were full. He ate. I ate. Neither of us talked.

Pack training was joint that afternoon, which I had forgotten until I showed up to the field and found Jax already stretching near the far post with the casual confidence of someone who had been training his whole life. He had. I could see it in the way he moved. Controlled. Efficient. Not showy.

Our trainer, Coach Renna, split us into partner drills without thinking about it or maybe thinking about it too much, and I ended up across from Jax for the resistance exercises. We circled each other in the grass.

"You going to take a swing or just look at me?" he asked.

"I'm assessing."

"Mm." He stepped in and used his momentum to take my balance, quick and clean, and I went down into the grass and was back up in under two seconds. He was already repositioning, not smiling, just watchful.

We went five more rounds. I got him twice. He got me three times. By the end we were both breathing hard and I had grass stains on both elbows and he had a split lip from where my shoulder had caught him, which was already closing up.

Coach called time.

Jax walked past me toward the water station, close enough that his arm brushed mine, and the contact sent something electric up my forearm. I stopped walking and stared at the middle distance and told my wolf to sit down and behave.

It did not listen.

That evening I was at my desk trying to focus on a history essay when I caught him looking at me. Not the evaluating kind of look he'd had at training. Something quieter than that. Something that had a question in it he wasn't asking.

"What?" I said.

"Nothing." He went back to whatever he was reading.

"You were staring."

"Observing."

"Same thing."

He glanced up again. "You carry everything right there," he said, tapping two fingers lightly against his own sternum. "Like it's going to fall out if you move too fast."

I turned my chair to face him fully. "Is that a criticism?"

"No." He held my gaze, steady and direct. "Just an observation."

The room felt very still. Outside, the wind moved through the trees. His scent was everywhere now, present in every corner of the space, and my wolf was doing something quiet and persistent in the back of my chest that I did not want to examine.

I turned back to my essay.

I had written about twelve words when the feeling hit.

It started low and warm and it spread outward and it was not subtle. My wolf surged up hard enough that I actually gripped the edge of the desk to keep still. The back of my neck went hot. My breath came shorter.

A mate reaction.

Not possible, Not now, Not him.

I stood up abruptly, knocking my chair back, and walked to the window and pressed my forehead against the glass. The cold helped, barely.

"Kai."

His voice was very close. I hadn't heard him move.

"I'm fine," I said.

A beat of silence. Then, quieter: "You don't smell fine."

I did not turn around. "Go to bed, Jax."

Another pause, longer this time.

"Okay," he said.

He went back to his side of the room. I stayed at the window until the feeling settled into something manageable. It took a long time.

When I finally lay down, the dark was full of his scent and the undeniable, deeply inconvenient understanding that whatever had just happened, it was not going away.