Obsessed With My Alpha

Jonah's Rejection

Gema's POV

One month.

Thirty-one days of waking up in a twin bed that isn't mine, in a room that smells like someone else's shampoo, in a city that moves at a pace my hometown never bothered to learn. Thirty-one days of Crescent Grove University, and I was still finding my footing.

The funny thing about starting college the day after your heart gets handed back to you in pieces is that the timing is almost poetic. There's no space to fall apart properly. You just have to carry it — the grief, the humiliation, the 2 a.m. replays of everything you wish you'd said differently — and somehow also locate your lecture hall and remember to eat breakfast.

I'd gotten surprisingly good at it.

Crescent Grove University was the only college within thirty miles of Moonrift Pack, werewolf-owned and exclusively ours — a fact that became obvious about thirty seconds after arriving on campus. The wolf hierarchy followed us here like luggage. Alpha heirs walked differently. Betas clustered in familiar formations. The rankless ones — there were a few of us, scattered and trying not to make it obvious — learned quickly which spaces felt safe and which ones required armor.

I had more practice with armor than most.

My mother had been a Delta Pi Sigma legacy, which brought me some social currency I hadn't earned on my own yet. It also bought me a pledge requirement I was currently failing to concentrate on, because I was sitting in the back corner of Lit 101 staring at the same paragraph I'd read four times without absorbing a single word.

*The thing no one tells you about obsessive love is that distance doesn't cure it.*

That was not, to be clear, anything Mr. Regan had written on the whiteboard. That was just my brain, editorializing.

"Earth to Harris."

I blinked. Mr. Regan was looking directly at me, one eyebrow arched above the rim of his glasses. He was an odd contradiction of a professor — built like a warrior, the kind of broad-shouldered, heavy-muscled frame you expected to find in the training yard rather than behind a lectern, and yet there he was, adjusting his thick-framed glasses and holding a worn copy of Fitzgerald like it was something precious.

"Sorry," I said, sitting up straighter. "Could you repeat the question?"

The bell saved me. Clean, merciful, perfectly timed.

I was halfway to the door when he called my name.

"Ms. Harris. A moment."

I turned back, waiting while the rest of the class filtered out around me. Mr. Regan set down his book and studied me with an expression that was more perceptive than I was comfortable with.

"Your essays are strong," he said. "Sharp instincts, good voice. Which is why I notice when your attention is somewhere else entirely." He folded his hands on the desk. "Is everything alright?"

"Adjusting," I said. "First month is a lot."

"It is," he agreed. He didn't push further — just held my gaze long enough to communicate that the offer was open, then nodded me toward the door.

I appreciated that more than he probably knew.

The thing I hadn't expected about college was the training.

My uncle had been working with me since the week after the treehouse — early morning runs, weight sessions, sparring drills designed for wolves who hadn't shifted yet but might someday. He'd never said, "might." He'd said, "When." It was a small distinction that mattered more than I could explain.

I was stronger now than I'd been a month ago. Not dramatically — I wasn't suddenly some action heroine — but in the way of someone who had redirected grief into something productive. I moved differently. Held my spine differently. The work felt good in a way I hadn't expected, something clean and earned about the ache in my muscles at the end of the day.

I'd also made three actual friends.

Laura was sharp and funny and had opinions about everything. Becca was warm in the way that people who had been hurt tend to be — carefully, deliberately warm, like she'd decided softness was a choice rather than a default. Michelle was still finding her footing, same as me, which made us natural allies.

None of them were Jonah. But that was sort of the point.

It was Becca who told me about the party.

"Sigma's doing their pledge welcome thing tonight," she said, dropping onto the edge of my dorm bed with the casual confidence of someone who had made herself at home within the first week. "It's mandatory for us to attend. Pledge visibility or whatever Roxy called it."

I looked up from my textbook. "Mandatory attendance at a frat party. Very academic."

"Werewolf college is a contact sport, Harris. You knew this." She tilted her head, studying me. "Also, I heard Jonah Snow joined Sigma. Same as his father, apparently. Legacy thing."

She said it carefully, watching my face.

I held very still for exactly one second. Then I turned back to my textbook. "Good for him."

"Gemma—"

"I'm fine." I looked up and met her eyes so she could see I meant it. Or at least, that I was managing it. "He's allowed to join things. I'm allowed to attend the same parties. We're adults."

She held my gaze for a moment longer, then let it go. "Okay. Wear something that makes you feel like yourself, then."

I thought about that for a while after she left. *Something that makes you feel like yourself.* The problem was I was still figuring out who that was, now that I'd stopped defining myself primarily in relation to Jonah.

I showered. Did my makeup — not to impress anyone, just because I liked the ritual of it, the small daily choice of who I wanted to look like today. I pulled on the red dress I'd bought on a whim at the mall last weekend, the one that was tighter than anything I'd normally choose, that made my curves feel like assets rather than apologies. I slid on silver heels, shook out my hair, and looked at myself in the mirror.

The girl looking back wasn't trying to be someone else's type.

She was trying to be her own.

"Good enough," I thought. And meant it, mostly.

The Sigma house was loud and warm and smelled like cheap beer and expensive cologne, and the moment I walked in, I felt the familiar crawl of eyes following me across the room. She-wolves in cluster formations, giving the slow once-over. Frat guys who weren't nearly as subtle as they thought they were.

I found my pledge sisters immediately, sliding into their orbit with a drink in hand, letting their chatter wash over me.

"I heard Jonah's back on the market, ladies—" Becca was saying, and I felt the name land like a stone dropped into still water, rippling outward.

I smiled, said nothing, and stepped away from the circle before my face could say something my mouth was too disciplined to.

The music shifted to something heavier. The lights dimmed toward the atmosphere. I found a spot near the wall, drink in hand, watching the room with the particular detachment of someone who has decided tonight she is an observer and not a participant.

And then the lights cut out entirely.

A cheer went up from the crowd. Someone on the speakers: *"Lights Out, people — grab the one you've been watching all night!"*

Before I could process it, a hand found mine in the dark — warm, certain, not tentative at all. And I was pulled forward into a chest that was solid and familiar in a way that my body registered a full second before my mind did.

His scent hit me first. Cedar and sandalwood and something warmer beneath — something that had lived in my memory for eleven years, that I could have identified blind in any room.

"Jonah."

His arm came around my waist, pulling me flush against him, and his mouth found mine in the dark.

And the world, as I had known it, briefly ceased to exist.

The kiss lasted exactly as long as the darkness did.

When the lights snapped back on, I was breathless and disoriented and acutely aware of every point of contact between us. His arm still at my waist. My free hand pressed flat against his chest. The noise of the party rushing back in like water filling a space that had briefly been air.

I looked up.

He looked down.

And for one unguarded second — just one — his expression was completely open. Something in it that I hadn't seen before, or hadn't let myself name. Something that looked less like casual and more like *undone.*

Then the party moved around us, someone bumped into my shoulder, and the moment sealed itself shut.

I stepped back. He let me go.

And I stood in the middle of a crowded frat house with my heart hammering in my ears, thinking: *that was not a nothing kiss.*

That was not the kiss of someone who sees you as a sister.

I filed that observation away very carefully, in the same place I kept all the other things about Jonah Snow that I was trying to stop reading into — and then I turned, located my pledge sisters across the room, and spent the next forty minutes not looking in his direction.

I was only partially successful.