Obsessed With My Alpha

The First Kiss

Gemma's Point Of View

The world narrowed to a single point.

His mouth. Mine. The dark pressing in around us like a held breath.

I'd imagined this. Of course, I had — I was a seventeen-year-old girl who had been in love with her best friend for the better part of a decade. I had imagined it in approximately a thousand variations, and every single one of them had been wrong, because none of them had accounted for the "weight" of it. The way his arm pulled me in like he'd been waiting for permission that he'd finally stopped asking for. The way he kissed me like I was something he recognized.

"You smell like heaven," he murmured against my mouth, low and rough, barely audible over the noise of the crowd around us.

I forgot, briefly, how to be a person.

His hand was warm at the small of my back, fingers spread wide, holding me in place with a pressure that was gentle and absolute at once. I felt the solid plane of his chest against mine, the way his other hand came up to cup the side of my jaw — careful, deliberate — like he was making sure I stayed exactly where I was.

I kissed him back.

I don't know when I made that decision. I think my body made it independently of anything resembling rational thought. My hands found the front of his shirt, and I felt him inhale sharply, and the kiss deepened into something that made every rehearsed version of this moment feel like a thumbnail sketch of a painting I'd never actually seen.

Then the lights came back on.

The crowd erupted — laughing, cheering, the spell of Lights Out breaking all at once into noise and movement. I blinked, dazed, my eyes adjusting.

And found Jonah Snow looking down at me.

His expression was — complicated. Something lit up behind his eyes, something that looked almost like wonder, or recognition, before his features shifted into something more guarded. He still had his hand on my face. I was still holding his shirt.

We both let go at the same time.

The wonder of it curdled into something sharper almost immediately. Because I knew that look — the one settling over his face now. I'd seen it before, outside the treehouse, right before he told me I was like a sister to him. The shutters coming down. The retreat.

"What is this?" I asked. My voice came out steadier than I felt, which was a minor miracle. "What game are you playing, Jonah?"

He looked stung. "It's not a game—"

"Then what is it?" I crossed my arms, needing the barrier, needing something between me and the fact that my lips were still warm from him. "Because the last time we spoke, you couldn't see me as anything more than your best friend. And now you're kissing me in the dark at a frat party?" I let the words land. "Help me understand the logic there."

"There's no logic." He dragged a hand through his hair. "I saw you come in, and I — I don't know, Gemma. I just—"

"You just what?"

"I just needed to know what it felt like."

The honesty of it — the raw, unpolished admission — knocked the sharpest edge off my anger for exactly one second.

Then I felt the full implication of it, and the anger came back twice as sharp.

"You needed to 'know.' I stared at him. "So I'm an experiment."

"That's not what I said—"

"Don't." I took a step back. "Don't reframe it while I'm standing right here. You needed to know what it felt like to kiss me. You satisfied your curiosity. And now we're going to do what? Pretend it didn't happen? Add it to the list of things we don't talk about?"

"Gemma—"

"Was that my first kiss, Jonah?" My voice dropped. Not to be dramatic — just because that was the honest register it had reached. "Did you know it would be?"

The silence that followed was answer enough. He did know. He'd known me my whole life; of course, he knew. He looked at me like he wanted to say something that would fix it, and I could see him searching — scanning through the available sentences — and coming up empty.

He caught my wrist before I could turn away. Gently, not grabbing. Just his fingers around my wrist, a question rather than a demand.

"Come with me," he said quietly. "Just — can we talk? Not out here."

I should have said no. I had a full working knowledge of why I should say no. But the pressure of his fingers against my pulse point was doing something inconvenient to my decision-making, and there was a part of me that wasn't ready for this conversation to be over yet.

"Five minutes," I said.

His room was at the end of the second floor — sparse, familiar in the way his spaces always were, smelling like him in that concentrated version that made it harder to think straight. I stood near the door and didn't sit down, because sitting down would have felt like settling in, and I wasn't ready to give that signal.

He stood a few feet away, giving me room. That careful, measured distance he maintained when he was trying to be considerate, which I had once found touching and now found maddening.

"I don't know how to explain it without sounding like an i***t," he started.

"Try anyway."

He exhaled. "I saw you walk into that party tonight and something just — shifted. You looked—" He stopped himself. Tried a different angle. "It wasn't about the dress, or — I mean, you looked incredible, but that's not—" He stopped again. Pinched the bridge of his nose. "I'm doing a terrible job of this."

"Yes," I agreed.

"I have feelings that I don't know what to do with," he said finally, bluntly, like he'd decided to skip the preamble. "When it comes to you, I have—" He gestured vaguely at the air between us. "This. And I don't know if it's something real or if it's just that you told me you loved me and now I can't stop noticing you, and I don't know the difference. And I thought if I kissed you, I'd either feel something definitive or I wouldn't, and I'd have an answer."

"And do you?" I asked. "Have an answer?"

He looked at me.

"No," he said honestly. "It just made everything louder."

I absorbed that. Let it sit.

"That's not fair to me," I said finally. "You understand that, right? I told you I was trying to get over you. I was actually making progress. And now you've kissed me, in public, without asking, and you're standing here telling me you used it as a diagnostic tool for your own confusion." I shook my head slowly. "That's not okay, Jonah."

"I know." No excuses. No deflection. Just: "I know."

Which somehow made it worse and better simultaneously.

He looked at me with that raw, undefended expression he so rarely showed anyone — the one beneath all the Alpha Heir performance, the one I had always been one of the only people to see.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You're right. I handled this badly, and you deserved better."

I stared at him for a long moment.

Then he said it — quietly, almost under his breath, like it escaped him:

"Can I kiss you one more time?"

The audacity of it was so complete that for a full second, I simply stared.

And then I slapped him.

Not hard enough to hurt, really — more sharp than painful, the crack of it loud in the quiet room. His head turned with it. His hand came up to his cheek, eyes wide.

I pointed at him. "That," I said, my voice impressively steady given that my hand was now trembling slightly, "is for treating my feelings like a problem you get to solve on your own timeline."

He blinked. Looked at me.

And then, to his credit — to his absolute credit — the corner of his mouth twitched.

"Okay," he said quietly. "I deserved that."

"Yes," I agreed. "You did."

I picked up my bag. Smoothed my dress. Walked to the door with my chin up and my heart hammering somewhere in the region of my throat.

"Gemma."

I paused with my hand on the door frame. Didn't turn around.

"I'm not playing games," he said. "I just don't know what I'm doing. And I know that's not good enough right now. But I need you to know it's not a game."

I stood there for a moment, breathing.

"Figure it out, Jonah," I said. "Before you run out of opportunities to."

I walked out.

The cool hallway air hit my face, and I kept my stride even and deliberate all the way down the stairs, out the front door, and halfway across the dark lawn before I let myself stop. I pressed a hand flat against my sternum and stood very still, staring up at the sky.

The moon was high and full and absolutely indifferent to the catastrophic state of my emotional life.

"That was my first kiss," I thought.

And then, in spite of everything — in spite of the slap and the anger and the hurt that hadn't gone anywhere — I thought: "at least it was extraordinary."