Claimed By The Captain

CHAPTER 5 -HIS APARTMENT, HIS SCENT, HIS RULES

He texted at 7 a.m.

Pack observation starts today. You need to be seen leaving my building by tonight. Bring enough for six days.

I read it twice in yesterday's hoodie on the edge of my bed. Then I packed a bag. What else was there to do.

His building was in the east residence block, the section reserved for what the university publicly described as students requiring enhanced accommodation.

I had always assumed athletes with early practice schedules. I understood now it meant something else entirely.

He opened the door before I knocked.

"You watched me walk up," I said.

"The building has a front camera."

"That you monitor personally."

"This week, yes." He stepped back.

I walked in and stopped.

I had built an image of his space from the version of him campus saw. Clean lines, cold surfaces, expensive and empty.

The apartment was minimal, yes, but it was warm in a way I had not prepared for. Books on every flat surface, stacked without apology. A drafting lamp angled over a desk buried in papers. A coffee mug beside the sink still waiting to be washed. A pair of basketball shoes by the door, worn, the left one with the lace replaced in a slightly different color, evidence of a person who actually lived here.

The whole space smelled like woodsmoke and something underneath it I had no name for yet, something that made my shoulders drop half an inch before I caught them and pulled them back.

"Bedroom is yours," he said from the kitchen.

"I'll take the couch."

"It's your apartment."

"You're my guest."

"Technically I'm your fake girlfriend."

"Technically," he agreed, without turning around.

"Which is why the bedroom is yours. The couch is visible from the front door. If anyone comes by unannounced, the arrangement reads correctly."

I looked at the couch. Long enough for him, barely. A folded blanket already on one end. He had set it up before I arrived. I picked up my bag and brought it to the bedroom doorway.

Neat. Sparse.

The bed made with the precision of someone who had never left it rumpled. A single photograph on the nightstand, small, face-down. I didn't ask.

"Rules," I said, turning back.

He looked up from the counter.

"If we're sharing space I want to know what the boundaries are. What you expect. What's off limits." I set my bag against the wall.

"I don't like surprises inside my own living situation."

He pulled out a kitchen chair and sat. An agreement, so I sat across from him.

"Bedroom is yours," he said.

"I won't come in without being asked. Tell me your bathroom schedule and I'll work around it. I'm at the desk from ten to two, I don't make noise and I don't need quiet. Cook what you want, I'll keep the kitchen stocked. I have practice at six every morning and I'll be gone by five-thirty. It won't wake you.

" He paused. "I need us visible together at least twice a day. Morning and evening minimum.

The pack has eyes and they need to see a pattern."

"What does visible look like. Specifically."

"Close proximity. Natural contact. You carrying something of mine so the scent transfers. Nothing performed." He looked at me steadily. "Performed reads immediately false to us."

"How do you know I won't perform."

"Because you're not performing anything," he said.

"You're existing near me. That's enough."

I thought about what he had said the night before. It feels like quiet.

"Inside," I said.

"When no one's watching. What are we."

"People," he said.

"Just people."

Such a small thing. I didn't understand why it loosened something.

The first day was strange the way new things were always strange. I set up my drawing tablet at one end of the kitchen table. He worked at his desk.

We moved around each other carefully in the way you moved around someone when you weren't sure yet where the edges were. He made coffee without asking and put a cup beside my tablet and I didn't say thank you because acknowledging it would make it larger than he'd meant it to be.

At noon we walked across campus together. Not touching. Just close. He matched my pace without being asked, which almost no one did. I noticed people noticing. A girl outside the library who had been at every home game this season stopped mid-sentence to stare.

Two of his teammates coming out of the gym looked at me with expressions that were doing complicated things.

Cael didn't acknowledge any of it.

He said something low about the east wing construction and I answered and we were just two people talking and somehow that was more convincing than anything rehearsed would have been.

Dinner was pasta and herbs and he cooked it like he had done it a thousand times. I did the dishes after. He didn't argue.

"Tomorrow morning," he said, from the table.

"Practice runs until eight. If you're up, come to the gym at seven-fifty. Stand by the east entrance where the pack members on the team can see you waiting."

"Waiting for you."

"Yes."

"Will they believe it."

He was quiet for a moment. "Show up and we'll find out."

I dried the last dish and put it away.

"The tribunal panel," I said.

"Is there anyone specific I need to worry about."

He was quiet long enough that I turned around.

He was looking at me from the table, the lamp on and warm, his expression open in a way that daytime hadn't allowed. Not the calculation. Something underneath it.

"A woman named Sera," he said. "She's known me for eleven years. She'll be looking for anything false in how we are with each other.

" He paused. "She won't find it in the scent. She'll look for it in the small things. How you stand near me. Whether you reach for me naturally or remember to."

"How do I fix that."

"You don't fix it," he said.

"You just stop thinking about it."

I looked at him across the kitchen. Cael Ashford, who the entire campus had spent two years trying to reach, sitting at his own dinner table telling me to stop thinking about standing close to him.

"Easy for you to say," I said.

Something crossed his face. The same thing that had almost become a smile in the west courtyard and hadn't quite gotten there.

I went to bed.

His sheets smelled like him in a way that was different from the rest of the apartment, more concentrated, more specific, and I lay there in the dark and stared at the ceiling and listened to the quiet through the wall.

My phone lit up. The pack-encrypted one.

Tomorrow when you meet me at the gym. Sera will be in the parking lot. Don't look for her. Just find me and act like that's the only thing you came to do.

I read it twice.

How will I know what that looks like, I typed back.

A pause. Longer than his other responses.

You won't have to know. Just come.

I set the phone on my chest and looked at the dark ceiling of his bedroom and thought about six days and how that number had looked small from the outside.

From in here it looked like something else entirely.

I closed my eyes.

Down the hall, through the wall, nothing. No movement. No sound. Just the quiet of a space that smelled like someone I was pretending to be chosen by.

I did not sleep for a very long time.