My Shy Confession to the Alpha

Mia Pov I was going to ask Adrian out today. I had been telling myself that since six this morning, which was roughly the same amount of time it had taken me to talk myself out of it four separate times. "Would you like to go out with me?" I whispered it to a shelf of returned books, sliding them back into place one by one like the Dewey Decimal System could somehow absorb my nerves. I shook my head immediately. "Too direct." I picked up the next book. "Adrian, there's something I've been meaning to tell you—" I winced at my own reflection in the library's dark window. "Too serious. You sound like you're about to diagnose him with something." Another book. Another attempt. "Are you free this weekend?" I paused. That one wasn't terrible. Casual. Deniable. Except if he said yes, I had no idea what came after yes, and the not-knowing made my stomach fold in on itself like wet paper. "Maybe I shouldn't ask him at all," I muttered, and that thought slid into place far too comfortably, like it had been waiting for me all morning. Safer. So much safer. My heart, unfortunately, had been disagreeing with me for the better part of a year, and it wasn't planning to stop now. I glanced across the library. He wasn't there yet. I felt the strange double pull of disappointment and relief, mostly relief, if I was honest, which I was trying very hard not to be. Being a student assistant suited me. Quiet. Predictable. I could reshelve a hundred books and never once have to explain myself to any of them. Books didn't ask questions. Books didn't look at you like they were waiting for an answer you didn't have. Adrian Veyr asked questions like that without even opening his mouth. Everyone knew him; heir to a name people said like it meant something on its own, the kind of wealthy that made rooms go quiet when he walked into them. Girls found excuses to end up near his table. He never seemed to notice, or he noticed and didn't care, which somehow made it worse. He was cold. Everyone agreed on that. Distant, unreachable, always somewhere else in his head even when he was standing right in front of you. But I'd seen the version of him nobody else bothered to look for. The time he quietly paid for a girl's lunch when her card declined, sliding his own card across before she could finish apologizing. The time he stayed twenty minutes after class, walking a struggling classmate through the same equation three times without once making her feel stupid for needing it. He never mentioned either. I don't think he thought they counted as anything. I noticed. I noticed the way his jaw would tighten right before he did something kind, like kindness cost him something he didn't want anyone to see him pay for. I noticed how his eyes softened for exactly as long as it took to help someone, then closed back up like a door. Maybe that was the problem. I noticed too much and said too little, and somewhere between those two facts, a whole year had disappeared. I looked down at the paperback tucked under my arm. Love Beyond the Moon. My favorite werewolf romance, its spine cracked soft from rereading. The heroine was nothing like me, bold, unafraid, the kind of girl who said I love you like it was a fact of the weather rather than a confession that could get her heart handed back to her in pieces. "Maybe I should take advice from a fictional character," I said to the empty aisle, and laughed at myself before I could finish the thought. Then I remembered who I actually had to say it to, and the laugh died somewhere in my throat. "Right. Maybe not." By five o'clock, I had rehearsed the conversation so many times I was sick of my own voice narrating it. "Okay," I told my reflection in the library's front window, pulling my coat tighter. "Three steps. Say hello. Ask if he's free this weekend. Ask him out." I held up three fingers like that would make it simpler. "Three steps. You can do three steps." I stepped outside and immediately regretted every single one of them, because Adrian was already there, leaning against the railing, black shirt, dark trousers, phone in hand, wearing that expression of his that always looked like boredom but might have just been thinking. Turn around. Tomorrow is fine. Tomorrow is a completely reasonable day to be brave. "Mia?" My feet stopped before my brain gave the order. I turned. "Hey." "Hi." My voice came out about four sizes too small for the sentence. He glanced at my bag. "Finished for the day?" "Yeah." "Good." A pause that felt like it had teeth. "You're staring at me like you want to say something." Heat crawled up my neck. "I'm not staring." "You are. You do this thing—" he tilted his head, studying me with an amusement that felt entirely unfair given the circumstances "—where you look at a person's shoulder instead of their face when you're working up to something." "He noticed that?" My pulse tripped over itself. "I don't have a thing." "You have several things, actually." The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. "Go on. Say it." This was it. The moment I'd rehearsed six times in a library aisle like a coward with a script. "Adrian—" I made myself hold his eyes instead of his shoulder. "Are you doing anything this weekend?" Something shifted behind his expression, not quite a surprise, more like he'd been expecting this question for longer than I had the courage to ask it. "Depends what you're asking." "I'm asking if—" my throat closed around the rest of the sentence "—if maybe you'd want to—" "Mia." He said my name like a full stop. "Do you like me?" The question landed so directly I actually felt it in my chest, a physical thing, like he'd reached over and pressed his palm flat against my ribs. He'd asked. He'd actually said it out loud, and I had exactly one job now, which was to answer. "I—" My mouth opened. Nothing came out that resembled words. His face changed. Whatever door had been open for a second closed again, quietly, like it had never happened. "If you're asking whether I'd go out with you," he said, and his voice had gone carefully in a way that scared me more than anger would have, "I don't think that's a good idea." I smiled. I don't know why. It arrived on my face like a reflex, a shield I didn't know I owned. "Right." "I have too much going on. My family—" He stopped himself. I didn't ask him to finish. I didn't want the rest of that sentence anywhere near me. "I understand," I said, and the words tasted like a lie even as they left my mouth. "Mia—" "It's fine." I was already stepping back. "I wasn't actually going to ask you out anyway." A lie. He knew it. I knew he knew it, and somehow that was the most humiliating part of the entire evening. I walked. One step, two, three — I did not run, I refused to run — until I turned the corner and my chest finally gave out. "i***t," I whispered to no one, pressing the heels of my hands against my eyes. "You had one job." That night, I just lay in bed with my phone face-up beside me, checking it every few minutes for a message that never arrived, hating myself a little more each time I looked. I picked up Love Beyond the Moon instead, opening to the dog-eared page where the heroine stood in front of her Alpha, terrified and confessing anyway. "I wish I could be like you," I told the page. My eyes grew heavy before I finished the chapter. The book slid from my hands. Then the falling started, not the soft drop into sleep, but an actual, stomach-lurching fall, wind screaming past my face, the smell of pine and rain and something wild rushing up to meet me. I tried to scream. No sound came out. And when I opened my eyes, I was standing barefoot in the middle of a moonlit forest that shouldn't exist, with two glowing eyes already watching me from between the trees.