LOGINMAEVE'S POV
First day on the campus and my time here was already off to a bad start.
But all of that was thrust to the back of my mind the moment I met my new roommate, Alana.
Right now, she was currently trying her best to wrestle me off the bed.
“It’s our first day on campus! I forbid you from being a hermit. You are coming to the party with me little miss.”
“Alana, I have no desire to socialize. I'd rather rot in bed for the rest of the day.”
“Which is exactly why you can’t stay in. And that’s final. I'll find you something to wear.” She said and walked to the little closet in our room.After my encounter with the Alpha in the field, an event I was trying and failing to put out of my mind, I had come back to the dorm building and it had taken me about 10 minutes to find my room.
Nick had kept my luggage on the empty side of the room; and it was the empty side because the other side had already been decorated with pink sparkles that wanted to take my eyes out.
Don't get me wrong. I like pink as much as the next girl did, but sometimes it just got too much. But then again, that was Alana in two words. Two words. And the worst part was that she was already growing on me.
Huh.
I always felt uncomfortable around other omegas, something about us being natural rivals fighting for the best alpha on the market, but Alana’s scent didn’t make me nauseous.
I allowed her to ransack my clothes till she found something ‘acceptable’. Luckily, it was clothing I liked. Black on black.
She shoved the clothes at me. “Go get dressed right now!”
I laughed as I entered the bathroom and closed the door behind me. It was nice for a dorm room. There was a shower, a tub, and we even had double dressers. For a dorm, this was downright luxurious.
Alana had picked for me a simple but sexy outfit. The black jeans were low waisted with a boot cut, and they accentuated my hips while framing my waist nicely.
The black top was a simple crop top from the front. Its hands were long, and it was an off-shoulder cut. The back though, was left wide open. It was sexy as hell. It was me.
When I came out of the bathroom, Alana was dressed in a red gown that stopped a few inches above her knees. It was simple, but it highlighted her curves so well that I knew she’d get a suitor or five tonight.
I put on black Nikes, and Alana wore knee-high boots, and we were ready.
The walk to the dorm where the party took place took about ten minutes. I was warm already and even feeling a little giddy about it. I loved meeting new people, which is something I seldom got the chance to do considering the type of family I came from.
The moment we walked into the house, I sighed.
“Alana, this place reeks!”
“Yeah. Of alpha. Come on, you want to tell me you’re not curious to meet the men we’ll be stuck on campus with for three years?”
“Not really, Alana. They have the makings of douchebags. All these pheromones in the air are making me nauseous. I need a drink.”
Alana waved me off as she waded into the thick of people to dance. Loved her, but this was so not my scene.
I walked to the kitchen fighting off the urge to sneeze. There was a joke we had, that too many alphas gathered in one room was bad news for any omega. For an omega on suppressants, the mix of scents, from pheromones to colognes, was sending my senses into overdrive.
The island in the kitchen had bottles of beer, a bowl of punch, and some non-alcoholic beverages laid on it. I grabbed a can of orange soda, grabbed a cup which I poured into and added some punch into it. To complete the drink, I added a decent pour of vodka to it and stirred it with a straw.
I took a sip of my drink and sighed. Bliss. I wasn’t much for socializing, but I loved myself a good drink. I made a good drink.
A strong scent wafted into my nose, and I felt goosebumps rise on my skin. It was familiar. I opened my eyes and found a man standing in front of me watching me. Alpha. I could smell the dominant pheromones wafting from me. With suppressants on, I still felt the need to submit my neck to him. What the hell?
He was watching me, and I narrowed my eyes at him. It was the same alpha I had seen in the field earlier. The one who had made me feel things.
I didn’t like being watched. And when things I didn’t like happened, it made a bitch.
“Whatchu looking at huh?”
He didn’t answer me immediately but instead took his time to run his eyes all over me. I suddenly felt very conscious of the fact that I was an omega alone in a room with an alpha whose sent was bad for me int he best way. An alpha who smelt like he was made for me.
Bad combo. But then he opened his mouth.
“I should be asking you that, omega. You don’t belong here.”
Declan's POVShe came back two days later and we made rules. It was her idea. She arrived in the evening with her bag and her composure and sat down at my kitchen table. She put her phone face down on it like she was calling a meeting, and I made coffee because my hands needed something to do. I set it in front of her and sat across from her and waited. "No public acknowledgment," she said. "Nobody knows. Not your teammates, not my roommate, not anyone." "Marcus already suspects," I said. "Marcus can suspect all he wants," she said. "He doesn't get confirmation." "Alana?" I said, because Alana had been many things but subtle was not one of them. "Alana knows enough," she said. "She doesn't need more." She wrapped her hands around the coffee mug. "No social media, obviously. No being seen together publicly in any way that could be read as more than two students at the same university." I drank my coffee and said nothing. "When you get drafted," she said, "we deal with that then
Maeve's POVThe dawn came in through the window the way dawn crept up on you in February, slow and inevitable, and I woke up before he did and lay there for a moment thinking about what I had done. The bond was warm and close and louder than it had been since September, that doubling quality it had taken on that I was going to have to find a way to manage, and Declan was asleep behind me with his arm across my waist and his breath even against the back of my neck. I should not have stayed. I had known I should not stay last night when the knot released and I could have left, and now it was morning and I was lying in his apartment thinking about my mother's voice saying we have plans for you and they don't include teenage mistakes. I started moving carefully. "Don't," he said, which meant he had been awake for a while. I stopped. "I have to go." "Not yet," he said. "Declan." He sat up behind me, and I turned to look at him in the grey morning light, his hair badly behaved, his
Declan's POVWe made it to the couch. There was a lamp that shifted and a book that fell and neither of us paid any attention to either of those things because the last four months had built up a kind of pressure that left no room for graceful, and by the time we got to the couch we were both breathing like we had been running. She was furious. I could feel it in the way she moved, in the way her hands were in my hair and not gentle about it, in the way she kissed me like she had an argument to finish that words weren't adequate for. I was not far behind her. Four months of watching and managing and standing on paths below library windows had produced something that came out now with the kind of force that had nothing polished about it. Good. I was done with polished. "You're mine," I said against her neck, which was not a managed thing to say but I was past managing. "Don't," she said, but she tilted her head anyway, giving me access to the place on her neck where my mark was st
Maeve's POVHe blocked the door without thinking about it, I could tell, because the thinking came after. He was just there, suddenly between me and the exit, and he looked almost as surprised by it as I was. "Move," I said. "No," he said. I looked at him. "Declan." "Stop running Maeve," he said. "Every time this gets close to something real you run. I'm done watching you do it." The nerve of that landed somewhere that immediately became anger, which was fine, anger I knew how to use. "I'm running?" I spoke. "Do you want to talk to me about running? You, who told me it was a mistake the morning after you bit me, who avoided me for three months with surgical precision, who lied to a scout in your coach's office—you want to stand at my exit and tell me I'm the one who runs?" Something moved through his face. "That's fair," he said. "All of that is fair." "I know it's fair," I said. "So move." "No," he said again. I took a step toward him. "You don't get to do this. You don't ge
Declan's POVShe asked first. I had been ready for that. "Why have you been watching me?" And I had asked back, because it was the only fair response, the only question that matched hers in weight. "Why did you call me on New Year's Eve?" Neither of us answered and the apartment settled around us in the silence, and we stood there on opposite sides of it and I watched her do what she did, which was hold herself exactly where she needed to be and look at me with those brown eyes that the bond had been giving me in impressions for months. She was so beautiful. I had thought it in September and I had been thinking it in some form every day since and standing in my own apartment with her in it for the first time, the apartment that smelled like me and not like her and was therefore the wrong scent as far as the bond was concerned. "You first," she said. "Ladies first," I said. Something crossed her face that might have been the beginning of a smile before she caught it. "I came he
Maeve's POVI closed the laptop and sat there for a moment. Then I stood up, put my things in my bag, and walked out of the library. I had been sitting with the decision for two weeks in the same way I sat with difficult legal arguments, turning it over, examining it from every angle, looking for the flaw that would make it untenable. Looking for the reason that outweighed all the other reasons. I had been thorough about it, the way I was thorough about everything that mattered, and the conclusion I kept arriving at was the same one every time. I was done waiting for a readiness that was never going to feel clean. There was no version of ready that came without the weight of September and the weight of my family and the weight of everything that sat between us. I had understood that on the river path last Tuesday when I had felt him watching from his usual point and had felt, alongside the familiar complicated pull of the bond, something that was simply tired. Tired of managin
Declan's POVI smelled him on her before I saw them together. It was a Monday, and I was cutting across the east side of campus on my way back from the athletic facility. I had no reason to be on the east side except for the fact that I found any excuse to find a way to run into Maeve even when I
Maeve's POVMy mother called on Sunday at noon as usual. I was ready for her this time. I had spent the week building the version of myself that sounded settled, productive and completely fine, so when her contact photo lit up my screen, and I answered on the first ring. "Maeve." Her voice was pl
Maeve's POVThe first thing I noticed about Tyler was that he was easy, and in my current situation, easy was the most attractive quality a person could have. He didn't make the bond do anything. He didn't make my omega sit up and take notice. He was just a boy in my study group who was funny and s
Maeve's POVI knew the moment he found out who I was. I was in the library when the bond went sharp with shock first, and then it grew into heat, and before I knew it, I was partially blinded by the rage Declan was feeling. It hit me so suddenly that I knocked my highlighter off the table and had







