All Chapters of OFFSIDE MATE: REJECTED BY ONE ALPHA. CLAIMED BY ANOTHER.: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

He came out of the dark like he'd been there a while.Hands in his pockets, walking easily.The building light caught his face and my brain needed a full second to place it."Daniel?"He grinned. "You remember me.""You're hard to forget." I blinked. "What are you doing here?""Coach Petrov is my distant relative." He shrugged. "I begged to tag along." He took a step closer and dropped his voice like he was sharing something classified. "So I could see you again."I stepped back without deciding to.He noticed and smiled wider. Didn't push it."Relax," he said. "I come in peace.""You come to a mountain retreat uninvited.""Announced to the coach. Uninvited to you specifically." He tilted his head. "I'm working on that."I laughed despite myself. Out loud. He offered to walk me back to the main house and I said yes because the alternative was standing alone in the dark arguing with my own thoughts about a man who had told me he wasn't coming.We walked.The mountain air was cold and c

~KAI~I didn't think before I kissed her.That was the problem. That was always the problem with her. She made the space between deciding and doing disappear completely and I was kissing her before I'd finished the thought that led to it and her lips were soft and she tasted like something I didn't have a word for.My chest did the thing it had been doing for weeks except louder now, more insistent, like it had been trying to tell me something and had finally just decided to shout it.Her hands were on my chest.Pushing.I didn't move. I was fairly certain she didn't want me to move. I was fairly certain the pushing was performance and the staying was what she actually wanted.Then she pushed harder.I stepped back.The sound of the kiss breaking was loud in the room.I looked at her.Her chest was heaving. Her hair was pulled at where my hands had been. Her eyes were — furious. Wide and something underneath the fury that she was working very hard to bury.Her palm

~SLOANE~I lay in the dark after the bonfire and stared at the ceiling and thought about the way he'd looked at me from across the fire.No emotion.Not the almost-smile. Not the silver threading into his eyes when something was happening underneath the control. Just even and nothing, the way he looked at rooms before he decided whether they were threats or not.He had called everything nothing.Standing in my doorway with that even voice. ‘None of anything happened, I apologize for the inconveniences’, and walked out and I had stood there wanting him to stop, wanting to say his name, wanting to take back the word I'd used because the look on his face when I said it had done something to my chest that I was still feeling three hours later.‘Molest.’I closed my eyes.I hadn't meant it the way it landed. I'd been scared and furious and the word had come out before I could pick a better one and I had watched it hit him and watched him go somewhere behind his eyes tha

~SLOANE~The team was already outside when Anya and I got there.All of them. Jackets, lanterns, people who had been cooped up in a mountain building for two days and were being given permission to go into a forest with fire. The sky was doing that thing it did at dusk in places with actual darkness — going purple at the edges, stars already bleeding through before the sun had finished leaving.Luka saw me first.He always saw me first. I didn't know how he did it — he was standing at the back of the group and I was barely through the door — but his eyes found mine immediately and held there with that unblinking weight and I held it back because I always held it back and then I looked away because Luka was someone I was choosing not to think about tonight.Coach Petrov was mid-announcement."—known as the Lantern Descent. Each member will be paired with a partner. Together you'll carry your lanterns and use your map to locate three carved tokens hidden in the fore

~KAI~I lost her in under four minutes.Four minutes of walking with my head somewhere it had no business being.Distraction, I'd called it, distraction, what was wrong with me? I looked up and the amber of her lantern was gone and the forest had swallowed her completely.I stood very still, closed my eyes and listened.Nothing. Just the trees doing what trees did at night and the sound of my own breathing and the absence of her footsteps which I had apparently been tracking without knowing I was tracking them.Sloane.I turned and walked fast and then faster and the forest was identical in every direction at night and I was running calculations — how far she'd walked, what direction, whether she'd gone left at the split or straight, and underneath the calculations something else was running that I didn't have clean language for.Fear.Real fear. I swept the lantern wider and caught it on the ground — a flash of red. I crouched.The ribbon. Lying on the leaves, pulled