Page 22 of Healing the Alpha

I ease his stiff body off the sofa, supporting his weight down the hallway to the bedroom. I pop two painkillers onto his tongue and hold a cool bottle of water to his lips until he swallows it down.

He crawls under the covers, dragging me with him as soon as I’ve pulled off my shirt, still too pumped full of lingering hormones to let me out of his grip for long. The bedside lamp casts the room in a dull, warm glow, and when I turn to look at his face, he looks as exhausted as I feel.

Something sad and pained pulls down his features as he looks at me.

“Max,” he rasps, his voice hoarse.

I blink slowly, shifting on my side to look at him better. “Yeah? You hurting?”

“No,” he says, swallowing heavily. “I just… I’m really sorry if I—if I pushed too far.”

I frown. “What are you talking about?”

“My rut. The accident. Everything.” His ears turn pink, his eyes turning down at the corners in a way that makes my whole chest ache. “I’ve felt like such a pile of shit having to rely on you for the last few weeks. I hate not being independent. I hate feeling like a burden. And when we kissed the other night, I wanted—god, Max, I wanted to do things properly. I wanted us to take our time. I was going to talk to you about it when you got home from work that night, so we could figure out what the fuck was actually happening between us.

“But then my fucking rut hit, and all that just flew out the window. I—I made you do things that I have no idea if you actually wanted to do or not. Things that would send any other straight alpha out of their mind. And now I’m crashing, and I’m fucking terrified that I’ve fucked it all up, and I never even gave you the chance to tell me how you felt about it all. About… us.”

The sight of his strong features twisted in self-loathing brings a lump to my throat, but hearing that he was having the exact same thoughts as me before his rut—wanting to talk it over, to do this properly—fills me with a rush of warmth that’s so strong it makes my eyes sting.

I stay quiet for a long moment, watching his pulse kick in his neck and trying to think of the words to express the wild mess of emotions I’ve been trying to process for the last few days—hell, the last few weeks. I let out a long, slow sigh and reach up, cupping the back of his neck with my palm.

“First of all,” I say, squeezing gently. “Shut the fuck up. Nobody forced me to do anything. Not after the accident, not during your rut, not ever. I wanted every fucking second of it.”

I can see him searching my face for a lie, but I make sure my eyes are dead serious and fierce enough to stop whatever spiral his adrenaline crash is forcing him into.

“Secondly,” I continue with a soft, disbelieving laugh. “I was literally on my way over here to talk it out with you before your rut hit, so we could figure all of this out.”

“You were?” He laughs weakly, some of the anxiety draining out of his face.

“Yes, dumbass, because we’re the same fucking person,” I say, my thumb tracing the base of his skull. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it all day. About the things you said, and all the things I wanted to say back. I was going to tell you that you’re the best option for me, too. Always have been.”

Kyle’s eyes crumple with something like relief, and the sight of it—the toughest, most stubborn alpha I know, vulnerable and on the verge of breaking down because he thought for one second that I might not want him—nearly takes me out.

I laugh softly, trying to stave off the wave of emotion that’s rising in my throat. “But I mean, when have we ever figured anything out by having a polite conversation, anyway? We’ve always just dived in head first whenever we have a problem. Act first, ask questions later.”

He grins, a lovely, fragile thing. “Like that time we built—”

“The closet,” I finish with a smile, already knowing exactly what he was going to say. “That fucking closet. I think you threw away the instructions before we’d even taken all the parts out of the box.”

“It was a bit of a disaster, to be fair. We put the drawers in backward.”

“Ky, it’s literally over there,” I say, pointing to the closet in question, still going strong after over a decade of use. “It’s a thing of beauty.”

“It is,” he concedes, his thumb brushing over mine. “I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it when I moved into this place.”

There’s a beat of silence where Kyle is chewing his lip, his eyes glued to the small smile forming on my lips, and he looks so fucking gorgeous in the warm glow of the lamp that I find it hard to catch my breath.

“I even, uh—I asked Marcus for advice,” I say, a little sheepishly.

His eyebrows shoot up his forehead. “You told Marcus?”

“Not about us,” I say quickly, feeling a sudden heat in my own neck. “I just asked about him and Alex, how that whole thing came about. He was always straight as far as we were concerned, and he fell for Alex, so I thought it was sort of… similar.”

His eyes light up at the comparison. “And?”

“He was actually pretty insightful.”

“Grumpy, turn-the-music-down, Marcus? The same Marcus who slaps me on the back and grunts instead of saying happy birthday?”