#alpha!harry

Comatose spills like syrup behind your eyelids, where shapeless light dances ahead as a fizzing gradient. 

It’s almost cinematic— the border of a muted palette in a lens, under a wispy, static filter. The yellowy orange of the lamp on the nightstand, eclipsed by a shadow when you knock your forehead forward against something damp, something firm with the doughy plush of a little give. 

Higher, you nose along (sandalwood, sweat, something sharp that spikes your senses like the heady stab of a retiring starvation rebounding) into a nook where the top of your skull can perfectly slot.

It’s in this penumbra— the in-between of your rattling ribcage, eyes heavy— that you consider how exhausted you are. It’s reminiscent of that muzzy, warm feeling, watching the hilt of a melting sun sink into the leveled horizon. How worn and strained—

You breathe with the even tempo of a thump under your palm, planted onto something cold and wet. Let logic fizz with the metrical respiration against your ear (the way the thud swells under your hand), and wallow in the sticky pool of an ache you can nearly feel behind your navel. You feel… unfathomably dispersed; diffused all over. Stinging in the sockets of your joints, along your thawed sinews, taut to the wire. You sense the brunt of it in your lower body, a smarting twinge that scatters itself along your quadriceps, your hamstrings. 

You shift on your shins, where they’re split wide around a warm bulk that obstructs you from clasping your knees together, and— Oh. 

The movement gets your breath stuck to the back of your throat— the way it cudgels some soft, sensitive spot inside of you— and works the mass under your temple into a ragged hiss. But you don’t pay any mind to that, not when your feel your rim smart as the thickness inside of you throbs—

You tuck your cheek to sweaty skin and mewl. It’s a wanton sound, out of your own mouth, that lulls you more awake, battering the dispersed flinders of your logic and nearly wheedling you from the molasses-like depths.

Until you feel the heated coast of a hand against your nape. Heavy, squeezing (if you weren’t drenched in an opiate pool of pheromones and the receding pinnacle of a heat— you have yet to acknowledge— you’d note it as a clear-cut mating idiosyncrasy).

(Mated.)

Instead, it gets you paralyzed. Docile, malleable, melty like you’ll ooze apart into a sopping puddle under his grip when he presses his chin to the crest of your cheekbone— abrading, sandpaper stubble you find comfort in against your soft skin, like the cozy scrape of a wool blanket— and tells you to hush, now. 

If you were more cognizant, you’d probably be startled by the ease with which the rumble— like the yawn over a cliffside before it collapses, vibrating under you— beneath your splayed fingers shepherds you back into the smoggy haze of nirvana. The undiluted, absolute sense of security you feel, even just trying to piece the fractured pieces back together. 

There’s a mellow comfort in the raw cologne of a satisfied alpha— this alpha (yours, hisses a reedy thing at the back of your head)— dried fruits and wood sap, curled tobacco leaves, the sweet smoothing of vanilla that ghosts your lungs. Lingers, perfuming the air, where you can make out the vinous aroma of your own slick. The mesh tangling in your nose.

You roll your hips. 

A sharp sound brews behind your teeth, leaks out through the gap when you part them. The way it ripples up your spine makes your shoulders wobble— he’s got his knot inside of you. You realize it now, the way the sting radiates from the way you’re split on his fat cock, the way his cum seeps out of you, coats your ass and the hirsute smattering of skin at his lap. 

“Mm, you don’t learn, do you sweetheart?” Harry purrs, and rights you with a hand on your hip that pins you in place. “Stay still for me.”

You ball your fists, scrabbling against his abs for purchase, and blink up at him through the smog. It’s a haze— a blur of sweat-slick skin in denuded peach glowing gold, ridges in sepia, the bleary edges of his ivory teeth stained pink, blood red in the crevices—

The ruptured splatter of your cosmos, your entire world and everything you’ve ever known, or been, or intended to be, in dust across your skin, the pads of his thumbs along the hollows of your cheeks when your jaw falls wide and your molars unlatch at the too-full.

His eyes are midnight craters, pupils drowning the eroded bands of his irises like hungry ink. On the outskirts, you see the woods. Smell petrichor in the undertone of his musk when you breathe deep, the kind you used to find in your grandma’s yard on the fringes of the wet forest.

You see it, too. The multicolored canopy of a taiga; pine, spruce, tamarack. The gold-flaking of autumnally emerging, yellowed larch, swallowed out by that ebbing hunger you feel is, progressively, eating you whole, too. 

Too full, you want to whine, too much—

“Nice and still,” he coos, gaze unwavering, barely over a whisper. His face creases, then eases, lax, like it hits a raw, lightning-sharp nerve to remember, “…pumped you so full.”

The admission (the reminder) draws a long keen out of you, makes your chest feel tight. Wildfire licking up your veins when you clench and slump forward, tucking into him, shoulder blades prying wide. Helplessly, you rock your hips.

And he— you can taste the salt on his skin, between his pecs, against your mouth when you press too close and breathe, lick out at your lips. Feel the swell of his chest, the way his knot pulses, stuffed up into you to the root of his cock, hear the way a caustic sound gets caught behind his teeth when you hold your breath and constrict, eyes screwed. 

“Fuck. Still,” he orders, like he’s scolding you (you hear the grunt in the hollow of his chest, where your hairline kisses his sternum) but the heady elixir of a scent— want, in sultry rebirth— betrays him. Even when you feel him spread his fingers across the top of your thigh and instruct, “Stay still.”

It’s a demand. The kind you can’t shrug off, coated in intoxicant alpha ambrosia. That decibel— that note; the authoritarian lilt, of a stern alpha nudging you back into line, seeps under your skin until you’re vibrating with the urge to please. Please, please—

You don’t realize you’re saying it until you feel his hand press between your shoulder blades, and then notch over one of your shoulders, wrenching you flush to his front with the other arm circled around your waist. 

He shushes you, all sweat-slick skin and the sugary scent of acquiescence, letting you unspool yourself in his lap. Tells you just like that, now, pet. I’ve got you. Easy, baby. Sweet, little omega.

It comes back to you in pieces. In warm amber and burnt umber. His thumb tucked to the dent, one side of the Rorschach dimples at the base of your spine, the other crawling up your damp back to fondle at your damp nape. 

The way he strung you out over foreign sheets that reek like harmonized honey and the raw earth, now. His mouth on every square inch of your skin, pulsing, radiating heat, the fog of an insatiable fever under your skin when he battered his cock in with his lips suckling at your jugular. 

Your throat stings something awful, and when you turn your cheek and let him thumb at the side, you feel your blood sing in the circuitry under his fingerprint. 

Dread should froth in the gap between your ribs. Brew in your tummy, spike behind your skull to blink the sleepy mirage of a warm peace from your eyes. Inflate in the stretch of skin between your shoulder blades.

Where he’s clipped your wings. 

(Just wanna take another bite.)

You should recoil at the muted pink on his teeth and flinch at the way his forefinger grazes the open wound beside your even pulsepoint. Bonding is a soul tie— a forever. You were always warned to stay away from dog teeth. 

Always had an affinity for taking mutts home, you, even if they growled and bit.

You’ve always had a distinct vocation for the unconventional. 

Felt this deep-rooted necessity to keep shattered things close; pick them up off the concrete in their splintered pieces, cradle them in your palm off their dust-coated shelves. Cosset insentient objects like a baby, untouched for years, with a soft hand. Glue serrated edges back together, sew gaping dry rot shut in crumbly stitching. 

You’d collect it off antique store sills; find a new, broken thing to coast your fingers over and clean up (your own, personal, philanthropic undertaking)— find the stuff that needed it most. An old, battered music box covered in soot with a missing gear. Grimy, hundred-year-old, porcelain faces you’d clean with a damp washcloth. An aged, moth-eaten wedding dress you’d repurpose and restore.

When you were a kid, you used to hoard strays off your street. 

You used to name them by the months of the year, bait them with scraps of lunchmeat out of your sandwich. Lug them by the ratty collar up the steps of the porch (always double your size, clambering beside you, knocking the potted plants outside over). It drove your mother mad— don’t you know, those things are wild, they’re wild and they’re sick, and we don’t have the space, they’re dangerous—

(You’re a life path number 2– star-crossed altruist— and you never quite learned how to curb that nagging urge to save.)

But everything deserves a soft touch, doesn’t it? The broken, battered things that life has turned its back on, maybe more.

You’re no good at self-preservation, not when you’re chasing the high of a self-indulgent humanity, pouring energy into charity cases of plastic, ceramic, flesh. Scraping by, half the time, by the skin of your teeth.

Retrospect reminds you of human fallacy. That he must have sensed it, right under your nose. 

You don’t have any business reeling in a man like that (just like those hungry dogs; August that tore your arm open)— the lone one on a stool at the fringe of the bar, with his scarred knuckles wrapped around a chipped glass of amber liquor. You find him in a pub on the outskirts of town, the only one left open at this time of night when you bar hop with your friend, looking for a phone to call a cab. 

His eyes are worn emeralds mounted in white. Shiny, sharp, listing, red-rimmed at the corners. The pink webbing in the corners seems carved straight from a searing lavascape (it accredits the molten heat that rolls off when you catch his eye).

He’s not a talker, and maybe that’s what lures you in like a fish. Always finding traces of obligation in the burbling silence, you. You— need to fix, and he is the kind of dilapidated mystique your fingers itch to graze. The longer you stare, the more you recognize that he’s a fractured bulk that won’t fit on your shelf (don’t you know; wild, and sick, and dangerous), but you still sidle up two stools down with your half-nursed vodka cran when your friend goes to the bathroom. Like he’ll fit with your figurines and the framed polaroid of you in the yard, girdled by mutts you rehomed— a perfect fixer-upper that you haul up off the the end of a driveway to repurpose, roaming on the outskirts of the suburbs in your Chevy.

Alpha. It’s a heavy scent that you taste at the back of your throat with the proximity, almost instant. Potent, it barrels into you, peeling apart in the inches of the space between. It’s soporific when you breathe it out, like the buzz of holding nicotine in your lungs after taking a drag from a cigarette— reminds you of the smoggy slowness in your head, the weight of your skull resting on your shoulders after long, sun-drenched hours wading the pool.

There’s a pang in your stomach— you cross your legs. 

He’s not a piece of broken china you should be chasing— you watch the subtle way his nostrils flare with the new distance. He has to scent you (black fig, honeysuckle, green melon, grapes). The sugar-sweet omega in between the new notes that perfume the air around him. 

In the undertow of stale cigarette smoke and weathered, leather barstools (the musk of wet floorboards and spilled malt), you smell the heady tang when you bring the rim of your glass to your mouth. Unmistakable and sharp; want.

Oh, how many trinkets you’ve cut your fingertips gluing back together.

You make friends with him. Friends— a facsimile of companionship, you think, with the way his eyes roam you, wordlessly, like he’s dissecting you down to the raw core. You talk with your eyes, a lot. 

You return alone and take the same seat every time. It’s a slow dance; takes days, weeks. You’re pleasantly surprised to find him in the same spot when you visit at the same hour, same day of the week, all by his lonesome (pitiful, really— but you fix, that’s your niche).

It’s not to say that you don’t watch women latch onto his arm, dripping sickly sweet when they anchor themselves to a bicep, liquid courage in their veins. Alluring, bolder than you.

You’ve always had patience in the pursuit of your predilections.

He never takes them home, shrugging off handsy remoras in stilettos that try to stick.

He speaks more when you gingerly accept the shot he buys, motioning with his index and middle fingers at the barkeep— what you get is straight, pellucid liquor that makes the bridge of your nose crinkle when you hold the glass between your fingers. You stare down at it, want to tell him you don’t drink straight liquor— haven’t knocked back a shot since the tumulus of your messy college days, a time spent taking swigs out of the bottle at the end of the week with your head over a porcelain bowl the entirety of the following day. 

It bleeds out of you as some hesitant demurral that wobbles on its own flimsy principle when the bartender sets a shot glass in front of you, and one in front of him. Reluctance that you muzzle between your teeth— “Oh. You don’t have to—“ when you meet his gaze across the countertop. 

The wordless contact you make feels like something that’s melting. Unambiguously smoldering— liquid fire, the oozing treacle of a longing beneath the surface. 

“Y’been staring at me for weeks,” he tells you— it makes your cheeks flame and your lips seal. He ducks his chin and motions out with his glass, and you stare at his scarred knuckles. Pink, shiny cicatrix stretched taut over bone. A dark ringlet flops over his forehead, “Figured one of us had to buy the drink.”

You’ve just been too shy to ask, you read, wry, unspoken. He’s taunting you. You’re a creep, wading the shallow pool of a convoluted push and pull with a tattered old, dog collar wedged in your fist.

His mouth quirks. It doesn’t reach his eyes.

You take the shot, hoarse when you thank him. It burns all through your chest, simmers in your face. You don’t think you’ll ever get used to the heat. 

The thing with those strays is that they found a home with you. Little kid leading them up off the street into a bed of furs by a fire, brushing the ticks out of their matted coats. You— some equinox in the fragile scope of an existence (cruel, all they’ve ever known, really). And in the stretch where some shape or form of an abandonment has crammed up every crevice, to find something that sticks—

Well. They’d stick back to that, too. And every dog safeguards its territory. 

(It’s only fair that I buy you a drink, too, sugar-sweet in the shadow beneath your batting lashes; …You don’t want to buy me a drink; And why’s that?; Liquid fire, molten heat, rich in sultry omen, You don’t want to start that with me, sweetheart; And what would that be?

A wry smile. The kind that makes your chest tight, lungs stalling, chasing the magnetic yank. Then… I’d have to buy you another drink, back, wouldn’t I?)

(Don’t you know, I’ll come back?)

The man that approaches you isn’t your type. 

Too… polished. 

(Too clean— you don’t need to fix—)

He wears his hubris like an enamel (hardshell, protecting the ego under the surface that’s scored by hairline fractures), shining like the smarmy ridges of his bared, smiling teeth. It clots in your nose when he leans close, forearms braced on the bartop— the suffocating stench of an over-spritzed cologne clinging to his collar. It blankets his real odor, a nauseating blend of tea tree and licorice.

He wanders along the slope of your shoulder, chin tucked to face you, with glaucous blue; a muddy, unsaturated color that almost foreshadows what’ll be the interaction between you with its vibrance alone. With his hand like this, he’s got two fingers crooked out, and he scrapes the back of them against your naked arm, as if to get your attention. 

Your eyes flash. 

“What’s,” when he leans closer, you sense the pungent miasma of a lingering want in the plume of him drawing near, “a pretty thing like you doing, sitting at the bar all alone?” 

You’re good at redirection. Self-preservation when the danger comes in the form of a hungry, sharp maw… nowadays…

(Veneers, pursed lips, an unfaltering gaze tucked into a skull where an itch scrapes into the other side of the bone— hindsight would make you crane your neck and laugh deliriously.)

You’re good at smiling taut, feigning delicate and dumb to assure the crackling rift in their self-worth. You know how to say no in a tone that sounds like sorry. Know how to placate enough.

Only now, you can’t force the corners of your mouth to stretch into a beam— can’t be polite, not with the subtle ache of a fever you’ve felt simmering under your neckline since before you stepped foot into the bar. Grating, like it’s bubbling your marrow, frictioning your muscles into a dry fire— and his stench makes your temples ache. 

The broken stray you’ve been tailing has gone off to the bathroom in the secluded hallway on the other end of the pub, and you stare at the empty stool on the corner.

“Oh, I’m not interested,” you lob over your shoulder, fingers curled in a clipped drum over the wooden counter. 

Sorry clings to the tip of your tongue— you don’t say that. What do you have to be sorry about?

It doesn’t really surprise you that he doesn’t immediately leave. He hovers in your periphery (parasitic, festering on the blunt tail end of your rejection, mulling, gears grinding in preparation, you know— you know his type), and you list your eyes to the beams on the ceiling and bring your glass to your mouth, wrist quaking.

But the way he slinks closer, pasting a sticky hand onto the small of your back (lingering over your tailbone) makes you grow rigid under his arm. You turn and—

The shortage of the space between you, suddenly, makes you startle, chin jutting when you tip back in the stool to peel his wandering hand off. Up close, the dull powder blue sparkles when he sniffs.

“Sure you are,” he counters, lips ticking, “Reeking like you are? You’re just begging for it, aren’t you?” 

You scowl, feel your pulse down to your fingertips, the way your heart sits at the base of your throat when you reach back and manually wrench his hand off your hip. “Fuck off.”

His smarmy mouth molds. And you don’t get why he doesn’t just give— just give— “You’re a wily thing. Come on. Why don’t we take a ride, just you and me?”

When his hand settles on your thigh, instead, fingertips pressing against the hem of the dress that’s notched itself mid-thigh, you sling the remnants of your drink at him.

It’s a last minute defense mechanism, infused with the quiver that lingers in your arm when you tip the glass and throw, dousing his face, the lapsing, jagged line of hair that his forehead meets, the pungent ribs of the collar on his dress-shirt (two buttons undone, sleeves rolled to the elbow). He flinches, face creased, eyes screwing. You watch the way your margarita dribbles over his lips, the way tequila seeps into the gap between his grimacing teeth. The way he licks it off, fists balled against the sockets of his eyes. 

Ice cubes rattle off onto the floorboards, land beside his overpriced dress shoes, toes wet. You swallow, jaw set when he clambers back, knuckling at his red-rimmed gaze.

You think, maybe, he’s going to laugh. Or cry. Your shoulders shake.

“You—“ he sputters, words caked with sardonic vitriol, “You stupid, little bitch.”

It happens too quickly for you to wallow in the way your stomach churns. At the way he grapples for your arm, fingers vicious— a slate of watercolors blurring, edges (one move, the next) bleeding at the spike of an iron-like, foul-smelling adrenaline between you that makes your bones buzz. The thick of his fingers mangling into your tricep, the glower writ large in the fold between his eyebrows, the way he keels back, suddenly, hand faltering—

You blink. Behind you, Harry cradles him by the dry seam of his shirt. 

You think his buttons might pop free in the squeeze of his fist. He ducks close, and the swell of his chest is an even roll— uniform, pacific. 

But his knuckles stretch chalk-white. Scarred skin over bone. 

“Say that again?” he murmurs, airy (thunderous, lacerated under the surface), barely over a whisper, drenched in a sense of faux calm. It makes your chest tight. 

You can’t make out his face, not with the way his chin is twisted, tipped down, but you imagine a storm, there. A grizzled overcast that wilts the sun behind its bristles before a thunderbolt tears at the sky. You picture it under his thick, dark lashes— a typhoon shredding the canopy in the bands of his irises, lightning on his teeth, a windstorm over his brow bone, the downturned corners of his mouth. A blizzard congealing his features; a tornado resting along the back of his tongue, electricity aching in his wrist. 

Some brutal impulse he’s been tucking behind his ribs. Harboring in his shoulder.

And he’s just… big, you think in that moment. 

Big in a way you didn’t initially note with the way he slouched over a pint, slotted behind the corner of the bar. Tall, broad, all bulk in the flexing, muscly structure of his arm, where you can see the cut of muscle at the back. Big hands, big, taut knuckles. Towering, looming— a mountainside, all stone. Bleeding heat against your juddering knee that courses to your underbelly. 

The other guy cocks his chin up, huffs. Licks out at his top lip, chest rocking up— his wet mouth carves into a sneer. 

“Is that your dumb, frigid cunt, then?”

Harry doesn’t say anything. You watch the subtle ascent of his shoulders (milk-white knuckles), and then he’s lugging him forward and walking him by the peeling sutures at the shoulder of his button-down. In their strained exit, he manages to shuffle the guy into a hightop and knocks over a chair. The legs screech, and you—

Only pick up, “Let’s take a walk, mm? Jus’ you and me,” caustic and low.

You slam a wad of cash onto the counter and desert the stool to tail them. He’s manhandling him to the back, long legs moving, soles falling purposeful, deserting too quick for you to keep up—

By the time you ram your shoulder against the back door, lungs swelling with the gust of petrichor-soaked air, Harry’s already pummeling him into the wet concrete. 

You see it traced in the blue glow of moonlight, kissing his skin along the ridges when he cocks his fist back. The firm bulk of his knees, split, straddling, the way his back heaves and his shoulder rolls to connect his knuckles in a sticky, sopping blow; a nauseating crackle of bone meeting bone— meeting bone, again—

You watch, helplessly, tethered to this, here, moment in time, the macabre wet sound, impact after impact (soles pinned to the asphalt as the door clangs behind you). 

The alleyway is still drenched after the torrent that dribbled down the windows, rattled up over the dingy ceiling, dirty rain water trickling down the rifts in the brick when you glue your hand to the wall to stabilize yourself. And the man under him is bleeding into the craggy, shimmering puddle beside him. 

And he’s not fighting back is the thing— can’t— rasping gusts of air between his teeth, gurgling when Harry sits back, heft of his shoulders bobbing, sucking in gasps— he grunts and hits him again— 

It rattles you down to your marrow.

“Stop— stop,” you launch off the wall to yank at his shoulder— tummy seething at the bulwark of firm muscle your quivering fingers find underneath— “You’re going to kill him—“

He rolls his shoulder out from under your fingers, brushing you off, scraping out at him, the cotton of his shirt, like some petulant form of rebuttal, hissing breaths in between his teeth. He pulls his arm back for his fist to collide again—

(Because that’s the thing with these wild dogs. They’re wild, and sick, and dangerous. Undomesticated, working off their own, primeval accord.)

You dig your knuckles against your lips (your stomach twists), and you can’t look at the face under him, the blood-smeared swell of a cheekbone, the red, jagged crook of a broken nose. You can’t stomach it, and you still feel like you’re simmering all the way down from under your collarbones. Blistering, warm from the base of your throat.

The man bleeding into the gravel wheezes. Says something that mirrors an orison through his split lips; a please. It’s the stifled cry you make into your hand that makes Harry pause. He sits back, shoulders climbing, descending, and finally—

You stare, stunned, through the shimmering film that’s made a dew across your eyes, when Harry hunches over him, spine curved, and rumbles (dogmatic, predominate, commanding), “Say you’re sorry.”

The man below him twists his head, a jarring, weak motion. His temple kisses the gritty, wet tar. You hold your breath, and Harry—

Exhales. He leans closer (all dominion, unchained power— the killshot of a raging beast imposing his sheer strength to clamber to the top), waiting. In the silence, you can see the way the man under him— a pulpy, knurled mess of liquid crimson— breathes. You half-expect him to crane his head back and spit fuck you— half expect Harry to grapple him by the fringe (slicked back— was— now, an unkempt, crunchy mess) and knock his crown back into the cement.

Instead, his apology makes your bones feel brittle. Makes your joints feel melted— a weak, garbled slur that’s only midway coherent, the kind that sticks to the back of his throat. It makes the heat simmer, scorch, the way Harry hovers. Waits, nearly vibrating. Centers his hand and gives him a benign pat against the side of his bruised face. Two. Good lad. Good boy. 

It reminds you of incipient autumn, receding dog days— August (untameable). Harry, this way; the sfumato of a moon-washed night against the sparkling asphalt, all hard ridges. Another man’s blood coagulated along the long lifeline denting in his palm when he takes his hand back.

There’s a tight knot inside of you. Wadded, unraveling, and you don’t even recognize that this dread— fright— is a surface-level superimposition over the thick fog that’s been brewing along your joints, at your jugular, in the pit of your belly. 

And this— you don’t acknowledge— all alpha, reeking dark, all bloodlusting thew (potency caking your sinuses with the scent of your honor— the defense of it— sopping on the asphalt) is like two fingers plucking at the flimsy, free end of the bow and tugging. 

Harry rocks onto his knees, and then the sole of his foot. Drags the other guy up when he rises, grunting, who slumps and swings on his feet when he’s stood back up— a marred rendition of the seemingly expensive, untouchable man he was, just minutes before. Soaked in blood, wobbling on the stems of his legs. Broken (and the irony, you think wryly, is that he more closely resembles something you’d put your hands on, now).

“M’glad we could,” Harry mumbles, chin ducked, dripping derisive hyperbole off his even, low tone— rich in the cadence of an unscathed, ruling beast, “…come to an agreement, hm?”

Blue— blurred in secreted, wet red— rides the corner of its crackled socket. His shoulders shake (he wants to say something— you see it in the pink flash of his teeth— …won’t) and he sags against the brick. 

Harry plants his palm against the back of his shoulder in a wallop that sends him stumbling into a step forward. “Walk it off.”

And he does. Forms some battered proxy of a scowl under the saturated bruising and hobbles, fingers scraping at the brick (too scared to show face back at the bar, you’re sure).

You clench the threadbare collar between your balled fingers. 

(So, what? We’ll buy each other drinks; F’that’s what you want; You don’t want that?; I don’t want you to start something you won’t finish; …You think I can’t finish my drinks?)

(You know better.)

His apartment is a noxious catalyst. A battered two-room (one bath, one bed/lounge/kitchenette) in a destitute fragment on the fringe of town, miles out. You don’t expect any different from a man with gashed knuckles, the kind that has a barstool that practically belongs to him.

It reeks of him; a dehydrated orchard, honeyed smoke. The wet aftermath of a forest fire, spice, sweat—

Every nook, every crevice, is a subterfuge on the boil in your veins.

There’s chasing a new, battered project, and then there’s this. Kismet in the mimesis of teeth along your bobbing throat.

You, always making friends with mangy dogs. 

You’re not sure how it happens— the blur of a simmering fever down to your bones, twinging under your skin, your fingers on him, and then his head cocked to the crook of your throat, the tip of his nose along your collarbone. Burrowing under your ear. The wet, molten want that seeps over you in the way he says, tongue slick against your skin, “You’re in heat.”

It’s not a question— not even a recognition, really. A reminder, you fathom feebly from under the wool-thick blanket of the haze. You think, through the clouded mist that clots from the base of your skull, he must have known. 

(Must have known, must have known—)

And what can you do but mewl and paw? You finger at the front of his shirt, scrape at the stitching (the same way you dug in earlier, heart rate rising at the merciless brutality under the bridge of your nose). 

All you can feel besides the molten roll of lava across your arteries, the unyielding fever (calefaction worsening from the tip of his nose bumping your earlobe, his teeth on it), is the way every nerve ending sings under his hands. The want— no, need, vibrating under his fingertips. 

Sweet, dizzy omega. Frantic for the way that the blunt of his nails digs into the knob of your knee. It’s a primitive torment— good judgment in throes— that bridges the gap between delirium and logic. 

(You stopped hoarding strays and offering haven between your ribs when they started nipping.)

Right, reasoned, cogent; you anchor yourself to the bubbling froth, palm pressed to his jaw, keeping him close to that sensitive sweet spot where your saccharine scent is saturated. The tip of his tongue lingers at the origin. 

It’s incongruent with the lesson you learned with broken skin in kidhood. 

(You remember when he warned you; starting things you couldn’t finish. See it through—)

The sentiment you’ve cradled in the space between your collarbones seeps out in the way your fingers tangle into the short bed of curls at the nape of his neck. The undomesticated (wild in your spuming bloodstream, riling every nerve ending to kindle in the fire— a twisted paradox) urge to be owned. Claimed. Mated. See it through—

He cradles your wet gasp against the flats of his teeth, the gap between. Your tongue slinks out sloppily, lashes fluttering, and you bask in the way he brushes his own against it. 

It’s no jejune delicacy of a first kiss. 

The tentative, eggshell-daintiness of brushing lips— no, it’s all tongue, teeth, sloppy, slick. Your head tipping back with the fingers he snares into the hair at the base of your skull, the fist he wrenches your crown back by. Spit smearing against the corner of your mouth. Humid aphrodisia that settles in the trench of your tummy when he grips you under your jaw, thumb and middle finger denting into the fleshy margins of your hot cheeks. He smears his tongue against yours again.

It’s this— possessive, hungering— a triumph you’ve been chasing from that prepubescent past time. Giving home, in longing, the pooling bliss of your mettle finally melting apart under the way he pants into your mouth. 

Nasty, nasty man— the kind you barely know, the kind you shouldn’t let suck on your tongue, never mind in the turbulent window of an incipient heat that’ll make your bones feel like they’re rotting in their sockets.

“Yeah, that’s it,” you make out the crook of a smile in his words (lewd, coarse), liquified yearning, your eyes half-mast, “Filthy, little omega. Never imagined you’d be such a needy thing.”

It’s vertiginous. Feral. Makes your world spin on its axis, because this exigency, swallowing you— need, need, need, fuck— is an all consuming rapture (when he sticks his fingers into your mouth— a bunched dyad, middle and forefinger— prying your head back with the heel of his palm still under your aching jaw).

“Sweet, little—“ you vaguely hear over the spindrift of blood in your ears— you don’t even recognize the wanton hum you grant him, tongue out— something that dies on his teeth, gets mottled by a growl (it stems from his chest, reverberates through the palm you still have on him, rocks your fizzing marrow). 

There’s no gentle dubiety (you don’t expect it from him, anyhow) when he pins you, limbs out, on the bed two steps from the front door. Your need— that same, unbroken longing that pulsates in your joints— spills a mist over the aftermath (clothes peeling away, your heart stuttering in its caging, your nipples between his teeth). 

Up until the point where he nestles himself between your thighs, splayed, flat on his abdomen at the foot of the mattress. 

You watch him with a lust-ridden hypervigilance. Like this, with your thighs split, you can smell yourself from the headboard. Your leaking slick. It makes you desperate, gets your face crinkling, forehead scored in lines as your hips cant up. 

And Harry plants his hand onto your tummy, under your navel. So big (cleaned as best as managed, knuckles bruised, split where aged scar tissue was battered back into gashing). The stark size of his hand against your soft underbelly— the way his thumb to his pinky, the shape, sits so perfectly between the verges of your pelvic bone, pressing you flat to the sheets— only makes you squirm more.

“Easy,” Harry purrs. Easy, girl— a luring croon in a dominion-rich tone that makes every atom in your body sing. If the fire rippling across your circuitry wasn’t drawing you into a delirium, surely you’d wear a frown at the smile over his mouth— the mocking. 

Even still, you think, it’d falter at the way he ducks his chin to stipple kisses to your mons, the faint dusting of curling hair there, eyes flickering up. The electric charge in his soft-spoken echo (instruction, gentle), “Easy, baby.” The, “I’ll take care of you, sweetheart.” His thumb prying you open, eyes winding, that clots your lungs.

You expected this man to be a liquefied charge (dark eyes, pupils eating at the irises with each whiff he took of you, even in the flimsy sanctity of a public bar)— all directive, a taunt to your green ambitions (eager, wet behind the ears, he nearly told you— don’t buy me a drink, don’t wheedle in). But you never expected him to make you beg. 

“Tell me what you want,” still rings in your ears when Harry peels you apart with his thumbs, gaze downcast, pink tongue behind the seal of his lips. 

You whimper. Like this, you feel like your skull is clogged by cotton. Clotted up, dumb, fucked dumb on the fingers he stuffed into your weeping seam— longer, bugger than your own,, stretching you taut with three in preparation (you can’t fathom the way his cock will bludgeon into you). And with his thumbs prying your lips apart, the way he bares your dripping slit and your clit, makes you feel like you’re drowning. Muzzy. Addled under the way he puckers his lips and blows—

The whimper suffusing from the back of your throat stutters into a pitiful staccato. A brooding sob in the making that he rights by smearing his thumb against your clit, digging his fingers into the smattering of wiry curls over it (a wave of pleasure-pain ripples up the knobs of your spine, and you arch, mewling). 

“You’re a big girl,” he reasons, encourages— no, a searing mandate off his tongue that makes something rattle in your chest, “You can use your words.” 

“Your cock,” you murmur. Whine. It doesn’t sound like you in your ears— just some whittled version of you— when you paw at the sheets, dig the tips of your fingers in. “Want your cock.” 

“Want my cock?” Harry purrs, a miming of your desperation refurbished into something stronger, and ducks forward to drag his tongue, featherlight, along your clit. 

At the pleasure that speckles along every nerve-ending, you crane your neck. Arch off the bed, windborne in the storm tearing up your resolve—

“Is that all you want?” he beckons and tucks your clit between his lips. 

By the time he finally, finally gives you what you need, feeding the unsatiated appetite that claws at your insides, you’re a sloppy mess. 

A broken shell of the woman you were, fever under your collar, when you ambled past his doorway. All mottled in nips across the landscape of your thighs, the plush there smarting from the scrape of his teeth— never quite breaking skin— pulled apart into cumming, again and again. On his fingers, against his tongue, drenching his chin in tacky slick that you taste when he kisses you again. 

He’s thick. Fat in his palm, wrist twisting over his cockhead, where he blurts a glob of precum— a rivulet he smears into his own skin, throbbing in the seal it peeks through, and the sight makes spit puddle under your tongue. 

Your thighs split wider off instinct. It makes his mouth quirk. 

He pulls you off the sheets by your nape, lets you clamber onto your knees and paw at his cock (basal instinct, hands working blindly— and something inside of your lurches at the shape of it between your fingers). 

By the time you’re hovering over his lap, his cock aimed up to the rim of your cunt, the only thing lapsing a sensible hesitancy is your heat. The char in your underbelly, the charcoal in his gaze when he steers you over him with a hand at your hip. 

Sinking on his cock isn’t a smooth maneuver. It doesn’t come with an inherent ease, despite the slick that’s begun to pool in the smattering of dark, curly hair over the root, trickling down the insides of your thighs. The mushroomed ridges of his cockhead nudge your slit taut, stretch, probe, and even still—

When his tip finally pries its way into you, the stretch stings. Your thighs quake— a soft gasp tears its way out from between your teeth, and he centers your wobbling frame with his hands against the cinching of your waist, jaw clenched. 

You feel the way his cock throbs, even only seated on the tip. 

And by the time you’ve seated yourself on the thick of him, soaking in the achy stretch, the too-full way he stuffs you, plugs you up, he’s all gritting sounds. Battered, roily growls that nip at you, grunts when he shifts, pulses against your spongy walls squeezing at him. 

You crane your neck, hands braced back on the muscly firmness of his thighs, let him cradle you by the throat and steer you back. 

“I want you to ride,” Harry orders— an edict that globs in the cotton stuffing your brain— your lips wobble, you grind—

“Want you—“ Harry instructs, coaxing you up by the flesh of your ass in his handful, pulling you back (it causes a high sound to spill from your mouth), “to bounce on my cock. Can you do that for me?”

Despite the gentle note to his request (command, you know it to be), it’s direction. Dictates in the way he pulls your arms over his shoulders, lets you squeeze at his deltoids and brace. 

Slowly, you inch up on your haunches, on his lap, and roll back. The heat simmering under your skin has no repose, and the way his head cudgels some unfathomably deep, sensitive, soft spot inside of you with the motion plants crescents into his skin in the shape of your nails.

It’s pure bliss. Liquid, hot, cinders in your belly, a fire that spumes from his gaze when he watches you, muted aside from the muzzled grunts you pry from his lips with the way your hips sway. You chase the noises you can pry. Bear down and clench. Good omega, best omega, need to be—

And the stretch is kerosene along your skin, under it. The angle, when you tilt back and brace back against his thighs to give him the sordid view of your pussy swallowing his cock, feeds that itch to be good. It lobs into that spot inside, again and again, and feels like liquified Nirvana along your baby-blue veins. Your DNA unraveling— your meager resolve disentangling into mere pieces, parts, fractures, at his whim. To be resculpted. Remade, into something new. Better. 

It starts to ache. Burns along your quadriceps, your knees. The straining sinew at the insides of your thighs. You gnaw into your lip, and rock over him. You don’t complain, because you need to please, despite the sting in your tired muscles, your panging plica. 

He cradles you by the hips, eventually. Must sense the sour tang of your threadbare desperation that perfumes the air between you, rolling off in waves as you bounce, the way you resort to little grinds to the root that stab up behind your navel. That is, if the way you whine, lachrymose eyes shrouded under your lashes, isn’t enough. 

“Alright,” he placates, and flexes his hips up. It’s enough to straighten your spine. Make your burning thighs thaw— you wobble on your shins, and he presses his hands into your hips, splays his fingers against the plush of your ass and rocks you forward, back. “Alright. You’re a good girl. Good, little omega.”

The praise, finally, makes your chest spill. Full. Full, everywhere— want, need—

He fixes your arms back onto the breadth of his shoulders. Huffs against your lips, coaxes you to sit up, and—

When he knocks his hips up and jars that spot inside of you again, a shudder wracks your shoulders. His breath sticks to the back of his throat. Seeps as a hungry click.

“Yeah?” Harry grunts. “There?”

So he does it again. And again, and again. He takes, and takes, and takes. And you give. Give, and want, hips pinned by the way he pummels up into you. Plunging, slick, the wet squelch of his base meeting your cunt ringing in your ears, drawing you taut, ecstasy searing along your spine. 

“Good, little omega,” he purrs again— a moniker you steal off his teeth and lock behind your ribs— grunting when he pumps up into you, harder, harder, palm latched over your jaw.

Holding his gaze feels like a form of cruel, raw overstimulation, but you’ve no other choice when he hammers up into you and pries your mouth on a silent cry.

“Sweet, little thing. Takin’ me so well.”

And the want (urge, need) rolls in your guts the harder he stabs up. You— need to fix, and keep, and he—

“Claim me,” you whine, eyes shedding their dew, sparkling like live coal seated in your skull. Your lips wobble. “Claim me.”

The coax— whether it’s the statement itself, the quivering note in your voice, or the mixture— burnishes something feral across his gaze. 

(Wild forest, you chase it.)

It knots along his brow bone, settles in the unsmiling edges of his lips, in the way he pulls you closer, like he wants to mesh skin—

You whimper. His hips slow into a gentle rock (the rolling tide).

“Shh,” he smudges his thumb across your mouth (the parted seam, knocks against the flat of a tooth), then migrates, wet, to the sensitive little stretch of skin between your chin and your lower lip when you rock over his lap. 

(Don’t start—)

But you don’t let it settle. Chase it, chase it, brows notched, heart hammering— 

And you bait. Lure. Craning your chin, making his thumb slip. Bare your throat to him. An unignorable bait, given the circumstances.

He bites.

Your methodical formula resonates as a sharp resolve that shimmers in his eyes— byproduct of a keen, a whisper, melting into the ridges of his teeth with your mouth, your lashes fluttering; “Please, please— Harry— yours, wanna be.” 

And Harry finally, finally nips. His tongue laves over your throat, your frantic pulsepoint, and then his teeth notch. Bite. It breaks the skin. Spills a rapture like no other inside of you. Frothing— the milk-white of Heaven’s towering gate stretching wide open, searing in your muscles. You freeze in the limbo between a euphoria that staggers across every synapse, reanimating the unwound coils of your DNA, and this— here— perfect moment—

A burning fever that your heat doesn’t contend. 

There’s blood along his teeth. His full, pink mouth stained rubescent with it when he makes a mangled, gritty sound— a blurry vista of pink, cerise, and skin that you can’t quite make out from beneath the sheen that glazes your eyes. 

And then it’s his knot, plugging you full. Stretching your rim taut, wider to encompass him (this part of him, all for you), and your body bends to his will (you, all for him, his). Pumping you full of heat, ribbon after ribbon, locking you in place to slump in his lap with half-mast eyes. You press your cheek into the sweat that coats his pectorals. Bask in the smog. 

With your ear against his chest— the even thud that sways you back into haven of that lingering comatose— you recognize that he didn’t use the kind of demand that’d cudgel the foundation of your autonomy (order, stringent decree with no room to disobey). The cadence of an alpha, that you— your pieces, scattered in the agony— wouldn’t hesitate to bow to. 

Not once, not until he instructed that you stay still in the aftermath. Only looking out for your best interests— altruist—

You take a deep breath. You never learn, and you wear the shape of his dog teeth in a serrated wound against your throat. Like the same, bloodstained, ratty collar you’ve been carrying for the friendly stray, wound onto you, instead.

The one-bath has a tub. 

You wouldn’t expect to find anything more than a free standing shower behind the door, but he sits you down into a bathtub. 

It’s nearly concerning how unused it seems. Unblemished, lily white porcelain where you’d anticipate, maybe, rings of gunge staining the walls. Gritty sand against your tailbone. Streaks of dirt run-off to the drain, beneath you.

It’s clean. He cleans it; the melange of chemicals under the sink, beside the bottle of suds he takes out, feels like an anomaly, and you tuck the detail onto the shelf where you’ve been harboring his fractures like an incomplete collection of puzzle pieces.

You wouldn’t expect a man who reeks of sex and omens, a man who's got demons under his skin that ripple in eskers (waiting to burst, buzzing in his shoulders), to have a soft touch about him. 

To cradle you in his hands like you’re this gentle, breakable thing. A little butterfly cupped in his hands. He holds you by your arms with his long, rough fingers, and sidles you back against him as the foamy water sways. The stark contrast (like bleeding watercolor from one contrasting hue to another) almost feels unfitting. 

With every broken piece you’ve picked up, the bridge you’ve built feels brittle, suturing land masses (one to the other—this), with wicker. If you were less intoxicated by his peppery musk and the lavender-scented soap lapping at your skin, you’d worry more about the overpass crumbling under you. 

You trace your thumb around the split gashes between his knuckles, the paper-thin nicks across the bones. Remember what he did only a few, short hours prior in that wet alleyway. That this is the same man that watched you from the other end of the glass like a hungry dog. Practically warned you, for weeks— subtle, omen hardly over a gentle, brassy whisper, thick with liquor and want— to just stay away. 

Don’t start with me, sweetheart.

Then, it felt like calling his bluff. An aphrodisiac in the pools of his eyes, shimmering in the gloam. Glinting like a shard of glass in the water. A tease. 

An empty threat you chased, wanted to pick apart in your fingers; those broken pieces you were collecting in your pocket.

But you’ll see it for what it is, now, firsthand. 

You’ll stare at it in the mirror. Find the hollows of his teeth, punctured and maimed like a grotesque love declaration (and it is, just that), and later, the soft, lighter patches of scars, as it heals, never quite all the way. 

Despite the nonchalance, the way he didn’t jump at the opportunity to tail your breadcrumbs to the stoop, he’s a man that follows through on his word. The unspoken promise stings at your neck, radiates down your shoulder when you turn your cheek against his prickly scruff.

The headspace is still a blur of sentiments you’ll have to sift through later. But you crane your neck back against his shoulder and feel the rumble of his lungs behind you. The even thump of his heart humming between your shoulder blades, and he kisses the corner of your eye when you tuck into him. In a way, you feel like you’re drowning. You’ve bit off more than you can chew again, and you’re just forced to swallow.

But you’ve never felt more at peace. 

The sense of belonging— you, you to him, him to you, him— in every sense of the word. And you know it’s the incipient, honey-sweet burgeons of a bond spitting into the flood of serotonin, dopamine. Syrup-slick, and cloying— the sentiments of a fresh, ancient mating mechanism. All down to the cut and dried, evolutionary phenomena born off your biological, ancestral branches. 

But it feels— so much more. Like you’re whole. 

Your heart feels like it’s wobbling in its cage. Bursting. 

“Shush,” Harry murmurs, like he feels it. Like he can smell it— the desperate, overwhelming zeal perfuming the air— because he probably can. He tucks a strand of hair behind your ear, off your sweaty forehead, and presses his mouth to your ear when he tells you, “Just stay like this, hm? Just like this. I’ve got you.”

Every muscle burns, every limb feels like the flowering border of a splotchy bruise. You know why. Contemplating still feels like wading a wetland (maybe worse, now), but you know you started purring somewhere along his knot softening up, so he fucked you again. And again. And again, until you were stupid and pliant on his cock, scraping red lines across his chest and stifling yowls behind your teeth. 

(He tucked your head to the side, pinned your temple to the sheets, and stared down at the bite, tar-like pupils swallowing the bands of the woods. Stifled his gruff swear against your throat when he stuck his tongue out and slid it over the wound.)

It’s somewhere in the middle of the night, now. Your internal clock feels shot. You take a deep breath, smell his notes between the foam (feel his coarse stubble against your temple)—

It feels white-hot all over, under your skin, and you know part of it is because every breath you take is another wave of humidity sticking to your lungs. That you’re cocooned in hot water, in his arms, in a room that feels stuffy enough to make your insides sweat. 

His hand settles across your tummy, beneath the water, and the soap bares a polynya wide enough to see. When you peek—

His hand is huge. Enormous. You know. You knew, but the reminder, seeing it in live action against a backdrop that’s not speckled with sex and primordial hunger that clouds the details—

It’ll probably rock you harder when you’re more sober. Less… vulnerable. Light-headed.

It’s an innocent motion. Meant to comfort. Pull you close, those same seedlings of an inexplicable compulsion (possess, protect) spilling in his bloodstream the same way your own urges do. 

And despite that, the first thing it makes you think of is the way that hand had cupped over your pussy. The heel of his palm to your mons, pressed tight to the hood of your clit, his middle and ring fingers crooking so the tips could massage at your slick, spent rim after the first round. Finger-fuck the cum he spilled back in. It swallowed you whole. Pried your thighs apart. 

A wicked heat ripples across the space under his hand. You hear Harry sniff, his chin still tucked to you, tip of his nose still in your hair. Your lashes flutter. 

That heat froths when he makes a sound behind you, rattling your bones, the stagnant water, and takes your cartilage between his teeth. You roll your head back. 

“Trying to have another go, are you?” he coos, blunts of his teeth still lodged over the shell of your ear. His voice is thick. Hot. 

There’s enough space between your arching spine and his front to evade the fat shape of his cock hardening, but you’re sure that if you scooted back far enough—

The water nearly sloshes over the lip of the basin when he lugs you back. The sound that comes out of you is unrecognizable to your own ears. With one hand against your tummy, swelling on every breath, and the other arm wrapped (constricting) around your shoulders, the space between, fingers notched around your arm, you feel wholly coddled. Swaddled in muscle. There’s a dangerous comfort you find in the lack of escape. 

His teeth aren’t locked over you anymore, but he presses his cheek to your wet hair (where he’d swiped his wet hand to brush it back), and taunts, “I’m trying taking care of you, and you’re being slutty. Are you a slutty omega?”

If you weren’t drunk on the fumes, didn’t smell the indisputable sharpness of a heady interest off him (if you didn’t feel his cock at half mast against the small of your back), the words would score you. Stab. Hurt.

But you do. And they don’t. You whimper.

“You’re a greedy slut?” he asks again, but his tone is light. Airy. Feels like he’s mocking you and—

You wriggle. Itch, under his unyielding embrace. The water ripples. 

When he tells you, easy— easy, sweetheart, (the croon for a wild animal), it feels like an echo of the same instruction he gave earlier. Only now, it’s less charred. Softer (less of a purr from the maw of a starving beast, and more of a redirection). He hesitates. You like the game, the cat and mouse, the dog and dog, but you sense the apprehension— the way he hadn’t anticipated you’d spool so tight— before he says the words.

“I’m taking care of you,” Harry tells you, holding you close, resolute (despite the way you can feel him, thick and heavy, between the dimples at the base of your spine, and you frown). 

It’s a denial. An unbending bulwark in resolve, cut in the flesh of a man that tore your throat open with his teeth and fucked you so deep that phosphenes erupted behind your quivering eyelids. You arch your back, as little as you can, and he tucks his chin over your shoulder. 

“And you’re going to be a good omega for me, and let me do that. Aren’t you?”

The words feel like a treacle seeping across your porous bones. They make you stiff. Then, liquified. Malleable. Obedient. The crash of an alpha’s lilt feels like the sea pulling you out. Your lashes flutter again. The plume of humid air kissing your skin feels as tacky as his voice along your eardrums. He noses along your temple and hums. 

The words are murmured against the crest of your cheek, and they don’t feel heavy, but you crumble under the undeniable order that seams them together. “When I ask you a question, I expect an answer.”

It makes your spine straighten out. You swallow. You haven’t formed any words around the nooks of your mouth besides please and yes in hours— in what feels like days— and your tongue feels like it’s caught on the roof. Useless. 

“Yes,” you tell him, and it sounds weak. So brittle, like that bridge between nuances, and it hits you that you’re tired. You’re so tired.

You’re worn, and sapped, and every atom feels like it’s smarting. You feel like you’d splinter if he tried to tuck the rigid head of his cock back into you again right now. And you wonder if it’s the bond that has him sensing your limits before you’re even aware, or a blind alignment of his character.    

“Just relax, mm?” Harry coos, and lathers a coat of warm foam across your shoulder, “It’s time to relax.” 

It feels like the kind of redirection given to a kid, and you’d be embarrassed by the way it soothes you if the soporific lull of bliss wasn’t swaying you out from land. And it’s so gentle, and soft, and out of character to what you’ve gathered that it’s nearly uneasy. Wrong. You tell yourself it’s the bond. It’s the bond. 

The bond. When your heat ebbs and you’re not swaddled in his scent, you’ll think back on your choices in an uncomfortable hysteria. 

You don’t know this man. Not even how old he is, not anything besides his name and the name of his drink, because you chased, and chased, and never listened, and now, you’re his mate—

(Untethered infinity, a collar in the shape of teeth and shared blood, feels like it’s searing when he draws a wet finger around it.) 

But it feels weightless. He shushes you again and lathers the other shoulder until you feel the roots of a contusion crackle and burst. 

With classes being over for the semester and the parties in full swing, she had known Harry would be later considering he had practice. Her brain being so full of formulas and equations she wanted to turn over to the side and let flow out like water, she hadn’t really considered the way an Alpha may feel coming in to a party with the residual scents of alpha and omega alike brushing past her in the crowded room.

So no, she shouldn’t have been surprised to see his jaw set and his fingers curled into his palm before he let out an irritated breath before pulling her to a secluded (as much as it could be) corner, letting out a little growl before telling her to let him scent her.

Harry was a sweet alpha, albeit a little prickly at times, but the one thing he was very particular about was making sure she was scented. To be honest, usually she was too, but midterms had her all sorts of fuzzy in her thoughts and if she thought about it long enough, the lack of proper scenting had likely been a part of it. It wasn’t just the all nighters and cram studying and multiple energy drinks and fast food (much to Harry’s irritation), but it was also lack of proper time with her soon to be Alpha.

“I’m sorry, Alpha.” Y/N tried to soothe him as her hands ran over his back, but the graze of his teeth had her stilling.

“No apologies.” He huffed, the slight bitter tinge in his scent slowly started to fade as he kept her crowded into the corner. “Just need you to smell like me. Not them.”

Y/N understood. Whenever Harry had come back from study group this last semester for his philosophy class, there was one omega who usually sat near him that had definitely been projecting her scent- and Y/N had tried to let it go but ultimately couldn’t. After a month she had broke down in tears and told him he had to shower before he came because she hated him smelling like someone else.

He had done that and stopped attending that study group, after telling the other omega sternly not to throw her scent when she knew that there were taken alpha’s in the course.

The guilt hit her for letting it slip her mind, a soft whine leaving her throat when Harry paused. “Sorry.” The apology again, came anyway.

“I’m not angry at you.” His voice calmed, nose nudging her jaw as his hand slid down her body. “Never angry at you. Don’t like all the scent but… s’not your fault.”

The reassurance soothed her a little bit, but most of it was the blanket of sandalwood and vanilla with a little bit of smoke that covered her up. His scent had always been the most calming thing to her and even with the lingering anxiety that she upset him, it was hard not to soften her posture and lean into him when he covered her in it.

“I didn’t mean to make you feel like m’angry. I just don’t like so many scents on you.” His lips brushed her temple, cheek running over her hair. Even if he pulled back now there would be no question of who her alpha was, but Y/N knew he wasn’t anywhere near done. “It’s a stupid alpha thing, honey. You could never do anything wrong. You’re too sweet.”

The little chuff he gave her was the final piece to have her wrapping her arms around his neck, leaning her body weight into him completely as her stance relaxed. The music and people around them were barely registering to her but that wasn’t a shock when it came to getting uninterrupted attention from her Alpha. “Only a stupid alpha sometimes.” She mumbled, letting her lips brush up against his jawline, trying to scent him in return.

A bit hard to make a real difference when he already did have her scent clinging to the shirt she had worn the night prior that he must have slipped on after his last midterm, but she tried anyways.

“I’ll take it. Can be a knothead sometimes but you put up with a lot.” He laughed quietly. “Just stay by my side tonight, yeah?”

Arms wrapping around you caused you to almost pass out of fear, screaming so loud and you couldn’t help but to cry.

“Shh, its okay its me. Y/n its me, Harry.”

Harry held you tightly to his chest, his arms holding both of yours pinned to your body while trying to calm you down with hush sounds and light kisses to the top of your head. You tried to stop crying, the small hiccups appearing while you tried to talk and breath at the same time.

“Don’t talk, love. Just relax and take a seat.” You did as told, Harry mostly taking you to the couch on his living room and placing you on your favorite side of the big couch which had a fluffy blanket— which he covered you with. Looking at Harry who was seating on the coffee table in front of you, he looked at you concerned, regret in his eyes. Sniffing and rubbing the blanket over your nose and eyes you took one last big breath and sat up, feeling slightly better. “There was wolves fighting,” you said, your throat feeling dry from the screaming and crying. Harry gave you a sad smile and without a word he got up and walked towards the kitchen.

You were going to ask him what he was doing but saw him walking back with a cup of water. “Here, its cold, I know you don’t like cold water but it’ll help with your nerves and sore throat.” You didn’t quickly drink it because like he said, you didn’t like cold water but drank it after a while just to make him stop looking at you a certain way.

“I’m sorry about that.” You looked at Harry, confuse at what he was apologizing about. “The wolves, that was me and a pack member training. I didn’t know you were coming and when my wolf saw you and heard you scream he thought you were in danger. He didn’t mean to go after you like that, I swear. You should have called me before you came over.”

That’s the thing, you had never called before hand. So after a couple of days later, after purposely ignoring Harry for scaring you, you texted him about going over to his pack, just like he had said. You didn’t want to run into his or someone else’s wolf, let alone get chased by one.

Go to my backyard when you arrive, I’ll see you there. xx

The text caused you to question his intentions, didn’t know what he was up to but obeyed his request. The walk over was no problem but the walk into the pack was scary. You could feel the anxiety and the fear creeping in, looking around the pack waiting for a wolf to jump out and attack you but got to Harry’s place in one piece and full of sweat, hands still shaking.

Walking inside his place you let out your breath, finally relaxing. After many years you had never thought you’d feel unsafe in the pack, in your best friend’s pack but here you are, hyperventilating and regretting leaving your house.

Heading over to the kitchen, slowly walking in order to try to get your heart to relax. Your hands were clammy and you felt tense but knew nothing will happen because Harry knew you were coming over and just like he said, he was outside waiting for you. He was standing in the middle of the yard but he was only in a pair of shorts which confused you for a minute. Opening the door to the back yard, his head snapped up at the sound of the sliding door, a smile appearing on his face which quickly dropped after seeing you tense.

“You okay hun?” Closing the door behind you, you nodded, trying to act as if you were cool with everything.

“I haven’t heard from you, thought you had ran up to the hills this time.” That caused you to chuckle because it was something that you had always joked about, running up the hills if you ever got chased by a wolf. You smiled at Harry and walked closer to him, making him see that you were okay but the little sweat on your nose told another story. “I considered it a few times but I’m here aren’t I?” Harry’s chuckle gave you goosebumps just as anything else he did when you were near, let alone when he was standing in front of you in just shorts, at this point you were probably on the verge of passing out.

“You are, but next time send me a text to let me know you are okay and safe at home. Almost had me go raid your place.” He walked the rest of the way to you, placing his hand on your cheek, causing you to close your eyes and relaxing on his hand. With a whisper he spoke, “but I am glad you are here and not 600 miles away on a beach.” Even in serious situations he tried to make you smile with some silly joke. Opening your eyes you saw Harry looking at you, he was admiring you but you didn’t know why and you didn’t really question him on why he was looking at you the way he was.

“So I actually wanted to show you my wolf.” At the mention of his wolf you pulled away from his hold and shaking your head quickly you started walking backwards towards the sliding doors.

“No, no, no, no, no.” You could already feel the sweat dripping down your neck and your forehead. Your hands were getting clammy and you just felt trapped while you were outdoors, how could that be fucking possible, you thought.

Harry walked up to you quickly, grabbing both your arms in a way to get you to calm down. “Listen, I want you to see it, get to know it. He is not mean, in fact he will be so gentle with you I promise you that.” Its not that you didn't trust him it was that you were officially scared of wolves and it didn't help that you were in their territory, maybe you should have listened to all the warnings that your family gave you when you were younger. Like always you were stubborn and wanted to be friends with everyone, that was one of the things that Harry liked about you, you gave everyone chances.

Your stomach tightened when you saw the facial expression he had. He looked betrayed and he didn't only look like that but he felt hurt because he knew you were scared to get hurt. All he has ever wanted was to care for you and protect you but instead here you are both in a situation that might change things.

That was the last thing that Harry wanted to happen. In fact the only thing that will change between them is their relationship status because he was fucking tired of being just her friend and that is the last thing he needed; lose his mate and best friend.

Fuck it.

Harry's thoughts left his head and figured that showing her his wolf could wait, but he couldn't wait on marking her. Just the way she was standing in front of him, looking scared and vulnerable, it just made him feel some type of way. He needed her now, no more best friend bullshit and she will have to deal with his werewolf side.

Harry moved his hands toward her waist and pulled her to his chest, his breath getting shorter the more he looked at her.

Meanwhile Y/n was feeling nervous, confuse, lost. You didn't know what to do or feel, one minute you were scared and feared that you would be attacked by a wolf and the next moment you are looking into your best friends eyes. The same green eyes that seem to change from green to black. Its as if they were playing a game on who would be decoration his eyes. You had know about the eye color changing, Harry having explained to you right after it had happened for the first time when he had shifted for the first time. Yet, seeing them change this close to you made you look at them with awe, they looked unreal and you just wanted to look at the different colors of them.

“Y/n.” Harry whispered, leaning closer to you but you didn’t really notice because the dark green, almost black eyes had you hostage. The swirls that were going through them were fascinating and enchanting.

“Baby.”

That caught your attention. Harry never called you baby, in fact he would only say love or hun but in a friend way, but baby? Didn’t help that the way he said it was in a way that he sounded desperate. He wanted your attention and even though he already had it, it wasn’t really to his words.

“You never call me that. Why are you calling me that, Harry?”

The close proximity was now obvious to you and your hands were in between both of your bodies, not being able to move away from him.

“I’m calling you that because I have always wanted to call you that. I’ve also wanted to call ya mine but I didn’t want to freak you out.” Mine… those words were something that mates said to their mat-

You quickly shook your head, not wanting to believe what you were thinking, because if you were right, if you were his mate, than that meant you would be loosing your best friend. “You can’t be. Please tell me we aren’t what I think we are.”

Harry’s hold tighten around you, his features darkening. It should have scared you but his eyes were back to green, which comforted you in a way.

“You are my mate, Y/n. You are mine and I want you know that I will never let another wolf, or me, to hurt you. Accept me as yours, as I accept you as mine, Y/n.”

Having come over to just visit him and get over your fears, you didn’t think this was going to be part of the night. Slowly, you raised your hand up to his cheek, caressing it and moving your thumb over his cheekbone causing his eyes to close and lean closer to your hand. He had always done it, lean at your touch, whether it was when you were running your fingers through his hair or hold his arm when walking, he always leaned towards you and you never questioned it.