Except it kind of is now, isn't it?
Ever since he gave me his room. Ever since the hospital. Ever since everything got complicated in ways I don't have the emotional bandwidth to unpack.
"Uh… professional courtesy?" I offer, going for flippant. "Can't have my blackmailer stress himself into an early grave before I finish paying off my debt."
I wink at him and give him finger guns.
I must be seeing things, because something that looks weirdly like sadness flickers across the half of his face that isn't masked. It's there and gone so fast, I almost miss it.
Aww, fuck.
"Okay, okay. You caught me," I say with a melodramatic sigh, flinging myself backward on the couch with my hand bent against my forehead like a Victorian peasant with the vapors. "You caught mered-handedactually caring about you a little bit. Happy now, Sherlock?"
"I'm fine," he repeats, turning away. "Anything else?"
Well, I tried.
"Actually, yeah." I close my laptop, setting it aside. "Jamie's been texting me."
Rex goes completely still.
"Has he."
"Yeah. He's pretty insistent about giving me the mask in person." I watch Rex carefully, looking for any hint of what's going on behind that perpetually unreadable expression that has fuck all to do with the mask hiding half of it. The half I can see might as well be a statue. "He wants to grab coffee at the same time. Hang out with no alphas around, which I appreciate given my whole..." I gesture vaguely at myself. "Situation."
There it is. A flash in that ice-blue eye, gone before I can name it, but definitely there. He may be in clear denial that I'm his scent match, but it's probably driving him absolutely insane and he has no fucking clue why.
Now that going through heat with Phoenix and Raf effectively reset my body and my suppressants have slammed my scent back into place, I'm going to have to tell him eventually. I can't just… never tell him we're fucking scent matches.
That doesn't mean I have to tell himyet.
"That's fine," Rex says, and his voice is so controlled it's basically a weapon. "Go have fun with Jamie."
"Really?" I can't help the note of surprise. "You're not going to give me shit about security or make sure I'm not planning to run away or?—"
"I don't own you." He cuts me off, still not looking at me. "I own yourvoice. Nothing else. You can make your own choices about who you spend time with."
"Wow," I mutter. "Character development. Who are you and what have you done with Rex Steele?"
His jaw tightens. "Was there anything else?"
Before I can respond, the penthouse door opens and Phoenix and Rafael tumble in, their energy filling the space immediately. Phoenix is laughing at something Rafael said, that booming sound that makes me smile involuntarily. Rafael's grinning, cheeks flushed from the rain outside, looking more relaxed than I've seen him in days.
It's good to see the two alphas are back to being besties again.
They've been acting awkward as fuck after everything that happened at the hotel. Like if they exist in the same room for more than five minutes, they'll go nuclear and spontaneously combust.
I'm assuming that's why they haven't been sleeping in the same room like they were before. I'm still in Rex's fortress, and Rex is still in Raf's room while Nash's room remains an untouched shrine. Raf has been on the couch for the past few nights.
His scent is all over it.
Iloveit.
They both spot me on the couch and their expressions shift subtly. Not obviously enough that Rex would notice from across the room, but I catch the way Phoenix's eyes soften and how Rafael's smile widens.
Scent match bullshit is real and apparently very obvious when you know what to look for.
"Hey," Phoenix says, shrugging out of his wet jacket. "We grabbed Thai food. You hungry?"