"Hi," he says.
"Hi." My voice is barely there.
Everett
Kieran gets dressed like he's preparing for court.
I watch from the bed, pulling my own shirt over my head. Kieran grabs his jeans off the floor, doesn't bother checking for stains, just steps in and zips up like he's done this a hundred times. Not the club, maybe, but the morning-after scramble—getting dressed fast, not thinking about why you were naked in the first place. Shirt next. He rolls the sleeves, runs his hands through his hair. In less than a minute, he looks like someone with somewhere to be. Not the same guy who was crying on my knot six hours ago.
It's impressive. Total bullshit, though. His hands still shake. He smells like me, inside and out. There's a bruise above his collar where my mouth was. But he's got the act back up, and I can see him settling into it, like it's a drink he needs to steady himself.
"You're staring again," he says without looking at me.
"You're interesting to look at."
"You said that already."
"It keeps being true." I stand up and find my shoes and put them on, and we're two people getting dressed in a trashed private room at an underground sex club at seven in the morning, and it should be awkward, but it isn't. Or maybe it is, and neither of us is willing to be the first one to acknowledge it.
He picks up his mask from the sheets, looks at it for a second, and puts it in his back pocket instead of on his face. I do the same with mine. We've seen each other now. The masks are just objects.
"So," he says, turning to face me. Without the mask, he's sharper than I expected. High cheekbones, dark eyes, a mouth that settles somewhere between skeptical and challenging. Beautiful. I already knew it from his body, his voice, the way he smells. But his face seals it. I want to see it across a dinner table, in a courtroom, first thing in the morning with real light instead of the club's haze.
"So," I say back.
"I don't usually do this."
"The anonymous sex club or the part where you tell someone your life story while they edge you?"
He huffs a laugh that's mostly air and shakes his head, and the fact that he's laughing at all is a good sign. "Any of it. None of this is — I don't do this. I'm not someone who goes off his suppressants and shows up at a place like this with some insane plan to seduce a specific alpha. That's not who I am."
"It's exactly who you are," I say. "That's what makes you unique."
He looks at me, weighing whether that's an insult or a compliment.
"You're going to want to know the whole story," he says. "About why I came here. What the plan actually was."
"Eventually, yeah."
"It's embarrassing."
"I figured."
"Like, genuinely humiliating. The kind of thing I would normally take to my grave and then ask to be cremated just to make sure."
I lean against the doorframe and look at him. "Kieran. You told me you'd been obsessing over me for three months while I had a vibrator in your ass and a ring on your cock. I think we're past the embarrassment threshold."
The flush that spreads across his face is the best thing I've seen all morning. It crawls from his cheeks down his neck. He's reliving it, I can tell. He looks away, rubs the back of his neck. "Yeah, fair point," he says, voice straining for casual.
I pull out my phone. "Give me your number."
"That's romantic."
"I'm not trying to be romantic. I'm trying to make sure you don't walk out of here and convince yourself this was a one-time lapse in judgment that you never need to repeat." I hold the phone out. "You're a lawyer. You'll build a case for why this was a mistake before you get to the parking lot. I've seen how fast you can reconstruct your walls. I'm not giving you the chance."
He stares at me for a second. Something flickers across his face—surprise, maybe, or that raw discomfort you get when someone sees too much, too soon. He takes the phone, types in his number, hands it back.
"Thursday," I say. "Dinner. Seven o'clock. I'll pick the place."