Page 28 of The Alpha Experiment
“Increase the environmental stressors while minimizing actual risk, in order to maximize the chances of a biological response in a moderately controlled way,” he recited, his tone just this side of offensively sarcastic. “Yes, thank you, Dr. McEwen, I took notes during your lecture.”
“It wasn’t a lecture,” I muttered, turning away to rifle through my bag and make sure I had everything I needed. Of course, I’d already done that a bazillion times on our way here and before we left home. But I needed something to do to look busy, and not look at him.
“No, lectures usually only last an hour,” he grumbled in reply, and finally, finally shut his own car door, tacitly acknowledging that we were actually doing this.
I ignored him. Pointedly.
He strolled away from the car, subtly sniffing the air, looking for the gods only knew what. Signs of mountain lions or bears, maybe? Not likely. They’d take one sniff of their own, catch the scent of an alpha werewolf, and scamper off somewhere they could be sure of being the apex predators.
Since I’d already started, I finished my backpack check. Flashlight. Water. A lighter. Emergency flares, not that I’d need them, since Colin would be able to find me no matter what, and find our way back to the car, no matter what. A change of socks, because I’d been hiking too many times to go anywhere without spare socks. My phone, tucked safely in an inner pocket. An extra jacket. Granola bars.
“You know, you should really just leave that in the car,” Colin said, making me jump a foot in the air. I spun around. He’d snuck up on meagain, the bastard. “We’re not going that far. Worst comes to worst, I can get us both back to the car in five minutes anyway. It’s just going to weigh you down. And anyway, it’s not all that realistic.”
I looked down at the backpack again, and then back up at him. He was right, dammit. “You could’ve made that point before I packed everything and made a big deal out of it.”
He shrugged. “You needed something to do. You get all antsy if you’re not prepared for whatever. Leave it in the car. You can change your socks when we get back. Are we doing this or not?”
“Who says I was going to change my socks?” I sputtered, quickly zipping up the backpack so he didn’t see them sticking out. I opened the car again, tossed in the backpack, and turned to the forest trail.
It wasn’t much of a path, just a narrow, zigzagging bit of pine-needle-littered dirt strewn with rocks and leading up into the trees. A gust of chill wind whistled through the parking area, sending pine needles whirling into the air and making me shiver.
“Okay,” I said, sounding even less sure about this than I felt. “I guess I’ll head up the trail? Five-minute head start?”
Colin leaned against the side of the car and pulled out his phone, looking for all the world like he was waiting for me to run into the grocery store for a minute to grab some beer. Totally relaxed.
“Yeah, whatever,” he said.
I knew it was an act, put on as much for himself as for me, but it still pissed me off.
“Fine,” I said shortly. “Five minutes.”
And I turned and set off through the trees. The trail slanted sharply up for a few hundred yards and then leveled off, and I paused as I hit the plateau. Staying on the path was definitely safest in terms of not breaking my ankle or falling off a cliff, and I’d told Colin I would.
But would it really offer much of a challenge to him, or much of a challenge to my body’s responses, for that matter? And it needed to be more of a challenge. Because once I’d gotten over the sheer embarrassment of the idea of doing this with Colin—okay, ‘gotten over’ was an exaggeration, maybe ‘gotten used to’—I’d realized that he was, while the only possible person to do it, also the worst possible person to do it.
He didn’t scare me. He was as familiar to me as someone in my own family. And even when I’d had those weird reactions to him over the past week, in his car and in the library…even then, I’d known deep down I was perfectly safe. I still couldn’t figure out what I’d been afraid of, at the time. It’d been a lizard-brain reaction I couldn’t control, but I’d been so certain he’d never hurt me, all the same.
And I stillwascertain he’d never hurt me. Which kind of lessened the potential effects of being chased through the woods. Instinctive responses, devoid of any logic, were precisely what I was attempting to evoke in myself. And I needed extreme circumstances, like the high stress we’d both been under on those two occasions, to help that along.
Which meant I ought to go off the path, bumble through the woods, and give myself every possible opportunity to get freaked out. The likelihood of panicking enough to change my own genetic expression by strolling down this trail until Colin caught up to me and said, “Hey, Newt, how’s it going” was pretty slim.
Dammit.
I started jogging, still on the trail, still considering. Colin would freak out if my scent went off the path; he’d think I’d gotten lost, or might be in danger, and he’d blow the whole thing by shouting my name and ending the experiment.
He was so the worst person for this. I should’ve posted on one of the online supernatural kink boards. Someone would totally have been up for hunting me in the forest for kicks.
I glanced down at my watch. It’d been ten minutes. Colin could easily go twice as fast as I could; where the hell was he?
The sound of pounding footsteps echoed through the trees.
Ah, there he was. I picked up the pace, trying to get that feeling of being hunted, and I glanced back over my shoulder.
Yep, definitely Colin and not some anonymous potential assailant.
I ran a little faster.
He caught up, grabbed me around the waist, and tackled me down to the side of the trail, where we landed in a puff of pine needles and a splat of mud.
