Page 40 of The Alpha Experiment
“Any more questions?”
“Nope, none,” he said hurriedly. “Um. I’ll be—outside. For a while. Calling the council. Just meet me at the car when you’re, uh, ready.”
His reaction was kind of funny, but mostly I was grateful. I’d been half afraid he might try to do something horrifying, likehelp.
It wasn’t so bad in the end, although there was a lot of cursing and dropping things, and the sensation was…beyond odd, but I managed. And then I used my fingers to stuff as much lube up there as I could, leaving me slick and messy with damp thighs, and with my boxer-briefs sticking to me in awful ways.
Colin was leaning against the trunk of the car when I finally emerged, walking carefully and suddenly realizing I was going to need to sit down for forty-five minutes. Ugh. I had to vehemently resist the urge to reach down the back of my pants and try to sort out the sticky underwear situation.
He looked up from his phone and quirked an eyebrow at me. “Okay?”
“Okay.” He kept staring. “Seriously, okay, let’s go,” I said, barely managing not to snap it, and he shrugged and got in the car.
He pulled onto the highway, clearly heading for the same spot we’d used the day before. Good call. I already knew the terrain a little, and we knew it was deserted.
When we were almost there, winding along a stretch of narrow road with the trees looming all around us, he said abruptly, “Are you going to need a safeword or something?”
I turned to look at him, and had the oddest sensation, like I was seeing double.
If I blinked, I saw my best friend, the same guy I’d been unselfconsciously treating like a member of my family for half a lifetime, with his messy hair and goofy grin, his tanned wrist resting on the steering wheel and knee splayed out in a posture as familiar to me as my own.
Blink again, and I saw the big, muscular guy who was going to chase me down in the woods, rip off my clothes, and fuck me up the ass.
My very slick and sticky ass. I shifted a little in my seat.
“You know what one is, right?” he asked, frowning, when the silence went on too long. “I mean, I didn’t know the term for it until this morning when I looked it up.” I almost laughed. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who depended on the internet too much. “But it makes sense.”
I blinked again. Colin. Blink. Big, muscular alpha who wanted me to pick a safeword.
“I don’t think so,” I said, after considering it for a moment. “The whole point is there’s no out, right? I need to be in the zone in order to get the right biological response. And if I say no, I know you, and you’re going to stop anyway, whether I actually want you to stop or just panic for a second. So it doesn’t matter.”
Colin didn’t turn to look at me, focusing straight out the windshield, but his jaw tightened, and there was something in his eyes. Something dark.
“I got carried away, yesterday,” he said quietly. “I was—I’m not sure I will, Newt. Stop. If you say no.”
Then I did laugh, because—gods, he could be such a drama llama. The laugh sounded shaky, but it cleared something out of my chest, something heavy that’d been weighing me down all morning. Blink. He was Colin again.
“Col, for one, it’sme, not some super hot…biker iguana chick. It’s not like you’re going to get overwhelmed with lust. I mean, I hope you manage to get it up at all.”
Oh, shit, I hadn’t even thought of that until the words left my mouth, and now my face felt like it was on fire. What if he didn’t? What if yesterday had been a fluke? Talk about a blow my ego might never recover from. Moving on, moving onquickly.
“And for two, yeah, right. Like you’d ever actually hurt me. I’m more worried I’ll look uncomfortable and you’ll just stop on the spot and freak out. And if youdidget way too carried away,” I said more loudly over his protests, “it’s not like a safeword would get through to you any more than my saying no! Does the word ‘pineapple’ have some magic power over alpha instincts, or something? Besides, I don’t want you to stop, even if I’m trying to fight you off. That’s part of it. It has to be as close to a real…” Oh, crap. What word did I use here? All the ones I could think of sounded just plain wrong. “…claiming as possible. You know. Like old-school style.”
I patted him on the arm, his muscles stiff as a board under my fingers.
Shit, that was so awkward. I jerked my hand back, my fingers feeling singed.
“You want me to keep going if youfightme? Newt, that’s fucked-up.”
I shoved down the annoyance that rose up. Of course this was weird, and…maybe more than weird, and I could understand why someone else, someone objectively viewing what we were doing, would think that. But I’d explained all the steps that had brought me to this hypothesis!
I forced myself not to sound impatient. “Colin, it’s part of the experimental model. Running, chasing, resisting, overcoming resistance. Simulating an atavistic mating paradigm. If Iwasn’tgoing to try to fight you off, then we should just be doing this at home and then ordering a pizza!”
He didn’t say anything else until he’d pulled over in a gap between two huge pine trees. When the engine cut, the silence felt absolute.
Colin did finally turn to look at me, and that ugly emotion I couldn’t identify was back, flickering in his eyes—along with a tinge of his golden alpha glow. I blinked my own. And this time, he wasn’t Colin. He was all alpha werewolf, hard and wild and dangerous. He shifted in his seat, leaning forward a little. “All right,” he said, almost a growl. “Fine. I won’t stop if you struggle.”
“I’m glad we’re on the same page.” And I was, because this wouldn’t work otherwise. But his tone, his expression, both sent a little shiver of primitive fear down my spine. “Let’s get this show on the road, yeah?”
