Page 49 of The Alpha Experiment
I went to the window and leaned my forehead against it, letting the chill of the glass soothe the headache I could feel gathering behind my eyes like thunderclouds.
Okay. Point one: The experiment hadn’t just affected me. That’d been obvious on the second day, when Colin had lost control, even if only briefly.
And earlier—no, yesterday, and it felt like years ago, through the fog of exhaustion—when he’d…it had affected him. He might’ve been role-playing at first, getting into the spirit of the experiment, but he wouldn’t have knotted me if his own instincts hadn’t come heavily into play. Alphas didn’t always knot when they had sex. They could control it most of the time, actually.
And he’d said he hadn’t meant to knot me, which suggested it’d been his body’s response to stimulus, not his mind’s.
So he’d been in a more instinctive alpha mode by the time we’d…finished.
And I’d done enough research into the hormones produced by alpha werewolves, not to mention spending enough time around actual live alpha werewolves in my own pack and social circle, to know how alphas tended to behave after claiming someone like that—and also what drove them, biologically, to behave that way.
Point two: Colin and I hadn’t been as close lately. I didn’t blame him for it, he’d already apologized for it, and I knew he hated it as much as I did.
But none of that made it any less true. We’d drifted apart, at least in terms of how much we knew about each other’s day-to-day lives. Yeah, we’d still been talking a lot more when I took my faculty position here, and when I’d moved into the office with Meredith. But she’d been my barely-acquainted colleague then, not a friend. We’d gotten to know each other a lot better since then.
Probably partly because I hadn’t had Colin to talk to as much, in fact. He’d been distant, and so I’d branched out, seeking out more additional human interaction than I usually wanted or needed.
He hadn’t heard much about Meredith, because he hadn’t heard much about anything I’d been doing. If Ihadstarted to want more from her than friendship, he wouldn’t necessarily have known about it.
And in the middle of convincing him to have sex with me to further my research? Well, that wouldn’t have been the moment I’d have chosen to tell him about it, either. It hurt that he thought I’d have hidden something like that, especially if it was germane to the issue, but…dammit. It was far from complimentary, but he wasn’t entirely wrong, either. I didn’t mean to be manipulative, but sometimes my laser-focus on my scientific goals gave me tunnel vision. I’d leave things out that I didn’t think were relevant, totally missing that other people wouldn’t agree.
So put together those two points, and what did I have? A hormone-drenched alpha werewolf primed to be possessive and jealous of my time and attention for the time being, until the effects of claiming me wore off, mixed with a worried, guilt-ridden best friend who thought he might have fucked up our friendship and hated that he’d missed out on enough of my life lately that he might not even know if I was dating someone.
Shake well, add one attractive woman I really liked and had a lot of interests in common with, and with whom I’d spent an entire night in a locked lab and come out giggling and hugging and congratulating each other, nerding out over a scientific breakthrough he’d need ten years of intense study to begin to understand on the same level…
I thumped my forehead against the window, once, twice, and then a third time for good measure.
Fuck.
I really hadn’t been fair to Colin, talking him into this and then ignoring what effects it might have on him.
I hadn’t been fair at all, and now I needed to suck it up, get over myself, and pay a little more attention to Colin’s needs. Alphas were stronger than humans, stronger than other shifters, even…but they tended to get a little wrapped up in their own instincts.
Maybe my human superpower was the ability to step outside of that a little.
And maybe I should use that to my best friend’s benefit, instead of focusing on myself all the time.
I cleaned up Colin’s discarded junk-food wrappers and headed after him.
The parking-lot lights were winking out as I stepped into the breath-fogging chill of dawn, and I pulled my jacket more tightly around me and hunched into it. Nothing made me colder than coming down off a caffeine binge, and that combined with sleep deprivation had me shivering.
Only three cars occupied the lot: Colin’s, and two that probably belonged to the early-morning cleaning crew, judging by the propped-open door further down the building and the mop and bucket on the walkway.
He was leaning up against the trunk of his car, his ankles crossed, smoking a cigarette. I stepped off the sidewalk and headed for him, my eyebrows raised.
“I didn’t know you still smoked sometimes. Holding out on me? I’d have chain-smoked with you on the way back from my folks’ place if I knew you had some stashed.”
“Bummed one off the janitor.” He drew a long, deep drag and blew it out in a huge plume, tipping his head up to look at the slowly-lightening sky. His sharp profile against the gray looked like something out of an artsy photograph. “Nice guy. I feel like shit, I think I left my trash on the floor up there.”
“I picked it up.”
Colin finally glanced over at me, his lips quirking in a half-smile. “Of course you did.”
He didn’t seem worked up anymore, but a trace of something vulnerable lurked in his expression, in the depths of his eyes.
Man, I was such a shitty friend sometimes.
“Come on, let’s head home.”
