Page 50 of The Alpha Experiment
Colin took a last drag of his cigarette, stubbed it out on his shoe, and tossed it in the trash, getting in the car without another word.
***
My apartment looked even dingier in the early morning, somehow both washed-out and with all the stains on the carpet and marks on the walls standing out in high relief.
I stopped in the middle of the living room and stared at the couch as Colin shut the door behind us. The sag in the middle had sunk almost six inches below the level of the frame, stuffing poked out all over the place, and I could actually see a couple of springs.
The only person I could think of I’d put to bed on that couch without guilt was Dr. Asshole Greenwald.
And the apartment feltcold. I’d left the heater off overnight while we’d been out, and the living room had that miserable, neglected feeling to it, all chilly and drab and unwelcoming. Colin had an alpha metabolism, but still. Ugh.
“You should just crash out with me,” I said, the words leaving my mouth before I stopped to consider how they’d sound.
I glanced at Colin in my peripheral vision. He looked as blank as if someone had taken an eraser to his face.
“Your bed’s a twin, dude.”
I shrugged. “It’s no worse than that time we shared that one-man tent. Remember, in Arizona?”
“Yeah, true,” he said, and chuckled. “Yeah. That night we took all those magic mushrooms with that spacey dude who claimed to be a werecoyote. Even though he reeked of raccoon.”
I managed to look at him full-on, and our eyes met…and it was as if something snapped into place, like a rubber band or a taut string, pulling me in. I took a step toward him, and then another.
And forced myself to stop, lurching forward a little as I did, like my body wanted to keep up the momentum. Why did I want to be near him? I was cold, yeah. And he still had that pinched look, like he’d stopped being angry for long enough to realize he felt hurt instead. Did he need reassurance? Did I?
“I—didn’t catch the raccoon thing. I did notice he smelled funky, though. Weird.” The words sounded awkward, irrelevant. Like I’d been trying to say something completely different, and translated my thoughts into another language neither of us spoke fluently. I cleared my throat. “Anyway, let’s get some sleep, huh? The bed’s small, but at least it’s a solid horizontal surface.”
Colin glanced at the couch. “So’s the floor, Newt. You know I’m not picky.”
I should’ve been relieved. I should’ve wanted my bed to myself. All the aches and pains from the day before had made themselves known at last, amplified by the come-down from research-breakthrough adrenaline and by my hours spent hunched over a lab bench. And every time I took a step, or stood or sat, I was conscious of muscles and flesh inside me I’d never had any reason to notice before.
Instead, it felt like a different and deeper kind of injury. Colin didn’t want to be near me after all. He wasn’t too picky to sleep on the floor, but being near me crossed the line. So much for my olive branch. And so much for nothing changing between us. Maybe instead of focusing on a shared goal and a shared enemy together bringing us closer, it’d done nothing but break what was left of the closeness we’d had before.
“I’m going to bed, then,” I said, turning away so he couldn’t see the hurt in my face. “See you in the morning, yeah?”
I stepped into the bathroom for a minute, coming out to find Colin lying on the couch with his arm over his eyes.
Well, okay then. Message received. I wasn’t sure where to go from there, but the gap between us gnawed at the pit of my stomach and made my head ache.
I crawled into bed and pulled the covers up to my neck, trying to ignore that itching feeling of wrongness. Colin and I needed each other. Didn’t we? Time apart, followed by this experiment of mine pushing us together in new and bizarre ways…had it been too much for our friendship to take, after all?
Exhaustion pulled me down into my bed like I had weights on all my joints, but my eyelids wouldn’t close, and I resigned myself to it, staring gritty-eyed and miserable at the growing light of dawn seeping around the blinds.
Chapter 16
Closing the Distance
I’d been lying there wretchedly wide awake for long enough for the birds to start chirping outside when I heard the couch creak, its springs and frame protesting Colin’s densely-muscled weight.
And then the floor creaked too. My bedroom door opened with a quiet squeak of hinges.
I tensed, hoping Colin hadn’t come in to restart the fight about Meredith…or to tell me he was leaving.
But he didn’t say anything at all. A gust of cold air hit my back as he lifted up the blankets, and then the bed dipped as he climbed in behind me.
Now we had a literal gap between us, as well as figurative—and that couple of inches of space felt like miles. I couldn’t feel anything but the air between us, fraught with…I didn’t even know what, but it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and froze my lungs, making me hold my breath.
We’d never cuddled before, even in that one-man tent. We’d lain down back to back, taking turns describing the way the tent walls looked like they were melting in different multicolored patterns and giggling like idiots.
