Page 3 of My Freshman Mate
And up.
He's a mountain. A solid wall of muscle stretching a gray Westbridge Athletics t-shirt tight across a chest and shoulders so broad he seems to block out the sun. Sun-streaked blond hair, a little messy, falls across a forehead that looks like it was carved from stone. His jaw is sharp enough to cut diamonds.
But it's his eyes that stop my heart.
They stop me cold. Blue. Not regular blue—impossibly blue, like someone took the sky on a perfect day and cranked the saturation to maximum. The kind of blue that doesn't seem real.
And those eyes are locked on me. Not just looking at me, butthroughme, with an intensity that's a physical touch, stripping me bare right here in the middle of campus.
Time stops. I'm not being dramatic; everything freezes. The chatter of students fades to a distant hum. The rustling of leaves in the oak trees goes silent. The only thing I can hear is the frantic, panicked drumming of my own heart.
And then I smell him.
Oh, God.
My suppressants are useless, a dam made of tissue paper against a tsunami. His scent slices through the air, through myclothes, through my skin, and sinks straight into my bones. It's clean sweat and something sharp and electric, like the air right before a lightning strike. Ozone. Raw power.
Alpha.
My mind, my logical, planning, calculating mind, tries to fight it.Fated mates are a biological anomaly. A one-in-a-million chance. A romantic fantasy. This isn't real.
But the screaming in my blood says otherwise. It's a feeling I've only ever read about in textbooks, a primal, soul-deep recognition that short-circuits every rational thought in my head. It's drowning and breathing for the first time, all at once.
My alpha.My alpha.
He takes a step closer, and the heat rolling off his body makes my skin flush. My knees turn to water. My mouth goes bone dry. And a hot, mortifying slickness pools between my legs, a deeply personal betrayal from my own body that I have never, ever felt before.
My omega instincts, the ones I've spent years pretending don't exist, surge through me with a vengeance. Every cell in my body is screaming one word, a desperate, shameful plea:Submit. Submit. Submit.
I fight it, trying to hold onto whatever scraps of control I have left.
"I—I'm late for my advising session," I stammer, the words coming out as a pathetic, shaky whisper. My scattered papers and forgotten map lie at our feet. "I have to go."
He doesn't move. He doesn't blink. His focus is a physical weight, pinning me in place. I can see his pupils dilate, those impossible blue eyes turning almost entirely black with a stark, predatory hunger.
This is insane. This isn't happening. I need to get to Thompson Hall. I need to stick to The Plan.
"I really need to—"
He closes the remaining distance between us in one silent, fluid step. He's so close now I can feel the warmth of his breath on my face. He crowds me, his sheer size a threat and a promise all at once. My head spins. I feel small. Fragile. An omega.
His voice is a low, feral growl that vibrates through the soles of my feet and straight up my spine, rattling my teeth. My entire five-year plan, my carefully constructed world, splinters when he speaks.
"You smell like mine."
Wes
I'm leaning against a pillar, scrolling through my phone. Bored as fuck. Coach's voice is still ringing in my ears.Show your face, Chambers. Good for team morale.Right. Morale. The noise in my head—the constant, buzzing static that's followed me for years—won't shut up. It's the sound of nothing meaning a goddamn thing. Another game, another party, another empty hookup. It's all noise.
Then a scent slams into me—old books, sharp anxiety, and sweet, sweet omega—and my whole world freezes.
The buzz in my head cuts out. Dead silence.
In that split second, there's nothing. Then a roar hits me, a physical shockwave like I'm standing under a waterfall. My body wakes up at once, hungry and howling.
A kid—a skinny, dark-haired omega with wide brown eyes that look a little lost—crashes straight into my chest.
And everything fucking stops.
