Shivering, I stepped out of the shower and grabbed the towel, immediately starting to dry my hair.
It was at that moment that I realized I wasn’t alone in the locker room anymore.
“You were in there for a while,” Edison’s voice made me freeze mid-scrub of the towel.
Pulling the cloth away from my face, I found Edison sitting on one of the long wooden benches that lined the lockers. He was still dressed the same as earlier, though he’d haphazardly tucked his shredded shirt back into his pants and hadn’t even bothered to hide the freshly bruised bite mark peeking out from underneath his undershirt.
“Where’s Perrie?” I asked, surprised he’d been able to deflate his knot so quickly. Neither of us had ever knotted an omega—and alphas rarely tried it with each other—but Edison’s knot could sometimes stay swollen for hours after sex.
One glance at the clock told me it had barely been thirty minutes since I stepped into the shower to relieve some of the tension in my body. Tension that was very quickly returning again now as we stared at each other.
As my body warmed up again, all of the senses that had been dulled by the cold water were starting to return, including my sense of smell.
Edison was wearing Perrie’s scent on him like a badge of honor and even though he was sitting several feet away from me, I could smell it as if he was rubbing it in my face.
“She’s asleep in her nest. She was a bit worn out after our time together.”
I snorted at that. Anyone would be after getting fucked by Edison Keane. The man was an animal that didn’t know when to give someone a break.
“So why are you here instead of there with her?”
“Because I want to know why you didn’t come in and join us.” Edison folded his hands in his lap, shooting me a glare that made me realize that I had hurt the other man’s feelings when I’d turned and ran earlier. “You heard me ask her about it, an explicit invitation, and yet you still didn’t come in.”
“You don’t understand—” I began wrapping the towel around my waist and securing it in a knot.
“I understand your reservations completely, Rhodes,” Edison cut me off before I could say anything else. “My father has been dead for two years and yet you still bow to him like a dog.”
That hurt like a bitch to hear Edison say and I worked to not flinch at the words he was throwing at me like darts.
Edison uncrossed his legs and stood, crossing the tiled space to me. He smelled of vanilla and strawberries, and it nearly made me stumble right back into the shower for another round of Antarctic-tug-and-pull.
“Stop.” I put a hand out to keep him from coming any closer.
Edison’s expression crumpled a little bit, his gold eyes pinching at the corners as he frowned at me. “I’m trying to give you the world here. You like her and I’m fairly sure she likes you judging by the way she clamped down on my knot when I mentioned you earlier. So why are you so reticent about it all? Is it the branch heads?”
It was. Edison’s position had been on shaky ground since he took over and throwing out all of the traditions and values that the oldest members of the Keane clan held had made it even worse.
I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I was the reason for toppling the man who was everything to me.
“It was supposed to be a secret.”
“What was?”
“Us. The things we do in the privacy of your room,” I muttered, looking away from his intent gaze. Only Edison had ever been able to tell my real feelings just by looking me in the eyes.
“We fuck. Call it like it is. Are you ashamed of us fucking?” Edison asked slowly.
I wasn’t. But what had started as sex out of necessity had transformed into the sort of naturally progression partnership that I realized I always wanted with Edison.
I’d spent years watching him pursue men and women—though he usually favored those of the fairer sex—and it used to make me irrationally angry.
But I’d always told myself that it was because he was putting himself in danger by the constant revolving door that he surrounded himself with. I had even gone so far as convincing myself that it was because Edison needed to just get married so that I could better protect him.
And now he was married and I still felt jealous. Except I didn’t want Perrie to disappear—no in fact I felt the opposite. I wanted to do exactly as Edison had asked earlier and join them.
I had no good answer for Edison, so I said nothing and we stood there in the locker room for what felt like hours but must’ve only been minutes.
Finally, I heard Edison sigh. “Fine. I hear you loud and clear.”
Tension started to seep out of the tight bunch of my shoulders as Edison turned to walk away.
Then he stopped at the door and turned. “But if you don’t want this—me and Perrie—in front of the world to see, then you won’t get it in private either. Make a choice Rhodes. You can either continue to live in the past, or take a step forward with me into a much brighter future.”
The door to the locker room slammed shut with a bang, leaving me still standing in just a towel but feeling like I’d been stripped down to the bone by the man who I would never admit out loud that I was actually in love with.
“It’ll be so fun, I swear!” I heard Kailey squeal to Perrie as they sat ten feet away from me in the on-campus coffee shop they frequented most days after classes.
Three weeks had passed since Edison confronted me, and strangely enough, everything settled back into the same comfortable routine that we’d built up ever since Perrie came to live at the Keane Estate.
Breakfast together every morning, then I followed Perrie around to all of her classes and half-pretend to be paying attention to camera shutter speed and settings, lunch in the Quad where Perrie would try in vain to get me to conversate for longer than a couple of words, afternoon classes, then Perrie would get coffee with her friend, after that we’d go home, have dinner together, maybe do some self-defense lessons and then everyone goes to bed.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
I was absolutely miserable.
Edison made good on his word from that day and everything was like it had been four years ago before we’d started our secret rendezvous. He didn’t treat me poorly, but now there was a wall between us that I didn’t realize had been torn down over the years of our sexual relationship.
