Alphas Like Us (Like Us 3)

I skim Moffy in a short once-over and look away.

He’s Maximoff Hale.

I almost laugh to myself. Fuck, he’s too pure. Too wholesome. And I just got out of a long-term relationship—there are reasons I wouldn’t. So many more reasons that he wouldn’t.

Not now.

Possibly not ever.

“I cut my leg,” he suddenly says, but the words come out slowly like thick tar on his tongue.

I eye his jeans while his rigid stance hardly shifts. “Where?”

“My thigh.”

“That’s a problem,” I say easily. “Your femoral artery—”

“I would’ve bled out hours ago if I cut my femoral artery. I’m okay.”

I try not to smile because it’ll just agitate him. “Web M.D. says you’re okay, but I haven’t yet.” I squat and unzip my trauma bag. “I still need to see the wound. What’d you cut yourself on?”

Maximoff stops protesting, and he unbuttons his jeans. “I don’t know.”

I frown and open the packaging on a pair of gloves. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I was off-campus last night with some guys on the swim team. It was dark.” He steps out of his jeans. Bandage is wrapped around his muscular thigh, gauze thick beneath. He dressed his wound perfectly.

Maximoff notices me staring, and he starts smiling. “Better than you would’ve done, huh?”

I snap on one medical glove. “I’m still better than you at everything, wolf scout. Don’t get excited.”

“Excited around you? Yeah, I’m never even close.”

I didn’t mean it sexually, but here we are.

I look up, just as he looks down, and he swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing. Shit, our banter hasn’t exactly taken this route before.

Since I’m older and wiser, I decide to eliminate the strange tension with “professionalism” and I ask, “Did you clean the wound?”

“Yeah.”

“Take a seat on your desk chair.” I stand and slide my trauma bag closer with my foot, just as he sits like a fucking board. His gaze plasters to my movements. I lean over his chest, the smell of chlorine rushing towards me, and with my ungloved hand, I grab his Fundamentals of Philosophy textbook.

“What are you doing?” he asks, hating to be in the dark. Clearly.

I put the textbook in his palms. “Read, take notes, study. Don’t watch me.”

“Farrow—”

“Trust me, wolf scout.” I crouch, snap on my other glove, and start undressing his bandage that edges close to his gray boxer-briefs. I pause not even one-fifth through when I catch him staring and overthinking. “You don’t need to overanalyze what I’m doing, Moffy. Just focus on your own shit.”

He glares. “My leg is my own shit, thanks for asking.”

I roll my eyes into a smile. “You’re welcome.” I continue unwrapping the bandage while his gaze is attached to mine. Trust me, trust me, I try to emote until he finally gives in and reads his text with a frustrated breath.

I concentrate on his wound, blood seeps through—fuck. I unwrap faster. “You bandaged your thigh without stopping the bleeding first?”

He glances down. “It was stopped.”

I reach for my suture kit. “When’d you cut it?”

He shuts his book and thinks. “Uh…” Maximoff pinches his eyes. “Three, four in the morning. I was out—”

“With your swim teammates, I heard that part.” I kneel on one knee for a better angle. Blood completely soaks the gauze, and I try to gently pull it off the cut.

He winces and grips the edge of the desk. “Fuck.”

“Sorry.” I discard the gauze in a plastic bag and squeeze his cut closed with my fingers. A couple inches higher and that would’ve sliced through his artery. “You were lucky.”

“I know.” He rubs sweat off his forehead with his arm. “I wasn’t drunk last night, if that’s what you think.”

“That’s not what I’m thinking.” I pull out more supplies. “You’ve been bleeding out consistently since early this—what’s your pain level from one to ten?” I cut myself off and ask since he’s sweating and gritting his teeth.

His nose flares, wincing. “It doesn’t matter. I can’t take a painkiller.”

“It does matter.” I planned to disinfect the wound first, then administer a shot of lidocaine, then suture, but I change the order and hurriedly unpackage a syringe and needle.

He white-knuckles the desk, the room deadens while I work and he concentrates on breathing. I give him a shot of lidocaine to numb the wound. Then I wipe the area with an antiseptic and irrigate with saline.

In less than two minutes, I’m done with both, and I start suturing the deep cut. I break the quiet first. “When was your last tetanus shot?”

“I was eight.” Too long ago.

I look up. “You sure?” I really don’t want to open his medical records, and I need him to be sure.

“Pretty positive.”

I trust him enough. “I’ll give you a tetanus shot before I leave.” I pierce his skin with the needle and weave the stitch.

Maximoff clears a ball in his throat. After I finish the sutures, I redress the wound with clean gauze and bandage. He slides forward on the chair.

“I can do that,” he says and reaches for the gauze.

I put a hand to his chest, my gloves new. “Just relax.”

He lets out a short laugh. “Right.” He cracks a crick in his neck and stares faraway again. Where’d you go, Moffy?

I watch him for a second, then wrap the bandage. “No swimming until the stitches are out—”

“What?” His voice spikes, eyes snapped towards me.

That woke him up. “You can’t swim in a chlorine pool with this kind of cut.”

Maximoff breathes out a weighted breath, and he keeps shaking his head. His eyes strangely carry a mountain of emotion and then no emotion at all. Like he’s fighting to show me something and then nothing. “I’m on the Harvard swim team.”

I expect him to say I need to swim, but he stops there.

He opens his mouth, then shuts it, conflicted.

I raise my brows. “Sad?” I ask.

“No.” He shakes his head repeatedly. “You know…” He licks his lips. “Last night, one of my new teammates shoved me in a pile of trash. There was metal and…” He was cut. He looks away, then his tough eyes meet mine head-on. “They don’t want me here.”

“Do you want to be here?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer. His face is blank.

I crave to hold his gaze longer, but I force myself to look down. And I tape his bandage. “You should’ve gone to Yale. Everything is better there: the people, the dorms, the alumni.”

He feigns confusion. “Really? I heard they churn out white-haired know-it-alls with pretentious lineages and asshole tendencies.”

“Asshole tendencies,” I repeat with a laugh. “I think you mean heroic tendencies.”

“I tell you I got pushed into fucking metal, and you take that moment to tell me Yale is better than Harvard.”

Yeah, I’m an asshole. My smile stretches as I stand up, snapping off my gloves. “It’s still accurate.”

His gaze lingers on me for a long beat. “Maybe,” Maximoff admits.

It’s hard not to stare at him.

I clean up, and I don’t let him help, even when he asks. He’s still a little weak.

“Why are you here anyway?” he asks after I give him a tetanus shot in the deltoid. “I know your father is with my Uncle Ryke, but I thought Trip would be here instead.” I’m known to tag along to calls, not pick them up on my own like I’m in-line to be a concierge doctor.

I pack up the suture kit, and I toss him a bandage for the small spot of blood. He’s been dying to do something himself, and he can at least stick a Band-Aid on his shoulder. “My uncle is with my father,” I tell him. “They needed extra hands. This is a one-time thing.”

Maximoff thinks hard.

I’m going to be a bodyguard, wolf scout.

The truth weighs inside of me, and as I get ready to leave, I recognize how much is about to be left unsaid.

1

FARROW KEENE

PRESENT DAY

“He’s going to throw a punch,” Oscar Oliveira says, observing my hot-blooded, twenty-two-year-old boyfriend.

I watch the same scene from the same vantage point as Oscar.

All six of us in Security Force Omega “guard” the double-door entrance of the Philadelphia Orchestra Hall. Two thousand of the richest fuckers I’ve ever seen fill scarlet velveteen seats. The main level and balcony tiers are packed tight, and a string quartet plays a classical piece on stage, ruby curtains drawn open.

Tucked up against the left-side emergency exit, my boyfriend looks ready to combust.

Maximoff speaks hushed, but his brows furrow and he gesticulates madly. Inching closer and closer to the uppity suit-and-tie organizer of tonight’s “unprecedented” event.