Page 46 of Knot Their Girl
I lean my ear against the door but don’t hear a thing. Maybe he fell asleep with the light on? Doesn’t seem like him, though. I decide to quietly knock, and when I do, nothing and no one answers me. Only silence.
With my free hand, I gently twist the knob and poke my head in. The ceiling fan light isn’t on; it’s a dim lamp on a desk near the windows on the far side of the room, where Gideon is sitting, more slouched than I’ve ever seen him.
“Gideon,” I whisper his name, hoping to avoid waking Pax up by speaking too loudly. “Is everything okay?”
The alpha sits with his back to me, his shoulders hunched with bad posture. He’s concentrating so deeply on whatever has his focus that he must not have heard me.
I slip inside the cracked door and move a little closer to him, saying, “Gideon, everything good?” Yet again, he doesn’t answer me, though when I move even closer I can hear him mumbling something under his breath. I stop only when I’m standing behind him, and I can peer over his shoulder at what he’s doing.
A sketchbook sits before him, a pencil in his hand and an eraser in the other. Numerous pulled pages are crumpled all around him on his desk. The current sketch he’s working on seems to be two omega symbols mirroring each other as a pendant on a necklace, but he must not like it, because he keeps muttering the word “No” over and over again.
“I don’t think it looks that bad,” I say, causing Gideon to nearly jump out of his skin as he swiftly turns on the chair to look at me. His posture straightens a bit, and even though I’m standing and he’s seated, our faces are damn near level. Gotta love being an omega shorty.
He sets a hand over his design. “What are you… Raeka, is something wrong? Was I too loud? Did I—” His brows furrow,and his eyes are slow to focus on me from behind his glasses. “Did I keep you up?”
“No,” I say, and now that I’m zeroed in on the glasses, they’re all I can see. He’s kind of cute in glasses. Is that a weird thought to have? Probably. Definitely, considering who this alpha is. “Your light was on, and you don’t strike me as someone who stays up all night, so I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”
“Oh, that’s nice. Yes, nice—” He almost sounds like he’s rambling. Damn. Is the guy really that tired? He spots the glass of water I’m holding. “Can I have that?”
I’m not expecting that, so I say, “Uh, sure.” I hand him the glass…
…which he takes and then pours right over his sketchbook, on the latest design of his as he mumbles, “This is terrible. Terrible work, really. I hate it.” He sets the glass aside, tears off his glasses, and then squeezes his eyes shut as he pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Yeah, I was totally going to drink that, but that’s okay. Whatever,” I mumble, and right as I do, Gideon sighs the world’s most earth-shattering sigh. It doesn’t look like much water escaped onto the desk; most of it was sucked up by the paper.
“I’m sorry, I just… I’ve been trying to come up with some new designs for next year’s spring collection, and it’s as if every ounce of creativity has been pulled out of my body, replaced by a soulless machine that can only spit out derivative slop. They should name the next ‘AI’ chatbot after me.” He puts the wordAIin quotations with his fingers.
I don’t say anything, figuring there’s more to this. And I’m right.
“It’s not like they need me, anyway.”Theymust mean the company, Chase Jewels. “Nothing I do recently has sold well. They might as well recycle my ideas from twenty years ago—they were better than this crap. It’s been downhill ever since…”
I can put two and two together. I know he’s referencing when his sister died. A pain like that I might not know, but it must stay with you, always lingering in the back of your mind until it demands more attention, such as it is right now with Gideon. Sometimes sorrow is eternal and it gets the best of you.
He puts his glasses back on and looks at me. “I’m sorry. Did you… did you say you wanted something? I’ve already forgotten why you’re here.”
I give the torn-up alpha a soft smile and say, “I think you should go to bed, Gideon.” When I say his name, his gaze falls to my mouth, where it stays, thereby ensuring my mind travels somewhere it shouldn’t.
“Maybe it’s you who should be in bed,” he whispers, as if it’s an ah-ha kind of moment. “Why are you up, anyway?”
I shrug, and since I don’t want to tell him about me watching videos in the hopes of learning some sign language, I settle for saying, “I was thirsty.”
“Oh.” He glances at his wet sketchbook, and then at the now-empty glass. “Oh. Of course. I should’ve known. I’m sorry, I—maybe I am a bit more tired than I thought I was.”
Staring at the frames on his face, I whisper, “You know, now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t know any other alphas who wear glasses.”
He chuckles softly and slides them off, twirling them in the air just above his lap. “Ah, they’re… uh, well, I’d like to say I only wear them when my eyes get tired, but we’d both know that’s a lie.”
Right. Because then his eyes must be tired all the time… which, I realize, they might just be. Again, he laughs awkwardly, and I don’t know what makes me say it, but the words come out of my mouth before I can stop them: “They look good on you.”
Just like that, his chuckling quiets, and he may or may not blush when he slides those glasses back onto his face. “I appreciate the white lie.”
“It’s not a white lie. I really do think they look good on you. You’re pretty cute.” Man, I’m just digging myself a hole here, aren’t I? A hole I will never crawl out of.
“Oh, well, um, thank you.” He stumbles over his words in the most adorable way. It’s like he’s not used to being complimented or called cute, and I suppose he isn’t, given that he spends most of his time locked in this house with Colter. “Can I ask you something? It might be considered personal.”
What the hell? Why not? “Sure.”
“You put something on your neck. A cream or lotion or something. Why?”
