Page 22 of Overeager
“Can I scent mark you?” he found himself asking.
Jesus. So much for not jumping the gun.
Eli spluttered at him for a minute or so, which was pretty fucking cute, before he gathered his words. “What? No. Jesus. We can’t—”
“Just a little,” Noah told him. “I’m kind of losing it here.”
It was true. He might not have been freaking out about the teacher thing—all new couples had their setbacks, right?—but there was a strange, jittery energy dancing under his skin, and it had been there ever since he’d caught Eli’s scent in the classroom. It was like the inner alpha part of him was all over the place. He knew he and Eli weren’t bonded or anything, but it still felt likehisomega was here, smelling nothing like him, and that seemed weirdly unacceptable.
Was this a virgin thing? This … clinginess?
Eli eyed him skeptically. “Our versions of losing it are very different.”
Noah threw his head back and laughed.
Eli’s lips twitched, but he still looked skeptical.
“For all anyone knows, we could be casual acquaintances,” Noah reasoned. “Scent marking wouldn’t be totally out of the realm of appropriate.”
It was a stretch, and he knew it, but after another moment of studying him, Eli held out his hand. Noah grabbed Eli’s wrist immediately, his thumb sliding along the scent gland there.
He let out a sigh of relief, his tense muscles relaxing.
Eli gave him a small smile. “Better?”
“You have no idea,” Noah told him with a smile of his own. He kept rubbing his thumb along that gland, willing to stay there as long as Eli would let him. “Why didn’t you call?” he asked again.
Eli shrugged, his gaze dancing away toward the back wall. “I thought—I thought maybe you’d have realized it was a one-time thing.”
Noah didn’t miss the fact that Eli hadn’t saidhehad realized it was a one-time thing. Hope blossomed in his chest, and his pheromones swelled before he could stop them. “You did?”
Eli’s gaze returned to his, and Noah’s breath caught. He was right; he knew it—there was something there. Something real. Something good.
But Eli pulled his arm back, out of Noah’s hold. “And I was right.”
He twisted away, bending to stuff his laptop and USB stick into his satchel. “This can’t happen, Noah. What we had—it was really, really great. But that was it.” He turned back, not quite meeting Noah’s eyes. “I—I have to get to a meeting. Are you going to be okay?”
Noah recognized temporary defeat when he saw it. It was probably even reasonable of Eli, as much as Noah might hate it. “Sure,” he made himself say agreeably. “I’ll be fine.”
Eli nodded once and then hurried out of the lecture hall.
Noah watched him go. It was easier to handle than it might have been, now that Eli smelled a little like him again.
And really … a one-time thing? With the connection they’d had?
Yeah fucking right.
With the rushof the semester’s classes starting and the roommates’ tendencies to take all their meals together, it was Wednesday evening before Chase cornered Noah without Spencer around.
Noah should have been expecting it, really. Chase may not have had the lock on pheromones that an alpha or an omega would have, but he was observant as hell.
He found Noah sprawled on his bed, surrounded by textbooks, his laptop, and the notebook where he liked to jot the important things down by hand.
Noah’s door was open, but Chase knocked on the doorframe anyway, always polite like that. His ever-present cap was off, and his dirty-blond hair flopped from a perfect center part, like some sort of nineties teen heartthrob. “You doing your reading for Omega Studies?”
“You know it,” Noah told him. They had their discussion section tomorrow, and Noah wasn’t going to be caught slacking in that class, not even by one of Eli’s TAs.
Chase came to sit on the edge of the bed. “You knew our professor.”
