Get It 6

The alpha’s house has a rhythm, and I’ve spent three days learning it by heart. Richard leaves at six, Mom at seven, Max trains until seven and eats alone. I exist in the gaps between them like a ghost with a schedule.

Tuesday morning, I miscalculate. I’m reaching for the cereal when his voice comes from behind me, already dressed, hair still damp, droplets of water sliding down his toned torso. I look away before my cheeks start burning visibly enough for him to notice.

“Top shelf, left side.” He crosses the kitchen and pulls it down. “They reorganized after the move.”

“I would’ve found it.” I take the box without touching his fingers, a surgical extraction I’ve been practicing in my nightmares. “Cereal is not a team sport.”

“You’ve been staring at that cabinet for three days and never asked.” He leans against the counter, arms folded, and the kitchen shrinks around us as I can’t look away from the bronze skin and the purple veins. “You know, you live here now. You’re allowed to open things, touch things, exist in rooms.”

“I exist in rooms. I’m in a room right now.” I pour with extremely focused hands. “I’m a prolific room-exister.”

“You’re avoiding me.” He says it simply, no accusation, and his eyes stay on me with that slow focus from the ceremony that makes the air thicken. “You eat when I leave, use the common room when I train. Last night you turned around in the hallway when you heard my door.”

“I forgot something in my room.” The milk splashes harder than I intended. “People forget things.”

“What did you forget?” His mouth does something that is a smile, soft and small, but isn’t pity. Just… caution.

“That’s private.” I take my cereal and go before my face betrays what my mouth is barely keeping hidden.

That afternoon, I step into the bathroom without checking the connecting door because in three days it has never once been open. The water is hot and the steam builds fast.

For ninety seconds I am a girl in a shower who isn’t performing, calculating, or rationing herself into the smallest version of a human being. Ninety seconds. That’s what I get.

Then the door opens. Not my door—the other one, the one I should have locked because I am apparently determined to construct my own destruction with loving attention to detail.

Max walks in mid-motion, toothbrush in hand, wearing shorts and nothing else. He registers me behind the glass partition at the same moment I register him, and the world stops.

“Oh.” He freezes, eyes flicking to the glass—fogged enough to blur, clear enough to leave very little to imagination—and deliberately to the ceiling. “Didn’t know you were in here.”

My spine connects with the tile so fast the impact jolts through my teeth. Arms crossed, mouth open, nothing coming out.

“Meeting with my dad in twelve minutes and I need to brush my teeth.” He turns his back, faces the mirror, puts the toothbrush in his mouth like this is a minor scheduling conflict. “Not looking. Two minutes.”

“You could wait two minutes in the hallway like a person with boundaries.” My voice comes out strangled, pressed thin between steam and the wreckage of every operating system in my body.

“Last time I was late he made me reorganize training logs for the entire fiscal year. I’m choosing efficiency.” He runs the faucet, starts brushing with unhurried calm. “You’ll survive.”

“Your efficiency is costing me years off my life.” I press harder against the tile and the cold bites through the heat across my back.

“Dramatic.” He doesn’t even look up from the sink. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re dramatic?”

“Has anyone ever told you that walking in on someone in a shower is a fireable offense in most professional contexts?” My voice is doing a passable impression of someone not falling apart.

“Good thing this isn’t a professional context.” He switches to mouthwash, and even the sound of him gargling invades my personal space. “This is a house where we both live. As established.”

I can see him in the mirror. His back is turned but the angle gives me his reflection—jaw working, shoulders carrying tension from training, a bead of sweat tracing down between his shoulder blades.

“You’re very quiet back there.” He glances at the mirror and then deliberately away. “Should I be concerned?”

“I’m composing a formal complaint to building management about the lock situation.” My eyes are committing crimes against my own self-interest, and my stomach drops so hard I nearly lose my footing.

“You know,” he says around the toothbrush, conversational, like we’re discussing weather, “most people lock both doors. It’s basically standard practice for shared bathrooms.”

“Most people knock before walking into an occupied room.” I cling to the steadiness in my voice the way you’d grip a ledge over a long drop. “Radical concept, I know.”

“I did knock. You didn’t hear because of whatever you’re doing in there that requires a Category Five water pressure setting.” He spits, rinses, and the quiet huff of a laugh that follows does something to the space behind my ribs that I have no language for.

“I was relaxing. A concept you’ve currently put into critical condition.” My hands are shaking against my own arms and my pulse is hammering everywhere—wrists, throat, the backs of my knees.

“Relaxing.” He reaches for the towel and dries his hands, and the movement shifts his shoulders in a way that makes my mouth go dry despite the water running directly over my face. “You seemed real relaxed this morning too, bolting out of the kitchen like the building was on fire.”

“I didn’t bolt, I had somewhere to be.” The heat crawling across my skin has nothing to do with the water temperature. “I’m a very busy person.”

“Busy avoiding me.” He folds the towel with maddening precision. “We’ve established the pattern. I’m just wondering when you plan to get tired of it.”

“I’m not tired. I have excellent stamina for avoidance.” My voice nearly cracks under the weight of maintaining this bit while naked and shaking and three feet from him. “It’s basically my cardio. Not that I avoid anything.”

“A schedule specifically designed around not being in the same room as me.” Something dry and warm moves through his voice. “I’m starting to think it’s personal, Donovan.”

“Don’t call me Donovan while I’m in a shower.” It comes out sharp. “It sounds like a gym teacher doing roll call.”

He laughs—not the huff, an actual laugh, brief and startled and real—and the sound travels through the steam and lands behind my ribs and stays. “Fair enough. Lock the door next time, Kylie.”

My name in his mouth while I’m pressed against a wet wall with nothing between us but fogged glass and the absolute wreckage of my composure. Then the door clicks shut and I am alone with the steam and the ringing in my ears.

My forehead drops against the tile and I count my heartbeats because they’re too fast, drumming against my throat in a rhythm that spells out his name, which is traitorous at best and catastrophic at worst.

I turn the water to cold and stand under it until my teeth chatter and my fingers prune. None of it helps. The warmth sits low in my chest, patient, merciless, fed by the memory of him three feet away, laughing at something I said, choosing not to leave.

He is twelve feet of drywall away right now, and my body already knows the exact direction—and I don’t think cold water is ever going to be enough.