The Bully Alpha's Fake Alpha Mate (BL)-Chapter 83: The Apology

ASHER

"Asher." Julian’s voice was quiet but it snapped me out of thoughts.

"Come on, Scott," Julian said, signalling for Scott to come closer.

A pause, footsteps drawing closer and I kept my eyes on the floor.

"I’m sorry," Scott and I said at the exact same moment. I looked up and he looked at me. A beat of pure silence.

"You go first," I said.

"No, you—"

"Scott." Julian’s voice carried the particular exhausted patience of someone who had been managing both of us for longer than today.

Scott exhaled and he uncrossed his arms and dropped them to his sides and looked at me with the expression of someone who had been rehearsing something and was now discovering that rehearsed things never come out the way you planned them.

"I’m an idiot," he said.

I waited.

"I should have — when it happened, in the hallway, I should have been the one pushing through that crowd. Not standing against the wall like—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "Julian told me why you did it. Why you enrolled. What it costs you to keep it going for a year plus." He looked somewhere past my shoulder briefly. "And instead of coming to find you I spent three days sitting with the fact that you — that an Omega—"

He stopped again.

I watched his face and I understood exactly what he wasn’t finishing. That an Omega had more courage than I did.

He didn’t say it but it was there in the set of his jaw and the slight tension around his eyes and the way he was looking at me like I was something he was still figuring out how to recalibrate.

My chest did something complicated because I knew what it meant for him to stand here and say this. Scott’s pride was not a small or simple thing. It was the architecture of everything he’d been built to be. And he was standing in a corridor at seven in the morning next to a mop bucket telling me he’d been wrong, and I could see in his face exactly how much it was costing him. He thinks I’m braver than him, I thought.

He had no idea that I was terrified every single day. That there was nothing brave about it. That I did what I did because the alternative was disappearing completely and I wasn’t ready to disappear.

He thinks I stood up for Reed because I was brave and I wanted to be a hero.

Because the version of events that had Scott looking at me with something close to reluctant respect was doing more good than the truth would right now.

"I also—" Scott paused. "I didn’t stand up tall when Rred—" He stopped. Looked at the floor. "You stood up for me when I didn’t have the courage. And that’s—" His jaw tightened. "I didn’t know how to sit with that."

That I hadn’t expected. I looked at him and felt something in my chest loosen that I hadn’t known was tight.

That’s what the distance was, I thought. Not just the Omega thing. Not just the pride. He was ashamed. He was sitting with his own failure and looking at me and seeing the shape of it reflected back.

"I understood why you kept your distance," I said finally and Scott looked up.

"If someone had been deceiving me for years," I said carefully, "I wouldn’t have known how to process it either. I would have needed time." I paused. "And I’m sorry. For the deception. For all of it. You deserved better than that."

Something shifted in Scott’s expression.

The complicated tension in his jaw loosened slightly.

"I’m sorry," I said again. "Both things can be true."

Scott looked at me for a long moment.

Then he nodded. Once. The particular nod of someone who has decided to put something down and move forward.

Julian looked between us with the expression of someone who had been waiting for this specific moment and was deeply relieved it had finally arrived. Then he stepped forward and pulled us both into a hug.

Not a brief one. A real one. His arms went around both of us and he held on for a second too long to be casual and I felt Scott tense for a moment before something in him gave and he let it happen.

When Julian released us Scott was looking somewhere else and clearing his throat.

I almost smiled.

The three of us stood there in the corridor with the mop and the bucket and the morning light coming in through the windows and something between us that felt, tentatively, like it might become normal again.

Julian looked at me.

"Better," he said simply.

I nodded and it was.

In that moment, in that corridor, with Julian’s arm briefly still around my shoulder and Scott examining something on the wall with exaggerated interest, it genuinely was.

But underneath it, quiet and certain as a current beneath still water, the other thing sat.

The thing I hadn’t said out loud to either of them. The thing I’d been carrying since I walked out of Voss’s office with Reed’s forehead pressed against mine in the empty corridor.

The semester was moving not quickly but it was moving and at the end of it Reed would have to go home. He would have to face his father and the pack and the ultimatum that had been waiting since before any of this happened. Would have to stand in front of the man who had spent years building a future for him and explain what he’d chosen and why.

Because the bond was real and the mate mark was real and what had happened between us in every dark and quiet hour was real, but none of that changed the structure of the world Reed lived in. None of it changed his father. None of it changed what losing the pack would cost him.

And Reed had hesitated once already.

I had seen it on his face. I had watched him weigh it, had watched the calculation move behind his eyes even while he was looking at me.

He had hesitated and I had forgiven him for it in the same breath that I understood it, because I knew what was being weighed and I knew what I was worth in that equation and I had made my peace with the answer.

The problem was that Reed hadn’t and until he did, every moment of warmth and proximity and I won’t let you leave existed inside a countdown I could feel ticking even when everything on the surface looked fine.