Episode 5 — Drunk, Shirtless, and Absolutely Nobody's Fault But The Open Bar

The dance floor was still full and the music was still going and nobody had stopped watching them.

Caelum could feel it. The eyes. The whispers moving through the room like a current under still water, passing from one cluster of students to the next, and he didn't need to hear the words to know the shape of them.

"When did those two get close?"

"Aren't they rivals?"

"Why is he dancing with that nerd?"

He caught a look from across the room. A group of boys near the far wall, broad shouldered and lounging with the particular ease of people who were used to taking up space. Caelum Voss's people. His so called gang, the ones who had attached themselves to the villain's reputation and called it friendship. One of them leaned toward another and said something with a smirk and the other one laughed.

(He must have a plan. That's why he's being nice to the beta. Some scheme. Classic Cal.)

Caelum could practically hear it.

The song ended.

He stepped back from Sylvian's hold before the next one could begin and said, flatly and clearly, "Don't follow me. Go dance with someone else."

Sylvian looked at him with those calm eyes and said nothing. Which was somehow worse than if he had argued.

Caelum turned and walked to the nearest table and picked up whatever was in the closest glass and drank it.

It was not water.

He knew immediately. The burn of it, low and certain, settling into his chest like something that had been waiting there. He set the glass down and looked at it and picked it up again anyway because Caelum Voss's body had apparently made a decision and his brain was three steps behind it.

"Why are you drinking."

Wren appeared at his elbow, materialising the way she always did, like she had a radar for the exact moment he was about to do something questionable.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "This body clearly has a history with it. My hands just did it."

She looked at the glass. Then at him. "You hate drinking."

"I know."

"In real life you have had exactly four drinks in the entire time I've known you and three of them were at my cousin's wedding under duress."

"I know, Wren."

She put her hand on his shoulder, light and careful. "Are you going to be okay if I leave you for a bit? There are some people I should talk to." She paused and something flickered across her face, half embarrassed and half delighted in a way she was clearly trying to suppress. "I've been here three months. I may have made some friends. The alphas keep asking me to dance and it's honestly a little bit."

"Are you telling me you have a boyfriend."

"I'm telling you I have options," she said with great dignity. "Which is new for me and I'm processing it."

He almost smiled. "Go. But first." He turned to look at her properly. "You said you got here three months ago. We talked on the phone a few days ago. How does that work."

She blinked. Then she tilted her head and thought about it with the expression of someone doing timezone math in four dimensions. "Time probably doesn't move the same way between worlds. Three months here might have been a few days there. Or maybe I arrived here on a different thread entirely." A pause. "Honestly I try not to think about it too hard or I get a headache."

"That's not a satisfying answer."

"No," she agreed. "But it's the one I have." She squeezed his shoulder once. "I'll find a way out. For both of us. Okay? I've been looking since I got here. We'll figure it out together." She stepped back, already glancing toward the other side of the room where someone had apparently noticed her leaving and looked mildly stricken about it. "Be safe tonight. You don't know this world well enough to be alone in it."

"I'll be fine."

She gave him the look. The one that said she knew exactly how fine he was going to be and had already prepared to be proven right. Then she was gone, swept back into the warm noise of the party, and Caelum was alone with his drink and the music and the low hum of a room full of people having a better time than he was.

He had another glass.

Then another.

The room got softer around the edges sometime after midnight.

Not unpleasant. Just softer. The music seemed to come from further away, the lights warmer, the noise of the party wrapping around him like something almost comfortable. Caelum was sitting in a chair near the wall with his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand and he was aware, in a distant and academic way, that he was drunk.

Caelum Voss, it turned out, could not hold his liquor.

He, personally, could hold it fine. But the body he was in had apparently made different lifestyle choices.

Someone sat down beside him. Close. Too close, the particular closeness of someone who had been watching for an opening.

"You're alone." The voice was bright and a little too warm. An omega boy, pretty faced, leaning in with a smile that had been practiced. "Do you want some company?"

A hand landed on his shoulder.

Then on his arm.

Then sliding, slow and testing, like someone checking where the boundaries were.

Caelum opened his mouth.

"I have some business with him."

The voice came from behind them, quiet and even, and the omega boy looked up and went still in the way that people went still around Sylvian when they finally clocked that the gentle expression and the terrifying composure were the same thing wearing different clothes.

"You two are rivals," the omega said, recovering slightly. "Why do you care."

Sylvian smiled. It was a very pleasant smile. "We are," he agreed. "But tonight he's my partner. So I can't exactly leave him alone. You understand."

A beat. The omega looked between them. Then he stood, straightening his jacket with a small sound that wasn't quite a scoff, and walked away.

Sylvian sat down in the vacated chair and looked at Caelum with an expression that gave nothing away.

(Cheap omegas,) something in Caelum's brain muttered, fuzzy and indignant. (Using a party as an excuse to touch someone who can't push back properly. Cheap.)

"You didn't have to do that," Caelum said. His voice came out slightly slower than usual.

"You looked uncomfortable."

"I was handling it."

"You were staring at the table."

Caelum considered this. "I was handling it internally."

Sylvian looked at him for a long moment. Then he stood and said, simply, "Come on."

"Where."

"Not here. The room is too loud and you're in no state to stay in it."

Caelum wanted to argue. He had a whole argument prepared, something about autonomy and not needing to be managed, but Sylvian had already picked up his jacket from the back of the chair and the room chose that moment to tilt approximately two degrees and Caelum decided that standing up was probably a higher priority than the argument.

He stood. Sylvian steadied him without making a production of it, one hand at his back, and steered him toward the door.

The hotel was quiet.

Not the dormitory. Somewhere else, somewhere with actual walls between it and the noise of the party, and Caelum was aware enough to notice the difference without being aware enough to fully question how they had gotten there. A room. Clean and simply furnished, the window showing a slice of dark campus sky.

He was warm.

That was the main thing. The alcohol sitting in him like an ember, making the air feel close and the room feel smaller than it was. He pulled at his shirt collar. Then at the buttons. Then he shrugged the shirt off entirely because the warmth had made a decision and he had run out of reasons to argue with it and honestly the shirt had been the problem all along.

He sat on the edge of the bed and breathed and felt marginally better.

From the bathroom came the sound of running water.

He had forgotten Sylvian was there. Or he had not forgotten exactly, more that the information had drifted to the back of his head where it sat warmly alongside everything else.

The water stopped. The bathroom door opened. Sylvian stepped out with his jacket gone and his sleeves pushed up and his golden hair slightly damp at the edges, and he stopped when he saw Caelum.

His eyes moved once. A single sweep, quiet and controlled, from Caelum's face down and back up again. Then he picked up the blanket from the foot of the bed and sat down on the sofa across the room and said nothing for a moment.

Then, in a voice that was doing an admirable job of staying level, "You're going to catch cold."

"I'm warm," Caelum said.

"I know." A pause. "You're still going to catch cold."

Caelum looked at him. Sylvian was looking somewhere slightly to the left of him with the careful attention of someone choosing very deliberately where to rest their eyes. In the low lamp light of the room his face was all soft angles, the gold of his hair darker, and there was something about him without the jacket and the public composure that was different. Less performance. More person.

(He's pretty,) something in the back of Caelum's head said, very quietly, like a thought that had been waiting for the right level of intoxication to make its appearance.

"Water," Caelum said. "Can I have water. I feel dizzy."

Sylvian stood immediately. Poured a glass from the pitcher on the side table and crossed the room and held it out.

Caelum reached for it. His hand was not entirely cooperative. The glass tilted.

Sylvian caught it. And then, rather than simply handing it over again, he sat beside him on the edge of the bed and said, "Here."

Caelum looked at the glass. Then at Sylvian. "Just give it to me."

"You'll spill it."

"I won't."

"You almost just did."

"That was..." he started, and Sylvian, in a move that Caelum's brain processed approximately three seconds after it happened, simply tipped a small amount of water from the glass to his own lips and then leaned in and pressed his mouth to Caelum's and the water passed between them warm and clean and Caelum sat very still with his eyes wide open and his heart doing something completely unauthorized in his chest.

Sylvian pulled back. Set the glass on the nightstand. Looked at him with an expression that was entirely too composed for what had just happened.

"What," Caelum said. The word came out very small.

"You asked for water," Sylvian said. "You got water."

Caelum stared at him.

The lamplight was warm. Sylvian's eyes were warmer. And the alcohol in Caelum's blood was doing something terrible to his ability to remember all the very good reasons he had constructed throughout the day for why this person was not his problem and not his business and absolutely not someone he should be looking at the way he was currently looking at him.

"You," Caelum said carefully, "are a beta."

"Am I," Sylvian said.

"Everyone says so."

"Everyone says a lot of things."

Something shifted in the air between them. Caelum's eyes were doing that thing where they stopped cooperating with his better judgment, drifting to Sylvian's mouth and back up, and Sylvian was very close and very still in the way that he was always still, like something that knew exactly how much force it contained and had chosen not to use it yet.

"You," Caelum started, and his voice had gone lower without his permission, "are really."

He stopped.

Sylvian waited.

"Pretty," Caelum finished, in a tone that suggested he was as surprised by the word as anyone.

Something moved across Sylvian's face. Quick and unguarded, the first truly unguarded thing Caelum had seen from him all day. Not the practiced warmth or the careful smiles. Something real and slightly undone.

"That," Sylvian said softly, "is the first time you've ever said that."

"I'm drunk," Caelum said immediately.

"I know."

"It doesn't count."

"Hm." Sylvian reached up and tucked a loose strand of hair back from Caelum's face, slow and deliberate, fingertips barely grazing his temple. "You called me an omega."

"You looked like one."

"Did I." He tilted his head. His voice had dropped to the register it used when he was saying things that sounded light but landed heavy. "And if I were an omega. What then."

Caelum looked at him with eyes that were half lidded and a chest that had completely stopped following instructions. "Then I would."

He didn't finish the sentence.

Sylvian smiled. Slow and private, the smile of someone holding a secret they had no intention of sharing yet. He leaned in until his forehead was almost resting against Caelum's and said, very quietly, close enough that Caelum could feel the warmth of each word, "You forgot about that night, didn't you."

Caelum said nothing. Because he had. Because he didn't know what night. Because he had arrived in this body this morning with no memory of whatever had happened before him.

Sylvian's hands found his, both of them, pressing them gently back against the bed on either side of him, and his voice when he spoke next was soft as a promise and twice as dangerous.

"Then I suppose," he said, "I'll have to remind you."

The lamp burned low. Outside the window the campus had gone quiet. And somewhere in the distance the last song of the Valentine's Day party played itself out to an empty floor.

.

.

End of Episode 5

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***