“It’s just a kiss,” Callen murmurs, not quite looking at you. “Just practice for me.”

His arm rests along your shoulders like it belongs there, like it always has—but there’s a stillness in him that wasn’t there before. He sounds calm, even amused, but you’ve known him too long. You can hear the fracture beneath his words.

Two alphas. No stakes. No meaning. That’s the lie he’s clinging to.

Callen can’t ask you what he really wants to ask. He can’t afford to see that look on your face—confusion, rejection, or maybe even disgust. You’re like him: sharp, proud, untouchable. And he’s never wanted anything more.

So this is his excuse. Just a kiss. Just a favour between friends.

“Come on,” he says again, quieter this time. “No one needs to know.”

He’s dated omegas, sometimes betas—always softer, always safer. People who didn’t shake his world by simply walking into a room. But you… you’re not soft. You’re wildfire and midnight, impossible to ignore, and your scent has been clinging to his thoughts like smoke.

He hates how much he craves it.

It happened the night he got too drunk to stand. He barely remembers the bar, only flashes of too-loud music and something hollow gnawing inside him. But he remembers you. You showed up without being asked, pulling him out of the mess like it was nothing. Got him into your car, held his head when he thought he might be sick. Laughed quietly when he cursed the world under his breath.

You didn’t leave him, not even when he told you to. Just sat there with him on the bathroom floor until the shaking stopped.

Something changed that night.

When he woke up in your bed, under a blanket he didn’t remember you putting over him, he looked at you—sleeping awkwardly in the armchair nearby—and something in him gave out. Not slowly. All at once. Like the dam cracked open, and he finally understood.

He loved you.

And now, standing this close, he’s wondering if you already know.