The Bully Alpha's Fake Alpha Mate (BL)-Chapter 75: GOODBYE

REED

"I, Asher Scott, reject you, Reed Jackson, as my mate."

The words landed in the silence like something dropped from a great height.

"And from today henceforth, nothing bonds us with each other."

I didn’t move nor could I breathe.

The lamp on my desk was still warm. Asher’s scent still lived in my sheets. The indent of his body was still pressed into the mattress beside me. Two minutes ago his hands had been in my hair and his mouth had been against my throat and I had held him like I was trying to memorize him without knowing that was exactly what I was doing.

Two minutes.

Rejection!?

The word didn’t make sense. My brain kept picking it up and turning it over and putting it back down because it had no place to go. It didn’t fit anywhere. Not in this room, not on this night and not from his mouth.

"Asher." My voice came out wrong. Scraped hollow like something had already reached inside my chest and dragged its nails down the walls. "Stop joking."

He didn’t laugh.

He was sitting at the edge of the bed with his spine perfectly straight and his hands folded in his lap and his eyes fixed on some point across the room that wasn’t me. Like a man sitting in a waiting room. Like a man who had already signed the paperwork and was just waiting to be called.

That posture, that terrible, composed, and already-decided posture. It made my stomach drop so fast I felt it in my knees. Then the bond detonated.

There was no other word for it. One moment it was warm and full and humming in my chest the way it always did after we’d been close, settled and content like something that had come home, and then it tore, a white-hot rip that started somewhere behind my breastbone and dragged outward in every direction at once, shredding through every layer of me on its way out.

My hand slammed against my chest without my permission. My wolf didn’t howl. It screamed, it hit the inside of my ribs so hard that my body folded slightly at the middle before I caught myself, before I locked my knees and forced myself upright and stood there shaking and stared at the back of Asher’s head while my entire chest cavity felt like an open wound.

"What the hell did you just say?"

He turned and looked at me and I almost wished he hadn’t. His eyes were dry, completely dry. Whatever grief had lived behind them had already been spent, long gone before tonight, long before he knocked on my door, long before he kissed me in the doorway with that desperate, and consuming hunger that I’d mistaken for want when it had been something else entirely.

Goodbye. He’d been kissing me goodbye since the moment he arrived.

He’d come here tonight already decided. He’d lay in my arms and let me hold him and looked up at me with tears on his face while I moved inside him and told him I’ve got you and all along he’d known.

He’d known he would be leaving me.

The realization didn’t hit me like a wave. It hit me like the floor dropping out. Like reaching for a wall in the dark and finding nothing.

"You heard me," he said.

"No." I answered flatly.

The word tore out of me before I’d chosen it. I was off the bed, feet on the floor, hand wrapped around his wrist, turning him toward me with a grip that was too tight and I knew it and couldn’t make myself loosen it.

"No. You don’t get to do that. Not tonight. Not after—"

My voice stopped because the end of that sentence lived in the wrinkled sheets behind us and in the sound he’d made when he came apart and in the way he’d held on tighter when I’d told him not to say goodbye.

He didn’t fight my grip and that was the worst part. He sat perfectly still and let me hold his wrist and looked at me with those quiet, settled, already-somewhere-else eyes, and I understood with nauseating clarity that he wasn’t fighting because he didn’t need to.

He’d already won. He’d already done what he came here to do. My hands on him were just something he was enduring now, the last small inconvenience before he could leave.

"I can," he said quietly. "And I just did."

Something in me that had been holding on with everything it had finally started to crack.

The sound that almost came out of my throat wasn’t human. I caught it behind my teeth and clamped my jaw shut so hard I felt the pressure in my skull.

My fingers tightened around his wrist before I forced them to loosen, forced my hand to drop, forced myself to take one step back because if I didn’t put space between us I was going to do something I couldn’t take back.

"You don’t mean that."

Asher drew his wrist back slowly and carefully. The way you close a book you’ve finished reading. The way you set something down that you’re not coming back for.

"I do."

"You’re upset." My voice had become unrecognizable, tight and unsteady. A voice with cracks running through the center of it that I was trying to speak around. "This is about my father. What he had said right? We’ll figure it out, Asher, we can—"

The breath he let out stopped me cold.

It wasn’t sharp, it wasn’t angry, it was just tired. Tired in a way that had been accumulating for a long time, and hearing it made me realize I’d been putting it there brick by brick.

Every time I hesitated, every time I’d chosen silence and every time I’d looked at him and weighed what keeping him would cost me. I heard my own words hanging in the air between us. We’ll figure it out. When had I ever said that before tonight? When had I ever once in all the months of this looked him in the eye and said we like it was real? Like it was something I believed in? Like it was something I was willing to fight for?

I hadn’t and he’d been keeping track.

"Tonight proved something to me," Asher said.

My jaw locked. "What."

He looked up.

"You deserve the life you’ve worked for."

The words hit me somewhere I hadn’t been guarding. My head pulled back slightly, an involuntary flinch, like something small and fast had come out of nowhere and caught me across the face.

"You think this is about my title—"

"Yes." His answer was not cruel, not defensive, just a simple, quiet word placed in front of me like a photograph of something I didn’t want to look at.

The room went completely still and the lamp hummed on my desk. Somewhere down the hallway a door closed. The world kept moving, small and indifferent, while something inside me began to come apart at every seam.

"You hesitated," Asher said and my stomach dropped through the floor. "When your father gave you that ultimatum." His voice was soft. It was the softness that made it merciless. "You thought about it. You sat there and you looked at me and you weighed it. You thought about what choosing me would cost you."

My mouth opened but nothing came out because my throat had sealed itself around whatever defense I was reaching for and wouldn’t release it. Because what he was describing was real. It had happened on my face and in my silence and he had been watching the whole time, had been watching and filing it away and carrying it quietly ever since, waiting for the right moment to lay it down between us where I couldn’t look away from it.

He’d come here tonight already knowing. He’d asked me to make love to him because he wanted one last night before he let go. One last time to feel what we were before he burned it down. He’d held my face in his hands and looked at me like I was something worth keeping and the whole time the goodbye had already been written.

Something cracked open behind my eyes. Hot and sudden and humiliating.

"You don’t get to decide that." My voice came out rough and uneven in a way I hated, in a way I couldn’t control. "You don’t get to sit there and make a decision that belongs to both of us like I don’t exist. Like what I want doesn’t matter."

"I already did," he said and he stood up. The simple, unhurried act of it destroyed me more than anything else had.

He rose from the edge of my bed, from the bed where an hour ago I’d held him and said I’ve got you like a promise, and he reached down and picked his shirt up off the floor and I stood there and watched him pull it over his head with steady hands and felt something close up inside my chest like a fist squeezing around whatever was left of me.

His hands didn’t shake but mine were trembling at my sides and I pressed them flat against my thighs so he wouldn’t see it.

"Asher."

He picked up his jeans.

"Asher."

He stepped into them.

"Look at me."

He did. One brief glance. A glance that carried so much deliberate, careful emptiness in it that it was somehow more devastating than hatred would have been. Hatred would have meant he still felt something. That glance meant he’d already finished feeling.

"Goodbye, Reed."

He turned towards the door. The word detonated in the center of my chest.