I Lay Completely Naked On The Sofa
Riley's POV
I have no memory of how the night ended.
The last thing I could recall was the heat consuming my body, a feverish restlessness that seemed to swallow time itself — and the blurred, half-formed sense that someone had been with me. But when I opened my eyes, I was staring up at the drop ceiling of the bar's private room, lying on a soft sofa with a blanket draped over me. The strange, clawing agitation that had overtaken my body was gone, replaced by a deep, unfamiliar looseness in my limbs — and something stranger still: a faint but unmistakable sense that my physical abilities had sharpened, as though something in me had quietly shifted overnight.
That rare comfort lasted only a few seconds before the soreness hit — a wave of aching, bone-deep tenderness that swept through me all at once.
Unease coiled in my chest. I reached down and slowly lifted the edge of the blanket.
My pupils contracted. My breath stopped. The blood in my veins seemed to freeze solid.
My clothes were gone. I was lying completely naked on the sofa.
What sent real panic through me was the state of my skin. Bite marks and bruises covered nearly every inch of me — deep ones, shallow ones, mottled clusters of purple and red pressed into my neck, my collarbone, my shoulders, my lower back, my stomach, and all the way down to the inner surface of my thighs. Every mark was unmistakably intimate, unmistakably deliberate.
And then I registered where it hurt most. My cock was swollen and tender, and the small entrance between my cheeks ached with a dull, throbbing soreness. I reached down carefully and confirmed what I already feared — both were badly swollen, the soft flesh around my hole still turned outward, too puffy and used to draw back into place. There were even tooth marks pressed into the skin of my inner thighs. Someone had bitten me there. Bitten me.
My vision swam. My thoughts scattered into pure, wordless panic.
What happened last night? Had those four men seen me like that — completely out of control, utterly exposed in the most humiliating way imaginable? The thought alone made me want to disappear from the face of the earth.
"Sir, we'll be closing shortly. We ask that you please gather your belongings and make your way out."
A staff member's polite voice came from beyond the door and yanked me back to reality. I looked up at the wall clock. The hour hand pointed to four in the morning.
I had been unconscious for the entire night.
I didn't let myself think. I shoved the shame down, scrambled off the sofa on unsteady limbs, and gathered my clothes from the floor piece by piece, pulling each one on as fast as I could to cover the marks covering my body. Then I walked out of the bar with my head down and didn't slow until the cool pre-dawn air hit me outside — a faint, damp chill that made me shiver from my scalp to my heels. I just wanted to get home.
It had been two years. Two full years since I had walked through the door of this house — the house that held every quiet, hopeless feeling I had never spoken aloud.
I pushed the door open and found Theo and Isolde on the sofa together, sitting in the warm glow of the living room light. Isolde was talking, animated and bright-eyed, and Theo was listening to her with a softness in his expression that he gave to no one else — a gentleness I had never once seen him turn toward me.
The sight of them hit me like a fist to the sternum. My eyes burned before I could stop them.
My heartbeat stumbled. A thick, suffocating bitterness flooded through me — resentment and shame and something rawer underneath, all of it pressing against the inside of my ribs until I could barely breathe.
Theo noticed me in the doorway and looked up.
"Riley," he said, his voice easy and unhurried. "Are you feeling any better?"
The question landed somewhere soft and unguarded inside me. And with it came the memory I had been too disoriented to reach — that Theo had been at the bar last night. He had been right there, right in front of me, when I lost control.
The humiliation was immediate and total.
I stood frozen in the doorway, unable to meet his eyes, my gaze dropping to the floor. "I'm fine," I said. My voice came out hoarse and thin.
I hesitated, then forced myself to ask the question I needed answered more than anything else: "Theo — where did you go after? Last night, I mean."
I needed to know. I needed to know whether he had seen the worst of it.
"You looked completely out of it," Theo said, "so I got you settled in one of the private rooms and headed home. Didn't want to hover."
Something inside me unclenched. A long, slow breath moved through my chest, releasing tension I hadn't realized I'd been holding since I woke up.
He hadn't seen it. He hadn't seen me grinding against someone, begging to be fucked, completely shameless and gone. If Theo had witnessed that — if he had seen me reduced to that — I didn't think I could have stood to exist in the same world as him.
"I'm going upstairs," I said quietly, and didn't wait for a response.
My old room was immaculate. Two years of absence, and it looked as though someone had tended to it every single week — the bedding crisp and smooth, the desk clear of dust, the plant by the window green and well-watered. Someone had kept this room alive for me while I was gone.
I closed the door behind me and let everything drop.
I peeled off my wrinkled clothes and stood naked in front of the full-length mirror. The reflection looking back at me had shed whatever was left of adolescence — silver hair cut close and clean, eyes a pale gray-violet, features sharp enough to turn heads, a lean and well-proportioned frame carrying the compact, unhurried readiness of a trained hunter. Objectively, not bad. Objectively, nothing to be ashamed of.
But this was a Beta body. A human Beta body, ordinary in all the ways that mattered — and no amount of good looks would ever change the distance between someone like me and an Alpha who had never once had to reach for anything.
And right now, this ordinary body was covered in marks left by someone I couldn't even name. Purple and red, overlapping, careless — evidence of everything I had lost control of last night.
I raised my hands and pressed them over my face. My fingertips brushed the corners of my eyes. The wall I'd been holding up finally gave way, and hot tears slipped through the gaps between my fingers and ran down my palms.
If Theo ever saw me looking like this, would he be disgusted by me?
I cried until my eyes were swollen and my throat ached, and then I made myself stop, turned away from the mirror, and walked into the bathroom.
I stood under the shower with the water as hot as I could stand it, and I scrubbed. I scrubbed every mark, every bruise, every place that had been touched — dragging the bath sponge across my skin again and again with enough force that I could feel the friction burning, as though I could scour the night off my body entirely, as though pressure and heat could undo what had already been done. I didn't stop until my skin was flushed and stinging.
Two years of living alone had made certain habits automatic. I stepped out of the bathroom without thinking, still bare, still toweling my hair — and then the door handle turned.
