The Fat Human both Alphas wanted

VANESSA

The coach's whistle cut through the air, sharp enough to make me flinch even from the bleachers.

"Scrum positions!" he barked, and the team folded into a tight, grunting knot at midfield, shoulders locked, heads down, bodies straining against each other like a single animal trying to tear itself in two directions at once.

Dariel anchored the front row, and even from where I sat I could see the muscles in his back bunching with effort as the ball got fed in low and fast.

I didn't know the first thing about rugby. I'd spent the last twenty minutes piecing together rules from context, that a scrum was some kind of shoving match dressed up as strategy, that a "ruck" meant a pile of bodies fighting over the ball on the ground, that whenever someone broke free and sprinted for the try line, the whole bleacher rose to its feet screaming like the world depended on it.

Damon played fly-half, which even I could tell was a position that demanded more brains than brute strength, reading the field, calling plays, deciding in half a second whether to pass, kick, or run.

He shouldn't have been fast. Not with that limp dragging behind every stride.

But the ball found his hands again and again, and every time it did, he turned defenders inside out with a change of direction that shouldn't have been possible for someone favoring one leg the way he was.

"Carter! Again!" the coach shouted, and Damon lined up another drill, driving through two tackle bags like they weighed nothing, then breaking into a sprint that ate up the field in a handful of strides.

Beside me, Catherine had stopped clapping and started muttering instead. "He's not even supposed to be that good."

"What do you mean?"

She glanced at me like she'd forgotten I was there. "Forget it Fat-ass, wasn’t speaking to you” she said with the usual mocking tone. I looked away avoiding her face.

I didn't forget it. I watched Dariel watching his brother from across the field, jaw tight, arms crossed, something dark moving behind his eyes every time the crowd cheered for Damon instead of him.

When Damon jogged past him after a play, Dariel said something low, too quiet for the bleachers to catch, and Damon's easy grin dropped clean off his face.

Whatever passed between them wasn't brotherly. It sat between them like an old feud , the kind that never quite clears no matter how much time goes by.

I filed it away, another piece of a puzzle I didn't have the full picture of yet.

Practice broke for a water rotation, and that was when Catherine found her opening.

"Look at her, all cozy with her little notebook." She dropped onto the bleacher directly in front of me, two of her cheerleader friends flanking her, and the warmth from a second ago was gone from her face entirely, like it had never been there. "You actually think Dariel wants you sitting here."

"I was told to come," I said, closing the notebook, though I hadn't written a word in it since I sat down.

"Told." She said the word like it tasted bad. "Right. Because a thing like you needs to be told to know its place.

" Her eyes dropped to the sandwich half-unwrapped in my lap, the one I'd packed that morning with hands still shaking from the night before, her expression darkened . "Go on. Eat. It's not like you're going to stop."

I should have wrapped it back up, all the nerves in me screamed that I should, wrap it up and go right up ahead and give her a loud resounding slap across her pale face, but I didn't.

Some stubborn, stupid part of me refused to let her decide whether I got to eat lunch in peace.

"I give her three bites before it's gone," one of the friends, I later found to be Brenda said, not bothering to lower her voice.

"I heard they had to widen the doorframes in her old school," said the other, and the three of them laughed together, ugly and delighted, loud enough that a few players glanced over from the field.

"It's actually sad," Catherine said, tilting her head at me like I was something under glass.

"You think if you just sit here long enough, close enough to people like us, it'll rub off. It won't. Some things don't wash off, sweetheart. You'll always be exactly what you look like."

I took a bite just to have something to do with my hands, chewed too fast, swallowed wrong, and the whole thing lodged sideways in my throat.

I coughed, once, twice, my eyes watering, and Catherine leaned back, delighted, watching me struggle like she'd been waiting for it the entire time.

"Oh, don't die," she said, not moving an inch to help. "It'd be such a waste of a scholarship.

" Her friends howled, and I hated her in that moment more than I'd hated anyone in my life. I hated the tears stinging my eyes, and that I couldn't get a full breath. I hated that she looked genuinely, thoroughly pleased to watch me choke.

Then a shadow fell over me, and a water bottle appeared in front of my face.

"Drink," Damon said, crouching in front of me, still breathing hard from the drill, sweat darkening the collar of his jersey.

I grabbed the bottle and drank, and the food finally worked its way down, leaving my throat raw and my eyes streaming.

"You good?" he asked, and there was nothing performative about the concern in his voice, none of the careful distance Dariel kept, none of the audience-aware cruelty of the girls around us.

"I'm fine," I rasped, mortified, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand.

He didn't move away right away. Instead he leaned in slightly, the way he had in the clinic, and I watched something flicker across his face, confusion, then something sharper.

"You still don't smell like anything," he said quietly, almost to himself.

"What?"

"Nothing." He straightened fast, like he'd caught himself saying something he shouldn't have.

But his eyes stayed on me a beat too long, searching, the same way Dariel's had the night before, like I was an equation that refused to balance no matter how many times he ran the numbers.

"Carter! Water break's over!" the coach bellowed, and Damon jogged backward toward the field, still watching me, until his teammates swallowed him back into the drill.

Catherine's smile had curdled into something colder. "He's never done that before."

"Done what?"

"Wasted a second on someone like you." She stood, gathering her pom-poms, her friends rising with her like a matched set, and when she looked at me again there was nothing playful left in it at all. "Enjoy it while it lasts.

Things like you don't get kept. You get used, and then you get thrown right back where you came from." She smiled, sweet and vicious all at once. "I'll enjoy watching that part."