Above him, a bell jingles, light and pleasant as he pushes open the cafe door. It grates on his ears, piercing and shrill in a way it never sounded before.

Neil wastes no time scanning the room for his target and quickly finding him seated at a small two person table across the room. Taking a steadying breath, he makes his way over with a casualness he doesn’t feel. His stomach squirms, occupied by a million ants crawling around. Once upon a time ago, they were butterflies.

As he approaches the table he gets a better view of Kash. His back is facing Neil, distracted by something on his phone, typing and pausing in intervals. Messaging someone.

“Hey.” Neil greets, tapping his ‘boyfriend’s’ shoulder. The man in question startles, flipping his phone over and setting it on the table. Neil doesn’t fail to sneak a glance at the screen before it’s fully out of view. He catches a stream of expressive emojis and a profile picture that has quite a bit of personality applied to it.

“Hey! It’s been way too long since I’ve seen your handsome face.” Kash stands and pulls Neil into a tight hug. He never thought a hug could be so suffocating and just barely manages to hold back a full body flinch when a chaste kiss is pressed to his temple. “How’ve you been?”

“Right back at you.” Neil forces out a chuckle, pulling himself out of the embrace to take the open seat. “Things have been… fine, on my end. Studying, assignments, work, the whole shebang. You know how it is.”

“Ugh- tell me about it. That stupid research project has officially taken over my entire life. All I do these days is eat, sleep, research, and then do more research.” Kash laments with an exaggerated groan, plopping back down into his own chair, sitting in it sideways so his body faces the rest of the cafe while his head is directed at Neil.

What immediately rose to Neil's attention was the way Kash’s leg bounced. Steady and making gentle taps when his heel met the tiled floor. A tic that only shows when he's impatient or waiting for something he's particularly eager for.

Neil pulls his gaze away from the bouncing leg to meet eyes with Kash, who’s still casting glances down at his phone. When he swallows it’s dry and painful, a lump that seems to stick to the walls of his throat as it goes down.

“Speaking of which, how’s that going? There’s no way you spend every waking moment on that project. I mean, everyone’s gotta take breaks at some point.” He leans forward, placing his elbow on the table and resting his chin on his hand. He observes Kash who copies the action with a small smile adorning his face.

“Not much different from the usual, I’m afraid.” Kash sighs out. “Now that we’re getting near the deadline, my professor’s been breathing down my neck. But I guess there are times I get to catch a breather. Though I mostly spend it watching a movie at home or going for a walk to clear my head.”

“Aw, my poor baby. Sounds like it’s been tough.” Neil uses an exaggerated voice at the word ‘baby,’ unable to stop a smile from tugging at his own lips. He gets a gentle chuckle from Kash which only makes the smile widen.

“It has! I come here to see my only oasis in this desert we call college, only to be mocked. How could you?” Kash lets his head fall back, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead like a distraught Victorian woman. The action makes Neil smother a snicker into his palm and encourages a grin from Kash.

For a second, Neil pretends that everything’s normal. Like they’re on another one of their traditional coffee dates. Like the incident a few days ago was nothing more than a bad dream he’d had in a moment of weakness. And he pretends that the man sitting across from him loves him the same now as he did when they first got together.

But, Kash’s leg continues to bounce and those blue eyes keep flickering down to the phone flipped upside down on the table. Not once since he’s entered the cafe did Neil have his full attention. The smiles he got in greeting and throughout their conversation aren’t as bright as he remembers them being. They certainly aren’t as bright as the one he saw that night.

He can pretend all he wants, but he knows. Something, somewhere, has changed.

Not for the first time, Neil wonders if this was inevitable. Because he’s a beta, he can never satisfy an alpha like his… like Kash. Not in the way an omega can. Maybe Kash realized that himself and that’s why he found someone else. Would things have stayed the same if Neil was an omega too? Or was the problem deeper than that? Maybe it is just Neil. Fundamentally Neil.

His train of thought is derailed when a waitress appears beside their table with a tray in her hands. She places a drink in front of each of them before tucking the tray under her arm and looking between them with a kind customer service smile. Although Neil doesn’t notice it, stuck looking at the drink given to him. A glass of pink bubbling liquid, darker with floating chunks of fruit at the bottom, and lighter with white cream and foam at the top, garnished with a mint leaf stuck to a slice of strawberry.

“Can I get you anything else?” She asks politely. Kash smiles and waves her off.

“No, that should be it-”

“What’s this?”

Both the waitress and Kash turn to him, blinking in surprise. When Neil lifts his gaze, Kash’s posture stiffens up, tensing.

“Uh… your drink? I ordered for you since you weren’t here when she came by. I… usually do that for you, don’t I?” Kash asks, brow raised as he looks over Neil.

The ants from earlier that swarmed within his stomach disintegrate to ash, replaced by a fire that scorches his insides and sears his chest, the smoke of it choking the entirety of his heart, squeezing like it’s a stress ball. Whatever pleasant expression he had on his face before is gone now, taken over by something much more flat and empty.

“Yeah, you do. But Kash…” Neil’s eyes bore into the ones staring at him from across the table. “I’m allergic to strawberries.”

The melting ice in his glass clinks. The singular sound following that one simple statement sucks all the noise out of the room in one go. In his peripheral, he can see the waitresses glancing between them, seeming as though she’s holding her breath. Maybe she is. Despite the absolute destruction taking place internally, Neil breathes slow and steady, looking unbothered and wholly unaffected. Carefully blank.

He can’t pretend anymore.

“Oh. Oh! Oh no- yeah, I… geez I knew that! I’m so stupid, I can’t believe I- I have no idea what’s going on with me. I must be more out of it than I thought.” Kash babbles, grabbing his head and ruffling his hair as though he could shake out a good explanation.

Neil takes an imperceptibly deep breath and eases his expression into something reassuring. It makes his eye twitch and a muscle in his cheek spasm.

“It’s fine, we all make mistakes.”’ He turns to the waitress and hands her the drink, which she takes, blinking back into awareness. “I’m sorry for this.”

“Oh no, that’s completely fine! The last thing we want is a customer having an allergic reaction.” Her smile is more genuine this time. “Can I get you something else instead?”

“No, I think I'm good. Thank you.”

The waitress nods, sparing him and Kash an uneasy look before walking off. Neil watches her momentarily before turning his focus to the more pressing issue.

“I guess that project really is taking quite the toll on you, huh?” Neil comments lightly, an airy laugh accompanies it though it comes out more bitter than he intends it to.

“Neil… babe, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”

“I know.” He holds up a hand, pausing Kash mid sentence. With the waitress gone, Neil’s expression gradually falls into something significantly less pleasant. “I know. It’s fine, it was an accident. I picked up on it in time and no one got hurt.”

“But you could have! You could’ve been hurt, Neil if you hadn’t-” Kash sucks in a breath, lowering the hand tangled in his hair to rub at his face. At least now his full body was facing him, his mind nowhere else except on what just happened. When he finally raises his head, it’s to give Neil pleading eyes. “I’m so, so sorry. It won’t happen again, ever. I swear.”

“I know it won’t.” Neil replies matter of factly, nodding in agreement. A lot of things won’t be happening again.

It’s funny. Really, it is. Because despite using the excuse of exhaustion and being out of it, Kash seems to forget that Neil’s seen him at the worst of his worst. He’s seen this guy when he was so tired, he would have full blown conversations with a lamp post. Once, after a particularly harrowing all-nighter during exam week, Kash had actually been so far gone that he found a cup of mud somewhere on campus, proceeded to drink it thinking it was coffee, and continued to consume the entirety of its contents despite it being immediately obvious that he was drinking mud.

Even on those days, Neil would drag Kash to the cafe to get something actually edible in his system and help him relax. It was always the same cafe, their cafe. In the same place, their spot. And every time it was Kash who placed the order, sometimes drowsy and slurring, but it was always the same thing, recited perfectly word for word like a memorized script. Never once has Kash ever messed up their order, his order, since the first couple of weeks they first met. Not once in three years.

“Here, look-” Kash glances down at his watch and gives him a weak smile. “I’ve still got some time left, why don’t we go catch a movie or some-”

Kash’s mouth clicks shut at the sound of a dull buzz from his phone. With a haste, and clearly forced calm, he picks up the device. He holds up a finger with a ‘sorry, just a sec- let me just…’ before redirecting his full focus to whatever the notification is.

Neil takes the opportunity to quietly observe him. The change is instantaneous. While Kash reads and responds to the message he’s received, fingers flying across the screen, the corners of his lips tug up until a full grin is in place. A grin that’s the brightest it’s been since he got here. The brighter he gets, the dimmer Neil becomes.

When he finishes, he looks back up at Neil with a lesser grin. The bouncing leg that had paused during the whole strawberry drink debacle returns twofold now. The fire in Neil’s chest becomes a stabbing pain and the smoke is full on clogging his airways now. Yet he maintains the neutral expression regardless of how it makes the muscles in his face jolt and twitch.

“Hey, so…”

“You have to go.”

He revels in the way Kash cringes.

“I do… it’s, y’know, my professor and the project. I can’t really back out of this, since he’s got my final grade in his hands.” Kash shrugs like he can’t help it. Neil nods and, to Kash’s surprise, stands.

“You know, I just remembered there’s something important I have to do. Can’t believe I forgot.” He straightens out his hoodie and keeps his eyes off the ones looking at him curiously. “Perfect timing actually.”

“Neil… babe, hey. I promise I’ll make it up to you. We can meet up later next week, do something fun together.” Kash offers, slowly rising. Neil sees how the screen of Kash's phone glows and is kept facing anywhere except for Neil’s prying eyes.

“If our schedules line up. See you ‘round, ‘babe.’” With that, Neil steps past Kash, not even offering him the fleetest of waves as he makes his way across the cafe and outside. He keeps going, keeps moving despite the way his legs seem to shake beneath him.

He got what he came here for. And the conclusion he left with? Well, he certainly has another reason to hate strawberries.