I want him. Not a version of him that works differently. Not a hypothetical omega who can give me biological children. Him.The man who drinks cold coffee and keeps his pens aligned and said the word love like it was being ripped out of him.
I want him and the barrenness doesn't change that. I've thought about it. I'm sitting here in the dark at two in the morning with a baby on my chest and I've thought about it honestly and the answer is the same: I want Miles.
But Devon is right too.
What does Ray Garcia's life look like?
I think about the case. The Whitfield-Crane deal — the phased diligence, the Shaw firm meetings, the way I read Whitaker's resistance and found a solution. I was good at that. Not because Miles needed me to be. Because I WAS. I read rooms. I find the human problem underneath the legal one. I build bridges between people who can't hear each other.
The firm has a paralegal certification program. I've seen the flyers in the break room. Twelve months, sponsored by McKenzie & Randall, leads to a real credential. I walked past those flyers for months without thinking about them because I wasn't a career guy, I was just Ray, the fun one, the assistant, the fuckboy who fell into a real job by accident.
I'm not that anymore. I can't pinpoint when I stopped being that — maybe at the Shaw firm when I smoothed the Whitaker situation, maybe in the car when Miles said "you did good work" and meant it, maybe right now on this couch in the dark — but I'm not the guy who coasts anymore. I want to build something. Something of my own, that I chose, that I'm good at because I worked for it, not because someone else needed me to be.
I want the paralegal program. I want the credential. I want to walk into a room and know I earned my seat instead of charmed my way into it.
And I want Miles.
Both. Not one for the other. Both.
Gabriel sighs in his sleep and nestles closer and I hold him and I look at the ceiling and the pre-bond aches and I let it. It hurts because it's real. It hurts because I chose someone and that someone pushed me away and the distance is a wound that won't close until I close it.
He said this isn't over and he told me to leave in the same conversation. I said this isn't over and he believed the second thing and not the first.
I'm going to show him he was wrong about that. Not by showing up at his door with a speech. By becoming someone worth choosing. By building my own ground. Then by standing on it and saying: I know. I know about the barrenness and the surgery and the wall you've been hiding behind, and I thought about it, and I'm here.
Not I don't care. Not it doesn't matter.
I know. And I'm still here.
I close my eyes. Gabriel breathes against my chest. The pre-bond hurts. Devon's question echoes. The paralegal flyer flashes behind my eyes.
Tomorrow I'll start. Tonight I hold the baby and I let the hurt be what it is and I wait for morning.
Miles
My name is on the door.
MILES COVINGTON, PARTNER. The letters are brass. Someone — Richard's assistant, probably — had them made this week, and now they're screwed into the oak door of my new corner office on the thirty-second floor. The office has a view of the city. It has built-in bookshelves and a mahogany desk and a leather chair that costs more than most people's rent.
I stand in the doorway and look at it and feel absolutely nothing.
Richard shakes my hand in the hallway. "You've earned this, Miles." Marcus Thorne claps me on the shoulder. Lauren Chen sends a firm-wide email. People I've worked with for years stop by to congratulate me, and I smile and say thank you and it's like watching someone else do it from very far away. The motions are correct. The words are right. There's nothing behind any of them.
At my new desk, I open the partnership agreement. Fifty-three pages. Compensation structure, equity stake, voting rights, governance responsibilities. The culmination of everything I've worked for since I was sixteen years old, lying in a hospital bed, deciding that if what the surgery took couldn't make me valuable, my brain would.
I read the first page and think about Ray's basil plant. The one on the windowsill in his kitchen, the one that's somehow thriving despite the state of his apartment. I wonder if he's been watering it. I wonder if the pasta sauce he makes comes out the same without the fresh basil or if he's been using dried.
I close the agreement. I put it in my desk drawer. I turn and look out the window at the city I just conquered. The view is beautiful. I would trade every square inch of it for the smell of garlic burning in a kitchen that isn't mine.
My phone buzzes.
Mom:Congratulations sweetheart!! Dad and I are so proud of you. Dinner Sunday? Also — Dad's colleague Gerald has a son, very nice alpha, just made VP at Mercer. Should I give him your number?
I read the text and put my phone face-down on the desk. Gerald's son. A very nice alpha. Like the partnership, like the corner office, like the view — another piece of the life my parents have been assembling for me since the doctor saidbarrenand they decided the best response was to pretend it didn't change anything while quietly adjusting every expectation downward. They've never said it out loud. They don't have to. The dinners, the setup alphas, the gentle nudges toward men who are nice and stable and understanding — which means men who won't mind that I can't give them children. Men who'll settle.
I don't want a man who'll settle. I want a man who crushes tomatoes with his bare fingers and leaves his hoodie on the chairand brings me coffee from the good place without being asked. I want a man whose scent makes me stop screaming for five goddamn minutes.
I want Ray, and I can't have him, and the partnership was supposed to make that okay and it doesn't. It doesn't make anything okay. It's brass letters on an oak door and a leather chair and a view of a city I don't care about, and I am so angry I could put my fist through the window.