The silence stretches. I look at him because I can't help looking at him, and I notice things I don't want to notice. His chest, bare, and across his shoulders and down his arms there are red lines where my nails raked his skin. I did that. During the second wave, when he was inside me and I was holding on so tight I drew blood. There's a bruised mark on his neck too, reddish-purple, right over his scent gland. I don't remember putting it there. My body remembers. My body remembers a lot of things my brain is still catching up to.
He looks tired. Not performatively wrecked, not sad-eyed and apologetic. Just tired, the way someone looks when they've been awake all night holding someone else's weight. His hands are resting on his knees and they're the hands that cleaned me up, that wiped the slick off my thighs with a warm cloth, that pressed a water bottle to my lips while I drank without opening my eyes. I trusted those hands an hour ago. I trusted them completely. And they were Sully's hands the entire time.
"Why?" The question comes out before I can stop it. I don't want to ask him why. I don't want to hear the answer. "Why didn't you leave? When you recognized me, why didn't you just walk away?"
He's quiet for a long time. Then he says, "I couldn't," and the way he says it is so simple and so honest that I want to hit him becauseI couldn'tisn't an answer. It's an excuse. Except I can hear in his voice that it isn't an excuse. It's the truth, and the truth is that he wanted me more than he wanted to do the right thing, and I don't know what to do with that either.
"You could have," I say. "You just didn't."
"Yeah." He looks at the floor. "That's more accurate."
The room is quiet. I can hear the faint thud of bass through the walls, the club still going somewhere beyond this room, other people's heat nights still happening while mine collapses into rubble.
The worst part is that I still want him. Even now. Even knowing. The scent-bond is pulling at my chest every time I breathe in, and his scent in this room is making my skin prickle. There's a low warm tug between my legs that has nothing to do with heat and everything to do with the specific memory of his hands on me. My body doesn't care about the betrayal. My body remembers being held and cleaned and praised and it wants more and I could kill it for that.
And underneath the wanting there's something worse. The quiet understanding that I can't go back. Before tonight I had a system. It was a bad system, it was lonely and painful and I woke up every time with bite marks on my own arm from clenching my jaw so hard, but it was mine. I managed. I got through it alone and I told myself that was enough because it had to be.
Sully took that from me too. He showed me what it feels like to have someone's hands on me during my heat, to be held through the worst of it instead of gripping a pillow, to hear someone sayyou're doing so wellinstead of biting down on silence. He showed me what I was missing and now I know. I know what I'm supposed to have and I know what it feels like when I get it. The next heat is going to come in three months and I'm going to be alone in my bed remembering this and it's going to be so much worse than before. Before, I didn't know what I was missing. Now I do. He gave me that and took it away in the same night.
"I need you to leave," I say.
"Wren." He catches himself. "Sorry. Can we just—"
"No. I can't think with you in here. I can't think with your scent—" I gesture at the air between us. "I need you to go."
He stands. He looks at me and there's something in his expression that I refuse to acknowledge, refuse to examine, because if I look too closely at what's on his face right now I might find something that makes this harder and it's already the hardest thing I've ever done. Harder than walking onto that floor. Harder than begging for his knot. This, right here, telling him to leave while every cell in my body is screaming at me to pull him closer.
"I'm sorry," he says. He says it simply. No performance, no drama. Like a fact. And I believe him and it doesn't help.
"Go."
He goes. The door closes behind him and I'm alone in a small dim room that smells like him and me and sex and I pull my knees up to my chest and press my forehead against them and breathe through my mouth so I don't have to smell him and my hands are shaking and I am not going to cry again.
I'm not.
My phone is on the side table. He must have put it there. I pick it up and there are three texts from Tate.
hope ur feeling better
lmk if u need anything tomorrow
love u bro
I put the phone face down and press my palms against my eyes. Sit in the quiet and try to figure out how to be a person who knows what I now know about myself and about Sully. About the sounds I made while his best friend's little brother begged for his knot.
The scent-bond tugs at my chest. Steady. Relentless. Like a hand pulling me toward a door I just closed.
Wren
Four days later I'm sitting in my organic chemistry review session and I smell him.
He's not there. I know he's not there. It's a phantom, a ghost scent, my brain misfiring because the scent-bond is fading and something in me is panicking about it. It's been happening since I got home from the club. I'll be brushing my teeth or heating up leftovers or staring at a textbook and suddenly the cedar-and-storm smell will roll through me like a wave and I'll light up and reach for something that isn't there.
I washed my sheets twice. I can still smell him on the pillow. I can't tell if that's real or if my brain is manufacturing it because it wants him there. Both options are terrible.
Tuesday night Tate came over to drop off soup because he still thinks I had a stomach thing. He sat on my couch and talked about work and I sat next to him and nodded and said the right things. The entire time I was thinking about how his best friend's scent was probably still on my skin, soaked in deeper than soap could reach. I wanted to ask Tate if he could smell it. I wanted to ask Tate a lot of things. Like whether Sully had seemed differentthis week. Like whether Sully had said anything. I bit down on every question and ate the soup and Tate left. Then I stood in the shower for thirty minutes and pressed my forehead against the tile and breathed through my mouth.
The nights are the worst. The scent-bond aches like a pulled muscle, constant and low, and it gets louder when I'm lying still with nothing to distract from it. I caught myself reaching for my phone at two in the morning. I don't even have his number. I was reaching anyway, my hand moving toward the nightstand like sheer need could bridge the gap. I pulled my hand back and rolled over and stared at the wall and told myself this was just chemistry. Just hormones and pair-bonding and the predictable aftermath of being knotted by an alpha with high scent compatibility. The clinical explanation sat there in my head, perfectly accurate, perfectly useless.