A black Amex.
"Wait." I grab his arm, my eyes so wide they might actually vacate my skull. "You are actually rich."
He chuckles. The sound is soft and warm, laced with a self-consciousness that tells me he does not particularly enjoy this revelation but is not going to lie about it.
"Not rich rich," he clarifies, like that distinction means anything to someone who has been rationing ramen packets and doing mental math at grocery store checkouts for the past three years. "But well off, yes."
Not rich rich. Well off. Said the man wielding a black American Express card at a jewelry counter with the nonchalance of someone paying for a coffee. I want to argue the semantics of his financial self-assessment, but the associate is already processing the transaction and Etienne is alreadypocketing the card and reaching for my hand with a casualness that makes my brain short-circuit.
His fingers find mine. Warm. Steady. Cedar and pine wrapping around me in the close air of the boutique, mingling with the faint perfume samples on the display counter until the whole store smells like comfort and expensive things I am not accustomed to being near.
"Do you like the bracelet?" he asks as we step through the glass door and back onto the street.
The January air greets us with a bite that makes me tuck my chin into the collar of my jacket, but his hand in mine is warm enough to offset the chill. I glance down at my wrist where the pink heart charm sways with each step, the figure skates catching a sliver of lamplight.
"I love it," I say, and the sincerity in my own voice almost startles me. "It is amazing, Etienne. Truly. But..."
I hesitate.
The but hangs between us like a held breath, and I watch his expression shift from pleased to attentive, his head tilting with that patient curiosity that tells me he is already preparing to listen to whatever concern I am about to voice.
"Is it not too expensive?"
There it is. The question that has been circling the back of my skull since the associate pulled the bracelet from the velvet display and fastened it around my wrist with the delicate precision of someone handling a coronation crown. The question that reveals, in three small words, every insecurity I carry about receiving nice things. About deserving them. About the transactional nature of gifts in a world where nothing comes free and kindness always has a receipt attached.
Etienne squeezes my hand.
"A sentimental gift is not expensive," he says, his voice carrying that quiet conviction that makes you believe him evenwhen your own experience argues otherwise. "I told you. I want to prove that I intend to make this permanent. And a permanent intention deserves a permanent gesture." He glances at the bracelet on my wrist. "That is a good start."
Permanent.
The word settles into my chest with a weight that is not heavy but grounding. Like a stone placed at the center of a table to keep the cloth from blowing away in a windstorm. He said permanent. Not temporary. Not provisional. Not contingent on conditions or timelines or the five-week arrangement that has been ticking down in the back of my mind like a countdown to detonation since the day I arrived on this campus.
Permanent.
I do not know what to do with permanent. I have never been offered permanent by anyone who was not contractually obligated to provide it, and even then, the contracts expired.
We walk in comfortable silence for half a block, our footsteps falling into a synchronized rhythm on the pavement while I process the enormity of what he just said. The street is quieter on this stretch, the dinner rush funneling people toward restaurants on the main strip, leaving the side roads to us and the occasional jogger braving the cold.
"Etienne," I begin, my voice smaller than I want it to be. "Why me?"
He looks at me.
"I mean it. Why..." I gesture at myself with my free hand, a sweeping motion that encompasses my borrowed jacket and my secondhand boots and my general existence as a packless Omega who, until three weeks ago, was surviving on scholarship funds and stubborn refusal to ask for help. "I am just an ordinary, boring Omega. There is nothing special about me. You could walk into any room on campus and find a dozen girls who are prettier, wealthier, more put-together, more..."
"Stop."
The word is gentle but firm, and the way he says it makes me close my mouth mid-sentence.
He slows our pace, his thumb tracing a deliberate arc across my knuckles.
"You are not ordinary," he says, and the certainty in his tone is not argumentative. It is factual. The same voice he uses when explaining a play strategy or quoting a passage he has memorized. "You walked onto that ice rink your first week here and outskated an Alpha who has been training since childhood. You read my unfinished manuscript and cried over characters I was not sure anyone would ever care about. You defended my writing to an empty room when you thought no one was listening."
The flush creeping up my neck has nothing to do with the cold.
"Your laugh makes people turn their heads. Not because it is loud, but because it is genuine, and genuine laughter is rarer than you think. Your stubbornness could power a small city. Your freckles look like constellations." He pauses, and the faintest blush colors his own cheekbones beneath the streetlight. "And your scent. Vanilla sugar and frosted roses. It makes me feel calm in a way nothing else does. Like the noise in my head finally quiets when you are near."
I stare at him.
