Something warmer.
Something that almost resembles rest.
I relax further into him, my weight shifting to lean more heavily against his shoulder, my body surrendering to the dual influence of the THC and the proximity and the low vinyl music that wraps the room in a sonic blanket of analog warmth. His arm adjusts automatically, his hand coming to rest on my knee—not possessively, not suggestively, just present. A point of contact that saysI’m herewithout requiring a response.
“You going to open that?”
His voice is softer now—the edges rounded by the weed, the natural roughness of his Alpha register mellowed into something that vibrates through his chest and into my skull through the point of contact at his shoulder. The question is casual in delivery and seismic in implication.
I take an inhale from the blunt.
Long. Slow. Deliberate. The smoke fills my lungs with a warmth that expands outward through my ribcage, pressing gently against the bandaged wound, and I hold it there for a count that extends well past the recommended duration because the delay gives me time to formulate a response that isn’t a confession.
I let it out slowly.
The exhale is measured, controlled, the smoke emerging in a thin, steady stream that rises toward the cracked window and dissipates into the night air. I watch it go—gray tendrils against the dark ceiling, twisting and dissolving, temporary by design.
I relax further into him, my body sinking against his warmth with the boneless compliance of someone who has been granted a chemical reprieve from the exhausting work of holding themselves together.
“It’s going to probably be a golden ticket to change,” I mutter.
The words come out with the particular flatness that characterizes my verbal output when the void and the weed are operating simultaneously—too honest for the walls to intercept, too blunted for the emotions to weaponize. Just truth, delivered without the packaging that usually makes it presentable.
He smirks—I feel it against my hair, the subtle shift of his facial muscles where his jaw rests against my crown. Then his lips press to my temple. A kiss. Light. Warm. The kind that lands on the skin and sinks through it, bypassing the dermal layer entirely to deliver its message directly to the nervous system underneath.
“Probably,” he says.
A pause. The vinyl fills the space between thoughts with something gentle.
“You don’t really like change, do you?”
“Nope.”
The answer is immediate, unadorned, requiring no elaboration because Hawk already knows its dimensions. I don’t like change because change in my experience has been uniformly catastrophic—a sister who changed from ally to enemy, a cliff that changed my anatomy from functional to reconstructed, a life that changed from privileged to hunted in the time it takes to fall two hundred feet. Change, in Victoria Sinclair’s personal lexicon, is a synonym for loss.
And yet.
Here I am.
Reaching for an envelope that promises exactly that.
I pass him the blunt and reach for the envelope.
The motion feels significant in a way that my weed-softened emotional architecture registers but can’t fully process. One hand giving up the thing that provides temporary peace. The other reaching for the thing that might provide permanent escape. The exchange is almost symmetrical, almost poetic, and I hate that I noticed because noticing poetic symmetry in your own life suggests a self-awareness that borders on the narrative and I am not a character in a story.
I am a person.
Making a choice.
In a room that smells like weed and wine and a man I refuse to love.
The envelope is heavier than I remember. The textured paper is cool against my fingertips, the wax seal catching the dim light and glowing with a warmth that seems internally generated rather than reflected.
“Martinez called me to the back after my performance,” I say, because explaining is easier than feeling and I need to do one in order to avoid the other. “None of the other students noticed. She gave me this envelope and then she left.”
Hawk nods. He’s listening—truly listening, with the full-body attention he gives to intelligence briefings and threat assessments, his amber eyes fixed on me with a focus that the weed has dimmed but not diminished.
I turn the envelope in my hands, my fingers finding the edge of the wax seal.
