The east yard is mostly empty at nine fifty-two. Two residents cutting across the far end who clock me and keep walking.Dalton near the building with his notepad, doing what he does — present, attentive, building whatever report he's building. He sees me cross toward the south fence. I see him see me.
Neither of us says anything.
I don't look back.
RJ is on the other side.
Sitting on the ground, back against the fence, knees up. He doesn't look up when I stop at the chain link. But his shoulders drop — just slightly — like something in him recognized the sound of my footsteps before I got here.
"Alex," he says.
I sit down on my side. The fence is cold through my jacket. He shifts until his shoulder is against it and we're inches apart with chain link between us, which is the closest we've been since before the shift, and I feel it through whatever runs between us — not the bond, not yet, something without a name — the weight of someone who has been waiting.
I talk.
Not because I planned to. Because he's here and the fence is between us and I have been holding everything since that hallway floor and the only person in this facility who knows what it's like to be the thing nobody has a protocol for is sitting beside me.
I tell him about the shift. What it felt like coming back — the bone clicking into place, the wrongness that wasn't there. I tell him about Gavin's office andfemale alphalanding like a name I'd never heard for something I'd always been. I tell him about six to eight weeks and one incident and the transport van waiting like a promise. I tell him about the third arc on my wrist and the stranger who looked at me when everyone else couldn't and the bonds with Leo and Gray.
I don't tell him everything. But I tell him more than I've told anyone.
He listens. He doesn't look at me — he looks at the mountain line, the fence, the ground — but his body is turned toward me and he's still and I know he's hearing every word.
When I stop talking the yard is quiet.
"Your wrist," he says.
I press my left arm against the fence, wrist up, fingers through the links. He turns toward me and puts his hand over mine — palm against my hand, fingers curling through the chain link to find mine.
His thumb moves over the mark through the gap in the metal. Slow. Like he's reading something.
Then he bows his head and presses his mouth to my wrist through the chain link — lips against the mark, the metal cold between us, a low sound in his chest that isn't quite a growl and isn't quite anything else. His tongue traces the edge of the third arc through the gap in the fence and the sound gets quieter and more certain at the same time.
I don't move. I don't breathe wrong. My core clenches at the warm feel of his tongue. I whine.
He lifts his head. His forehead tips forward until it's resting against the chain link, our fingers intertwined, his eyes closed.
The growl fades to something that hums.
I feel it in my sternum.
"Okay?" he says finally. Low. Rough.
"Yeah," I say. "You?"
He doesn't answer. Which is an answer.
The first time I was at a fence it went on my incident report. The evaluation panel read it back to me like a charge. I was at the fence and Leo grabbed my wrist and something happened that nobody had a protocol for.
Same fence. Different everything.
We stay like that until movement on my side of the yard catches my eye.
Jake.
Coming outside, hands in his jacket pockets, head down against the wind. He crosses the yard the way he crosses every space — deliberate, taking up exactly as much room as he needs and no more. He hasn't seen us yet.
Then he does.
