Stone's eyes move between me and Jake with an unhurried assessment. I think about saying something and decide against it. Stone doesn't make arbitrary decisions and he paired us for a reason and I don't need to know the reason to let it happen.
Jake looks at me when Stone calls it. "Fine," he says. To no one in particular.
"Great enthusiasm," I say.
"You want me to be enthusiastic?"
"I want you to not look like you ate something rotten."
The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile — the ghost of one, gone before it committed to anything. It's the first thing close to humor I've seen from him and I don't push it.
***
The work is resistance bands, paired pulling, core stability. Functional. The kind that requires contact without requiring conversation, which is probably why Stone chose it. Two people on either end of a band working against each other — it's simple, it's physical, and it doesn't ask for anything you're not already giving.
Stone demonstrates the first position with one of the other residents while I unroll a band and Jake watches me do it. He doesn't offer to help. I don't ask him to.
Jake takes his position across from me and wraps the band around his hands and looks at me with dark eyes and says nothing. He's broad through the chest and shoulders in the way of someone who has been doing hard physical work for years in conditions that required it — not built in a gym for aesthetics, built by necessity. The kind of physical presence that takes up space without advertising itself. My alpha nature registers him the way it registers all of them, that involuntary cataloguing that started the morning I shifted and hasn't stopped since.
The problem is that proximity makes the bond flare. I see the golden shape on my wrist pulsing, not complete, but still a problem I can’t ignore.
Three feet between us and it's a low persistent pull — rougher than Gray or Leo or Dalton, something that doesn't know how to queue and isn't going to learn. It has no patience and no subtlety and at three feet it runs like a current I can feel in my sternum. I keep my face neutral. Jake is doing the same, jaw tight, the effort of it visible in the set of his shoulders and the way he's looking at a point slightly past my left ear rather than at me directly.
We're both managing it. That's what this is. Two people who did not choose this standing three feet apart managing something neither of us knows how to turn off.
Stone calls the start. We begin.
The band pulls taut and I plant my feet and pull back and Jake does the same and his hands are close to mine on the band — not touching, four inches of cold rubber between our grips, but close enough that the heat off him crosses the gap or I imagine it does, which at this point amounts to the same thing. The pull between us doesn't care that we're doing a supervised exercise. It doesn't care about Stone twelve feet away or Dalton at the edge of the yard with his notepad. It runs through the contact point of the band like the band is conducting it and I push against it the same way I push against Jake's grip — steadily, without giving ground.
He's stronger than me. He's not using it. He's calibrating, matching my resistance with his, keeping the band at the same tension rather than pulling me off balance. I notice this and say nothing about it.
We hold the position. The band is taut between us. His jaw is still tight and his eyes have stopped avoiding mine — we're looking at each other now, directly, the way you look at someone when you've given up pretending you're not, and the yard is cold and the bond is loud.
The other residents are working around us. I can hear the slap of bands and the scrape of boots on frosted ground and somewhere behind me one of the Red House guys muttering to himself. Normal sounds. The sounds of a session running. And in the middle of it, three feet of taut rubber and a bond that has no manners and Jake's dark eyes not looking away.
I breathe. He breathes. The band holds.
He doesn't let go first. Neither do I.
Stone calls the switch.
We change positions. Stone comes over to adjust my stance — his hands quick on my shoulders, impersonal, the way he touches every resident during programming, corrective and professional — and Jake goes very still for one second. I feel it before I see it. The grip on the band tightening. The jaw.His eyes track Stone's hands on me with the quality of a man whose instincts have said something he hasn't finished deciding whether to act on. The bond flares briefly, a warning pulse, and I breathe through it.
Stone steps back. His eyes meet mine for a fraction of a second, then he's already moving to the next pair.
Jake resets. His hands loosen on the band. His shoulders drop a fraction and he looks somewhere past me again, the practiced distance he's been maintaining since the corridor, and we go back to work.
We work for another forty minutes. The cold stops being something I notice and becomes the ambient condition of the world. My shoulders burn by the end. Jake shows no sign of physical discomfort whatsoever, which is either impressive or annoying and I haven't decided which. By the time Stone calls the end I can see frost on Jake's jacket collar and he doesn't seem to have registered it. The mountain, probably. After the mountain, an Alaskan morning in a facility yard is barely a footnote.
***
The group disperses in the way of people who have been cold and physically exerted and want to be somewhere warm. Residents peel off in twos and threes. Stone stays, as he always does, to collect equipment. I'm rolling up a band when Jake stops beside me.
He doesn't look at me. Looks at the mountain line above the tree line above the fence.
"The bond," he says. Flat. A fact being reported to a room.
I wait.
