His scent wraps around me again as I stay close, not quite stepping back, not quite staying in—hovering in the charged space between the decision I've already made and the one Ikeep pretending I haven't. Cedar and leather and that whiskey warmth. A blanket is what it is, which is the most embarrassing way I've ever internally described another person's scent, and I'm a bartender with a professional nose; I have better vocabulary than this, but there it is.
It feels like a blanket.
Like being let inside somewhere after too long in the cold.
I want to stay in it.
That's the worst part. Not the kissing, nor the yearning—it’s the wanting to stay.
That specific, domestic, dangerous ache of a person who's been running so long that the idea of standing still in someone's warmth has started to feel like the most radical thing imaginable.
Don't. Don't do that. You know exactly what that kind of wanting costs. You have the paperwork to prove it.
Filed under 'failed pack,' see also: everything that went wrong, everything you're still paying for, everything that is why you are at this event in the first place, trying to win fifty thousand dollars to pay off the debt those people left you.
The bell rings.
Big, resonant, brass—the kind of bell that has opinions about itself. One long, ceremonious tone that bounces off the castle's stone walls and rolls through the corridors and lands directly in my stomach like an announcement: time's up. The lock-in bell. The one that signals the end of the selection window, the close of the contest, the moment when the Lucky Clover Society will begin tallying whatever mystical criteria they use to decide which Omega's life gets to change tonight.
We both go still.
I pull back first.
The train.
Oh god. The train. The 12:15. The last train out of this part of town because Oakhaven is not a city, has never aspired to be a city, and its transit schedule was designed by someone who believed that nothing important happened after midnight, which—fair, usually, but not tonight?—
I check the time on instinct, the way I always do when the panic arrives, and it's 12:03.
Twelve minutes.
The station is five minutes from here if you move, which means you have seven minutes of margin, which means you need to be moving right now?—
I look back at him.
And that's the mistake.
He's watching me—he hasn't stopped watching me since the whiskey display, since I told him the ice was wrong and he looked at me like I'd said something interesting rather than something obvious, which is a reaction I am not used to and have no established defenses against.
His gray-green eyes are steady on my face, his scent still pooled around us in the alcove, and there is nothing in his expression that pressures me. Nothing that demands. He just—waits. Patient and present and completely still in the way of a man who has learned that the best things come to those who don't chase them.
His dark auburn hair has a thread of silver at the temples that I clocked the moment he removed his outer jacket earlier in the evening. Broad shoulders. A jaw that could cut glass and seems aware of this. He wears his mask—deep mahogany with etched shamrocks along the border, ridiculous and perfect simultaneously—with the ease of someone who's equally comfortable either way, masked or unmasked, seen or unseen.
My honey whiskey and warm vanilla scent is absolutely betraying me right now.I know it is.The lime zest that sharpenswhen I'm trying very hard not to feel things I'm feeling very intensely has probably turned this alcove into a broadcast, and there is nothing I can do about it except pretend this isn't happening with the commitment of a woman who has gotten very good at pretending.
This is not a fairytale.
This is a financial strategy.
You came here for fifty thousand dollars, not for gray-green eyes and cedarwood and the way this man kisses like he's decided you're worth the time. Those are two completely separate missions, and you have only ever been on one of them.
Cinderella got the glass slipper.
She got the prince who came to find her. She got the reunion, recognition, and the whole gleaming narrative conclusion. You are not Cinderella. Cinderella didn't have a 1 am shift at a bar in Oakridge Hollows and a collection agency that knows her first name.
"I have to go," I say.
He says nothing for a moment. Just looks at me with those sea-storm eyes, measuring something I can't identify.
