My toe catches it perfectly.
The universe's aim is impeccable.
I go down fast—no graceful stumble, no dramatic slow-motion save, just the complete and immediate surrender of a human body to gravity in a very small hallway—and the floor comes up and introduces itself to my cheekbone with the blunt enthusiasm of something that has been waiting to do this for a long time.
Ow.
I lie there for a moment. Face-down on the laminate. Cheek pressed against flooring that smells like cleaning solution and every bad decision I've made in the last fourteen months.
A whistle cuts through the apartment—low, slow, genuinely impressed.
"Didn't I say," Elowen calls from the kitchen, and I can hear the absolute lack of surprise in her voice, "that if you didn't get a man in here to fix that plank you were going to trip and fall?"
I groan into the floor. "I don't want to hear it, Ell."
"I said it in January."
"I know."
"And February."
"I know."
"It's March, Mila."
I push myself onto my knees and consider the state of my life from this particular vantage point. It tracks, honestly. This is about where I am.
"Girl." I look up at her from the hallway floor. Elowen is turned from the stove, spatula in hand, one perfectly shaped brow arched in the direction of someone who has known me long enough to have predicted this moment to the exact floorboard.
"I'm not blessed with a man. I don't have a man. I don't have men, plural. What I have is—" I gesture broadly at the apartment, at myself, at the specific atmosphere of a woman who is twenty-seven years old and actively losing a fistfight with her own square footage. "My lot of testosterone decided to leave my poor, financially devastated ass behind and drop a hefty bag of fifty thousand dollars for me to carry. Because I'm apparently a sumo wrestler. I can hold the full weight of their stupid choices while I work myself into the ground. So. No man. No plank fix. This is my reality, and I live here."
Elowen sets the spatula down.
"Is your Heat coming up?" she asks, squinting at me with the clinical assessment of someone who has weathered enough of my spirals to categorize them by type. "You've been a bigger bitch than usual this week."
"No." I press my palm to the floor and haul myself upright. "My Heat is not coming because I'm on those stupid blockers again, so you can?—"
"The sexual health lecture?—"
"Elowen. No." I put one finger up before she can shift into the expression that means a careful, well-researched, loving but thoroughly exhausting conversation about suppression cycles and Omega wellbeing is incoming. "It is twelve in the morning. I have thirty minutes to eat something and probably need a shot of something before I work the night shift. I also took the morning shift because Rosemarie's sick, so I'm looking down the barrel of a twelve-hour stretch, and I haven't slept properly since—" I pause. "Tuesday? Monday? One of the days with a y in it."
The lecture retreats to her eyes. Still there. Just waiting.
Elowen closes her mouth.
The frown that replaces the lecture is softer—not sharp with concern, just weighted.
She tilts her head, thinking something through, and I watch her do it the way I always do, which is with the particular combination of gratitude and low-grade guilt that comes from having someone in your corner who cares considerably more than your situation deserves.
She smells like she always does—fresh peonies and clean rainwater and a thread of lavender that she's probably absorbed from the flower shop, her natural scent and her entire professional existence becoming indistinguishable after six years in Bloom and Brier. It's the most comfortable smell I know.
The olfactory version of a couch you've owned so long it has your exact shape pressed into it.
"Does Rosemarie need help at the café?" Elowen asks.
I sit on the kitchen floor because my knees still feel like they've filed a formal complaint, and think about it.
"Hazel's on mat leave. Reverie's on tour with her pack—lucky her—and Rosemarie just got back from her Rio trip." I pause. "Which, for the record, she went to with her pack. Her pack that she met. Because she went to my mixer invitation when I was sick. Which means Rosemarie went to a government mixer in my name and met three incredible Alphas, and I, the actual Omega on the invitation, have a loose plank and a debt that's developed a personality."
