"Come on, Jeffrey. You've been young! Please don't tell Dad."
His eyes meet mine through the glass. Steady. Evaluating. The specific, weighted assessment of a man who has been managing my crises since infancy and whose decision matrix includes variables that no other person in this vehicle possesses the clearance to access.
"And your mother?"
I shrug. The gesture carrying the calculated, strategic nonchalance of a woman who has identified an opportunity to weaponize her mother's obsession.
"Oh no, you can tell her. She'd be thrilled thinking I'm finally going to get hitched and bring a pack home. Give her some hope. Let her spend a week planning a bonding ceremony she'll never get to micromanage. It'll keep her occupied and out of my business."
The twins whistle. The synchronized, appreciative two-note observation of men who have just witnessed a tactical maneuver executed with a ruthlessness that their competitive instincts recognize and respect.
"She's savage," Rowan announces.
Archie smirks in the rearview. "Nah, this is justifiable. Trust."
Jeffrey sighs. The sound carrying the institutional resignation of a man whose professional boundaries have beeneroded by twenty-four years of service to a family whose youngest member treats social conventions as suggestions rather than requirements.
The Escalade slows. The campus party district materializing through the windows, the residential street lined with fraternity houses whose architectural dignity has been compromised by decades of undergraduate occupancy. Music bleeds through the walls of the largest house on the block, the bass frequencies vibrating the sidewalk beneath the tires. Students cluster on the front lawn, their voices carrying the elevated volume of people whose blood alcohol content has exceeded the threshold where indoor voices feel restrictive.
The car stops.
Jeffrey turns in his seat. His face carrying the expression of a man about to issue instructions he knows will be received as suggestions and ignored as guidelines.
"Don't do anything too stupid. Don't get arrested." He pauses. Then, with the specific, subtle shift in his expression that I have learned precedes the moments where Jeffrey transcends the butler role and operates as the co-conspirator my childhood required: "And there's weed tucked in the private pocket of your purse."
"WEED?!"
Three voices. Simultaneous. Archie from the driver's seat, Rowan from my left, Ronan from my right. The synchronized exclamation of three Alphas who have just discovered that the ageless butler in the front seat has been operating as a pharmaceutical supply chain without disclosing his inventory.
I grin.
Wide. Feral. The specific, incandescent delight of a woman whose most trusted person has just validated her recreational intentions with a contribution that no amount of pack disapproval can override.
"Jeffrey is the real MVP!" I announce, already reaching for the door handle. "Out the car, boys! We're getting high! And maybe a little wasted." I turn back to Jeffrey, my voice softening from proclamation to the genuine, tender register I reserve for the man whose presence in my life has been the single most consistent source of unconditional support. "Jeffrey, if you don't hear that I'm alive by three AM, come get me please. Love you."
I am out of the car before his groan of dismay can fully form, my sneakers hitting the sidewalk, my outfit catching the street lamp glow. I dressed for this. Not in the tomboy camouflage that governs my daily presentation. Tonight, for the first time in a timeline I cannot precisely recall, I allowed the twins to influence my wardrobe selection, which resulted in fitted black jeans that hug my legs with a fidelity my compression tights would envy, a cropped tank top that exposes approximately three inches of midriff and required twenty minutes of mirror-based negotiation before I conceded that my abdomen is not a classified document requiring fabric-based redaction, and a leather jacket borrowed from Ronan that carries his juniper-and-sea-glass scent in its lining like a second skin.
The twins tumble out behind me, their laughter trailing the Escalade's departure as Jeffrey pulls away with the measured pace of a man who is already calculating the optimal three-AM retrieval route.
Archie exits last. His door closing with the controlled click of a man who has accepted his role as the evening's designated rationality and has adjusted his recreational expectations accordingly. He catches up to Jeffrey's window, leaning down to deliver a quiet assurance that I can hear despite the distance.
"I'll be the closest to sober I can manage, so I'll call you if we need you earlier. Go rest."
Jeffrey nods. The Escalade disappears down the street, its taillights shrinking into the November darkness, and the four ofus stand on the sidewalk facing a fraternity house whose interior is producing a volume of bass that I can feel in my molars.
This is happening.
A frat party. With my pack. My three Alphas who cook for me and catch me when I fall and play Uno on the floor and asked my father's permission before claiming me. We are going to walk into a building full of drunk university students and pretend we are normal twenty-somethings whose primary concerns are alcohol selection and music quality rather than playoff timelines and pack dynamics and the specific, complicated, beautiful mess of a relationship that has been building since a forest trail collision.
I cannot remember the last time I did something purely for fun.
Community center ice at five AM is not fun. It is survival disguised as recreation. Solo drills in empty rinks are not fun. They are the desperate, grinding maintenance of a skill that the world refuses to reward. Even the Uno game, while joyful, occurred within the medical context of a recovery mandate.
This is just fun. Unstructured. Unrelated to hockey. The specific, ordinary, university-experience variety of fun that most students access during their first week on campus and that I am accessing now, weeks into my enrollment, because the path between my arrival and this sidewalk included arranged marriage threats, plumbing disasters, locker room crises, and the specific, protracted process of acquiring three Alphas willing to take a tomboy Omega to a party.
We enter.
The house swallows us through a front door whose hinges have been removed, presumably to accommodate the continuous flow of bodies that the party requires to maintain its population. The interior is exactly what every fraternity party promises and delivers: a converted living room whose furniturehas been pushed to the walls to create a dance floor, a kitchen island that has been repurposed as a bar, and the specific, dim, colored-light ambiance that universities have been recreating in residential spaces since the invention of the removable lightbulb.
