Except.
"I didn't get your name!"
The words escape before my filter can catch them. Loud. Carrying across the morning air with a clarity that startles a pair of finches from a nearby branch.
He pauses mid-stride. Turns back, just enough for me to see his profile against the mist-threaded forest light. The ginger hair catches the gold. The freckles stand out against pale skin flushed from exertion and confrontation. The broken glasses sit crooked on his nose, one lens fractured, one earpiece bent, somehow making him look less damaged and more distinguished.
"Doesn't matter." His voice is quiet. Stripped of the fierce energy it carried moments ago, replaced by a flatness that sounds rehearsed. Well-worn, like a phrase he has repeated so many times it has lost its edges. "I'm a nobody."
The words land in my chest like a stone dropped into still water.
I'm a nobody.
Said with the conviction of someone who believes it. Who has been told it so many times, by so many people, that it has calcified from opinion into identity.
He turns away.
Takes a step toward the trail.
"Sage!"
He stops again. Looks back.
I wave. Awkward and genuine, my hand cutting through the morning air in a gesture that is half greeting and half goodbye and entirely insufficient for communicating whatever it is I am trying to communicate.
"I'm Sage. And I'm sorry again. For the glasses. And the, um." I gesture vaguely at my own body, at the ground, at the general concept of gravity and its consequences. "Everything."
He holds my gaze for a beat that lasts longer than a stranger's departure requires. Those green eyes, vivid even through fractured glass, study my face with an intensity that feels like being read. Not glanced at. Not assessed. Read. Like I am a page in a book he was not expecting to find and is not sure he is ready to close.
Then he turns.
And runs.
His stride is smooth, practiced, carrying him down the trail with the efficient grace of someone whose body knows this path well enough to navigate it on autopilot. The black athletic shirt stretches across his shoulders with each arm swing, and the ginger hair catches the light in flashes of copper that grow smaller and dimmer until the forest swallows him entirely.
I stand alone on the trail.
The morning resumes around me. Birdsong. The distant woodpecker. The soft whisper of wind through birch leaves and the muted crunch of my own breathing settling back into its resting rhythm.
His scent lingers.
Cedarwood and graphite and warm, golden amber, clinging to the air where he stood, clinging to the skin of my arms where his hands caught me, clinging to the fabric of my father's oversized t-shirt where my body pressed against his during a collision that lasted thirty seconds and somehow rearranged the chemical composition of my morning.
He stood up for me.
That singular fact reverberates through my skull with the persistence of a bell struck in an empty room.
A stranger. A man whose glasses I shattered and whose personal space I violated and whose lap I sat on without invitation. A man who owes me nothing and who I will probably never see again on a running trail that belongs to my family's private property, which raises questions about howhe was here in the first place that I am too distracted to pursue right now.
He stood up for me.
Put himself between me and an Alpha who outweighed him by forty pounds and outreached him by three inches. Called me his without hesitation, without calculation, without the transactional undertone that usually accompanies an Alpha's claim on an Omega's proximity.
Nobody has ever done that for me.
Not a stranger. Not someone with nothing to gain and everything to lose.
Not with that kind of quiet, unshakeable certainty that did not need volume to fill a space.
