"Holy shit." The words exit my mouth on a breath that is barely a whisper, my voice betraying the tremor I can feel building in my chest. My legs are already moving. Sprinting. My untied sneakers slapping against the polished floor, the blazer I have been carrying over one shoulder flapping behind me like a flag of surrender, my body closing the distance between us with the desperate velocity of someone who has spent eight years running away and has finally found someone worth running toward.
I skid to a stop three feet from her, close enough that her scent reaches me and detonates a chemical cascade of nostalgia so acute it nearly drops me to my knees. Warm vanilla sugar and something floral, layered over a clean, bright note that reminds me of fresh laundry and the inside of her childhood bedroom where we built blanket forts and watched figure skating competitions until my eyes bled from boredom and my heart ached from the joy of being bored next to someone who did not require me to perform.
Omega. She presented as an Omega.
Like me.
"Oh my god." My voice is shaking. Actually, physically quivering, each syllable vibrating with the strain of containing an emotional response that wants to exit my body as a scream or a sob or some hybrid of both that has not been invented yet because no one has ever needed to express this specific combination of relief and guilt and love and terror simultaneously. "Please tell me you're Mae. Mae Rose? Like, Mabeline Mae Rose? The girl I've known since we were literally in diapers? The one who used to make me watch figure skatingcompetitions, even though I thought they were boring as hell? That Mae?"
She opens her mouth.
Closes it.
Tries again.
"That's... that's me."
Two words. Quiet. Cautious. The verbal equivalent of a hand extended with the fingers curled slightly inward, offered but not committed, ready to retract at the first sign of hostility.
She is not sure if I am safe.
She does not know yet whether the girl who abandoned her has returned to explain or to hurt her again.
And that knowledge is a blade buried to the hilt in the center of my chest.
My grin splits my face before I can regulate it, wide and crooked and carrying every ounce of the desperate, incandescent hope that is currently overriding the guilt long enough for my body to express what my words have not yet earned the right to say.
"I knew it! I recognized you the second I saw that ponytail. You always do the same little twist thing at the end. Like a signature."
I am bouncing on my heels. Vibrating with a kinetic energy that my body cannot contain and my social skills cannot channel into appropriate behavior. I feel like a puppy that has been separated from its owner for years and just spotted them across a parking lot. All instinct and no dignity.
And then she says it.
"And I dare guess you don't hate me, right? Since you kind of just... uh... you know... poofed."
Poofed.
The word is light. Casual. Delivered with a self-deprecating edge that is designed to make the accusation feel less like anaccusation and more like a joke, the way people cushion genuine pain in humor because the alternative is admitting that the wound is still open and the blood is still warm.
The bounce dies in my legs.
The grin falters on my face.
Every molecule of manic energy that was propelling me through this reunion drains from my body in a single, devastating instant, replaced by the full, unfiltered weight of eight years of guilt that I have been carrying in my gut and have just been invited to display in a public hallway in front of Miss Phillip and Jace and the girl whose childhood I ruined by not being strong enough to fight my mother harder.
"Fuck." I drag a hand through my navy-and-emerald hair, the gesture carrying the frustration of someone who has rehearsed this apology a thousand times in the shower and the car and the middle of the night and is now discovering that no amount of rehearsal prepares you for the real thing. "Fuck, Mae, I'm so sorry. There's so much to explain about that. So goddamn much."
"Language, Ms. Holloway."
Miss Phillip's voice arrives with the clinical precision of a woman who has been monitoring this reunion with the patient detachment of a zookeeper watching two animals reintroduce themselves after a prolonged separation and wants to ensure the process remains PG-rated.
I cringe, my shoulders hunching toward my ears in a posture of reflexive contrition that I developed specifically for interactions with authority figures who disapprove of my vocabulary.
"Sorry, Miss Phillip. Got caught up in the moment."
"Clearly." Her tone is dry and warm in equal measure. "Try to remember that profanity isn't part of the standard Valenridge greeting, hm?"
"Yes, ma'am."
