Vee walks beside me, close enough that our arms brush every few steps. I've noticed she's positioned herself slightly between me and the wider aisles, not in a way that's obvious, just in how she moves through space. She's learned what helps. She did that on her own.
I notice when she pauses to look at items.
It's a small pause. Half a second, maybe less. Her eyes resting on something before moving on. Most people wouldn't clock it.
I add it to the cart.
She turns back around and sees it and gives me a look.
I look at the cereal boxes directly in front of me. Reading the nutritional information with great interest.
"Rhys."
"Mm."
"I don't need that."
"It looked good."
"I was just glancing at it."
"You glanced at it for a notable amount of time."
She stares at me. I maintain my interest in the cereal boxes.
Eventually she turns back to the list Finn printed.
Later she tries to put something back. I watch her set it on the shelf and turn toward the next aisle. I pick it up and put it in the cart.
She turns back around.
I'm examining a display of pasta sauces with great focus.
"I saw that," she says.
"I have no idea what you're referring to."
Finn is making a sound behind us that he is unsuccessfully disguising as a cough.
I want everything on the shelf for her. I want to fill the kitchen with everything she's ever looked at for longer than a moment. I know it's excessive. I know that the instinct I'm operating on right now is the one Arden identified in our sessions as provider behavior, the fundamental alpha drive to supply and resource, and that I should be applying my tools to modulate it.
I don't want to modulate it.
She's my omega and I want to provide for her. I'm willing to look like a complete fool to see her smile.
She catches me adding another item to the cart and makes a sound of exasperation that turns into a laugh. The laugh sends warmth through every part of me and I don't regret a single thing.
People stare.
They always stare. I'm aware of it like I'm aware of most background data—registered, filed, managed. Betas mostly, pausing in the aisle to look at me with the same expression that I've been receiving since I was gifted these scars. Calculation.Wariness. The involuntary response to a threat signal their bodies are sending without their minds understanding why.
I hate it.
I've hated it since I first understood what I'd become. There's no anger in it anymore. Anger was one of the first things I worked on in therapy, learned to distinguish from other things. To set it down when I didn't need it. But there's a grief that I've never fully worked through. That I walk into a room and the first thing people feel is afraid.
Vee notices me noticing.
She puts her hand on my arm. Shows me something from the shelf—some kind of sauce. She's reading the label like it contains crucial information, telling me things about the ingredients that I'm not really tracking but that I'm listening to completely because her voice rearranges my nervous system in a way that nothing else has figured out how to do.
