That wasn’t what I expected. I expected the bond, the wolf, some biological explanation I could file away under “supernatural bullshit I don’t have to take personally.” Some version of “my wolf made me do it” that would let me stay angry in peace.
He didn’t say that. Instead he said I made him quiet, said I let him breathe, and that wasn’t a wolf thing or a bond thing but a choice. A human, deliberate choice, and it hit me somewhere deep and inconvenient that I didn’t want to examine right now or possibly ever.
I should have fired back with a deflection. A wall. I had a dozen options loaded because I’d been doing it all day, keeping him at arm’s length, and I was damn good at this.
“Goodnight, Finneas.” My voice came out softer than I planned. Soft enough that I saw his whole expression shift into that unguarded look I used to catch through the glass and never understood.
“Goodnight, Andrea.”
My heart wouldn’t stop racing at the elevator ride down. I leaned against the back wall with my palm flat against my chest, trying to hold myself together, and his voice kept replaying in my head.You made everything quiet.I wanted to stay angry because anger was clean and made sense, but every time those words came back the wall cracked a little more.
I sat in my car in the parking garage for five minutes before I trusted myself to drive. My hands were shaking on the steering wheel and my eyes were burning and I wasn’t crying, I refused to cry, but my body was doing its own thing and I couldn’t make it stop.
The drive home was a blur. When I pulled up to the house, the porch was empty. Just the light I’d left on out of habit, shining on bare wood and nothing else. I’d told him I needed space and he listened, because of course he did, and I wanted to throw my keys at the goddamn wall because why did getting what I asked for feel so much worse than not having it?
I ended up on the porch step anyway. The one where Fin used to sit. The wood was cold through my pajama shorts and the neighborhood was quiet in that late-night way where you could hear every car on the next block and every dog three streets over. Except the one dog I actually wanted to hear wasn’t coming, because he wasn’t a dog and I’d told him to stay away.
I sat there way too long. Sat there until my legs went numb and my ass was freezing and I still couldn’t make myself go inside because inside meant my bed and my bed meant the dark and the dark meant lying there with nothing to do except think about him.
Eventually I dragged myself in. Got under the covers. Stared at the ceiling. My hand kept finding my mouth, fingertips pressing against my lips where I could still feel the ghost of him, and I kept pulling it away and it kept drifting back like my body had its own agenda that my brain wasn’t invited to.
The porch felt wrong without him.
I hated that it did.
10
— • —
Andrea
I held the line for two days.
Mr. Kingsley, no eye contact, files handed over with my arm fully extended so our fingers couldn’t touch. I spoke to him in the voice I reserved for the IT department when they asked if I’d tried restarting, and every time I walked past his office the pull in my chest yanked me toward the door so hard I had to physically redirect myself back to my desk like a damn shopping cart with a busted wheel.
The first night I went out to the porch with my book anyway. Sat in my usual spot, opened to my bookmark, tried to read out loud. Got through half a chapter and the words just hung there in the empty air, flat and pointless without anyone to hear them. The spot next to me where a warm body used to press against my leg was cold. I closed the book, went inside, lay on the couch withoutturning the TV on, and tried not to think about the last thing he said to me in his office. Failed. Wanted to punch a pillow.
Second night I didn’t even make it outside. Tea at the kitchen table, phone scrolling, early bed. The pull sat low in my chest, a bruise that wouldn’t fade, and lying in the dark with nothing to distract me I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and breathed through it and told myself I was making the right call.
I felt like shit. That’s the honest version.
Day three I got to the office early, made his coffee, poured the mug. Plain black, no commentary. I picked it up to carry it to his office and then looked down at it and stopped dead in the middle of the floor.
Three empties already lined up on his desk. This would be his fourth before 10 am. I’d been tracking without thinking about it, the same way I’d tracked it for two years, my brain running the count on autopilot while the rest of me tried to freeze him out. He was going to give himself a heart attack and nobody was going to say a word because the only person who ever bothered monitoring his caffeine was me.
I should have just set it down and left. That was the professional move, the boundary-respecting move, the move that kept the wall intact. Three days of ice and all I had to do was not write on a Post-It and I could keep it going.
My feet carried me back to my desk anyway. I grabbed a pink Post-It from the pad, uncapped my pen, and wrote on it before the rational part of my brain could lodge a formal objection. Peeled it off, stuck it to the side of the mug, carried it into his office, and set it on his desk while he was reading on his screen.
He looked at the mug. His eyes dropped to the Post-It.
Third cup. Don’t push it.
When he looked up at me I was already turning away, but I could feel his eyes on my back and the silence behind me stretched on too long. Finneas Kingsley didn’t need to read three words twice unless they meant more than three words, and those three words meant I was still watching, counting, paying attention even when I was pretending not to.
My heart hammered the whole walk back. Over a goddamn Post-It, some scribbles of ink that just cracked three days of careful distance wide open. I sat down and pulled up my email and pretended the warmth crawling across my face was from the coffee I hadn’t drunk yet.
That afternoon I was buried in a scheduling conflict, rearranging a double-booked Wednesday, when I glanced up without thinking. A reflex. The same reflex I’d been strangling for three days, except my guard slipped and my eyes went straight through the glass wall into his office.
