The worst part wasn’t the anger. The worst part was that underneath the anger, underneath the hurt, I still wanted him. Still wanted his hands on my waist and his mouth on my neck and his voice in the dark saying things that made my chest crack open. I hated that wanting him didn’t go away just because he’d hurt me. I hated that love didn’t work like a switch you could flip when someone let you down.
I gave him a last chance. If he wasted it, I was gone. I didn’t know if that was a promise or a bluff and I didn’t want to find out.
21
— • —
Finneas
I sent peonies to her desk every morning for a week.
No card. I didn’t know what to write that would be enough, so I just sent the flowers and watched through the glass as she arrived each morning, saw them, touched the petals. She didn’t look at me. Not once. She was professional, distant, did her job flawlessly, gave me absolutely nothing. It was killing me in a way the bond strain never had because this silence was my fault.
I stopped responding to Lorraine entirely. Texts, calls, emails, all of it, dead air. When she emailed about a pack social event I didn’t respond. When she called the office line I let it ring. Three days of that before she cornered me.
The quarterly social at the pack hall. Families mingling, elders drinking too much, Luca keeping an eye on the younger wolves who always got restless at these things. I was talking to one ofthe beta liaisons about a housing issue near the southern district when Lorraine appeared at my elbow. Red hair pulled back, sharp smile, her hand landing on my arm like it belonged there.
“Can we talk?”
“Not right now, Lorraine.”
“You haven’t returned any of my messages.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You’ve been ignoring me.”
She steered me toward a quieter corner of the hall, her hand still on my arm, and I let her because I didn’t want a scene in front of fifty pack members. She turned to face me and the smile was gone.
“What is wrong with you? You’ve been avoiding me for days. You won’t answer my calls, you won’t respond to my emails, you didn’t show up to dinner at your mother’s last weekend.”
“There was no dinner at my mother’s.”
“There was. She invited me and the family. She said you were busy.” Her eyes were hard. “Were you busy, Finneas? Or were you somewhere else?”
I looked at her and I saw two people at the same time. The woman standing in front of me now, entitled and sharp, claiming a relationship I never offered. And behind her, the girl who was at every family dinner, every holiday, every birthday. The girl who brought my mother flowers every week for a year after my father died. Who sat next to me at Paul’s funeral anddidn’t say a word because she understood that sometimes being present was enough.
I grew up with her. She was part of the furniture of my childhood, woven into every memory I had before the age of eighteen. Telling her to back off felt less like setting a boundary and more like ripping out a section of the foundation.
But Andrea’s face kept coming back. Sitting at that desk. Watching me walk past with her on my arm. The hurt was louder than any childhood memory.
“Lorraine, we’re colleagues. We’ve always been colleagues. Whatever you think this is between us, it isn’t. It never was.”
Her face cracked. The hardness split open and there was real hurt underneath, raw and quick, before she covered it.
“We grew up together. Our families have been planning this since we were children.”
“Our mothers have been planning this. I never agreed to any of it.”
“You never said no either.”
That landed. Because she was right. I never did. Dodged, deflected, avoided for years. Let her and Margaret and Regina build a fantasy on my silence because saying no meant a fight I didn’t want. That was on me.
“I’m saying no now.” I held her eyes. “I don’t see you that way, Lorraine. I never have. And I need you to stop telling the pack we’re together, because we’re not.”
Her jaw tightened. Her eyes went bright and for a second I thought she was going to cry, which would be worse than anger because I’d never figured out how to handle her tears without caving. But she didn’t cry. She straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin. The mask clicked back into place.
“You’ll change your mind,” she said, and walked away.
