He looked at me. His face was wrecked, devastated, and for half a second I thought he was going to crack, thought he was going to say something real.
“No,” he said.
“You son of a bitch.” I was shaking so hard I could barely stand. “You absolute fucking coward.”
He just stood there. Jaw locked. Eyes wrecked. Not speaking, not moving, not doing a goddamn thing while I fell apart three feet in front of him.
“Say something!” I screamed. “Stop standing there like a fucking statue and say something to me! Fight for this, explain it, lie to me again, I don’t care, just open your mouth and say something because I cannot take you standing there in silence while my whole life burns down!”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. I watched him try to form words, watched the struggle cross his face, and for one second I thought he was going to break, thought whatever was holding him together was going to crack and the real answer was going to come pouring out.
“Andrea Grey,” he said. His voice had changed, gone rough, formal, wrong, like it was coming from somewhere deep in his chest that wasn’t him. “I reject you as my mate.”
The pain split me open.
Not slowly, not gradually, not the creeping ache of heartbreak I’d felt before. This was instantaneous, violent, a tearing behind my sternum so brutal my legs buckled and both hands slammed flat on the desk to keep me from hitting the floor. My vision went white. My ears filled with a high ringing that drowned out the room. The warm thread I’d carried in my chest since the day I met him, the pull I’d felt toward him for two years without knowing what it was, ripped out of my body with a force that made me scream, or gasp, or make some sound I’d never made before, I couldn’t tell because the pain was everywhere and I couldn’t separate myself from it.
I bent over the desk. Forehead almost touching the wood. Breathing in counts because counting was the only thing between me and the floor. One, two, three, four. The hole in my chest pulsed, raw, gaping, synced to a heartbeat that wasn’t connected to his anymore. I could feel where the bond had been the way you feel a tooth after it’s been pulled, the empty socket throbbing, the phantom shape of something that should still be there.
I forced myself upright. Locked my knees. My arms were shaking so badly the desk was rattling under my palms but I stood because I was not going down in front of this man. I was not giving him that.
I pulled open my desk drawers. Grabbed my bag, the photo of Hilda by my monitor, my phone charger, the pink pens. Myhands were trembling so badly I dropped the charger twice, had to pick it up off the floor both times, and I could feel him watching me do it and I didn’t look up.
“Andrea, you can still work here...”
I laughed and the sound that came out of me was something broken, a crack in glass, sharp enough to cut. “I’d rather burn this building down than see you for another day. I quit.”
I picked up the bag, walked past him, kept my head down because if I looked at him the thing holding me together was going to snap and I was not breaking in this office. Not in front of his glass walls, not under the fluorescent lights, not on the floor where I’d spent two years being the best goddamn assistant he’d ever had while he lied to my face.
The elevator. I pressed the button and waited and the seconds stretched into hours.
“Congratulations,” I said, my back to him, my voice level by a force of will I was going to pay for later. “You’re a match made in heaven. I’m sure you’ll spend the rest of your life hating each other.”
I stepped in as soon as the elevator opened, but not before I delivered them one last wish.
“I wish you a miserable life.”
The doors closed and I counted seventeen seconds on the way down. I know because I counted them the same way I counted my breaths over the desk, because counting was the only thing keeping me upright. Seventeen seconds of my jaw locked, myhands fisted around the strap of my bag, the floor numbers ticking down while the hole in my chest screamed.
The doors opened to the garage. I walked to my car, got in, locked the doors, put my hands on the steering wheel.
Then I couldn’t count anymore.
The sobs came so hard I couldn’t breathe. My forehead hit the wheel, my chest heaving, my whole body convulsing with a grief so total it erased everything else. I couldn’t see. Couldn’t think. The pain from the rejection pulsed through me with every heartbeat, a phantom limb where the bond used to be, aching for something that had been ripped away by the one person it was connected to. I cried until my throat was raw, my eyes swollen shut, my fingers numb from gripping the wheel. I cried until the sobs turned into dry heaves, the heaves into silence. The silence was worse, because in the silence I could hear his voice saying “no” and I couldn’t make it stop.
I sat in the quiet after. Engine off, phone dark. My lock screen was a photo of Fin on the porch, the dog lying beside my book, dark eyes half-closed. The dog was the man. I’d lost both at once.
I put the phone face-down on the passenger seat, started the car, drove home.
My house was contaminated. The couch, the kitchen, the porch. Every room held a version of him I couldn’t look at without the pain flaring. I made it to the bathroom before I threw up. Kneeled on the tile, heaving, emptying a stomach that had nothing in it. When it passed I sat on the floor with my back against the tub and my palms pressed over my eyes.
I should call someone. Mary, Hilda, anyone. I couldn’t form words. Couldn’t explain what happened without explaining everything, the wolves, the bond, the rejection I could still feel throbbing behind my ribs like a wound that wouldn’t close.
I dragged myself to the couch and lay down. The porch light was on because I always left it on for Fin, warm yellow through the window, and the realization that I was still leaving it on for a man who just told me none of it was real made me press my face into the cushion until I couldn’t see it anymore.
Sometime around 3 am the nausea came back. I got to the bathroom just in time, kneeling on the cold tile again, my stomach cramping around nothing. I sat on the floor afterward, shivering, forehead against the tub, and my brain tried to do math I wouldn’t let it do. The timing. The weeks. The nausea that started before the stress, before the hospital, before any of this.
I pressed my hands flat against the tile and shut my eyes and refused to count backward.
