She's quiet for a second. Cara's quiet is never empty. It's a woman turning a plot over, looking for the piece you can't see because you're standing on it.
“Here's what I'm hearing,” she says finally. “You built a fake pack to get your mother off your back. And somewhere in the last month it stopped being fake for you.”
“That's not—” I start, and stop, because I can't lie, and because she's my cousin, and because it's seven forty in the morning and I'm too tired to perform. “Yes.”
“And you're going to end it anyway. On your little schedule. Because you've decided it's one-sided and you'd rather pull the pin yourself than wait for them to.”
Everything in me goes very still. “I didn't say that.”
“You didn't have to, baby. I've known you since before you could walk. You'd rather break your own heart on purpose than let somebody else do it by accident. It feels like control.” A pause. “It's not. It's just breaking your heart with extra steps.”
I don't say anything. Out the window, the yard I keep meaning to fill with a garden sits in the morning sun, dew still on the grass, waiting for a plan. Something to tend. Something to still be here for me in August, when the rest of it isn't.
“Have you considered,” Cara says, gentle now, “that a man like the one you're describing doesn't stay the night for a bit? That maybe you're not the only one in this pack who forgot it was fake?”
“They're alphas doing me a favor, Cara. That's the whole arrangement.”
“Mm.” She's unconvinced in the exact key my family specializes in. “That's what the plan says.”
I get off the phone before she can be any more right, and I stand in my kitchen in yesterday's shirt, and I do not eat something, because Finn's not here to make me, and that thought is so pathetic I have to go take a shower to escape it.
The shower is where my body reminds me, again, that it has stopped taking suggestions.
Because I'm not cold and I'm not fevered, but I'mhumming.Low and constant, a pull that's stopped waiting for a reason.
My skin doesn't fit right. The water's too much and not enough. I stood in this exact shower yesterday and the day before and it was fine, and today my body is a rung too tight, restless in a way no amount of hot water touches.
And then the slick comes, without warning, a slow warm rush between my thighs that has nothing to do with the water and everything to do with the fact that he slept in my bed and his scent is still on my skin under six years of suppressant.
I catch myself with both hands flat on the tile like a woman being frisked, breathing through something that has no business happening for weeks yet, and I say, out loud, to the grout, “Absolutely not. We are not doing this. I have a schedule.” My body, which has never once respected the schedule, declines to comment.
In the mirror on the way out I catch my own face, cheeks gone pink and hot, eyes too bright, a woman looking back atme who is very obviously not fine and doing a terrible job pretending it.
Six years, one pill a day, and I never felt a thing. The pill was a wall and the wall held and I built a whole life behind it.
Now I'm taking suppressants like breath mints and the wall's not a wall anymore. It's a stove somebody turned down instead of off, and lately not even down. Lately just lit, and climbing, my biology quietly overriding six years of chemical common sense.
And there's a name for what happens when the suppressants stop being enough and a body picks a pack and starts getting ready for it.
I turn the water cold and I do not think the name.
I've kept that streak alive for four weeks. I can make it to lunch.
I cannot makeit to lunch.
Not because of the heat. Because of the man in the garden center.
I've come to Petal & Stem for tomato starts and drainage rock and to prove to Cara, and myself, and a heartbreak crop, that I am a functioning adult who does normal Tuesday errands and not a woman unraveling one degree at a time in the seedling aisle. I have my diagram. I have my zones. I am fine.
And then I round the end of the aisle with an armful of tomato starts and there is Logan, twenty feet away by the mulch, in a park ranger's uniform, with a beard.
My body reacts before my brain does. That's the terrible new fact of me these last few days, that some deep-down animal part has started throwing itself at the sight of my three before the rest of me gets a vote, and it does it now, warm and immediate and stupid, an omega body lunging toward a shape it has decided ishers.
And then his scent reaches me, and everything stops.
Because it's wrong. Close, but wrong. Cedar, yes, but cut with cold river stone where Logan's is sweetened with maple. My body catches the mismatch a full second after it committed, and the warm rush curdles into something confused and off-balance, a hand reaching for a stair that isn't there.
Not Logan.
