I've known it for a while, longer than I've had language for it.
The first night I spent on Maya's couch, I told myself it was practical. Temporary. She needed monitoring, and I was available.
That was true.
It just wasn't the whole truth.
By the third night, I was sleeping better on her couch than I'd slept in my own bed in months. By then, pretending that was only about convenience had stopped being convincing.
My apartment is a place I keep clothes. That’s about the most honest way I can describe what it’s become.
“Okay,” I agree.
Adrian waits, like he expected more.
“I mean it,” I say. “Yes. I’ll move in.”
Relief flickers across his face. With Adrian, that single nod says more than most people manage with a speech.
“There’s more,” he says.
“Her heat,” I say.
“Her heat.” He leans one shoulder against the wall. “Bonding. She hasn’t said she doesn’t want it. She also hasn’t said she does. I think the fear is still winning on that one, even now, even after everything.”
I think about her face this morning in the nest room. The open quality of it, unfamiliar and very real. The way she turned her face toward me when she woke up and held my eyes without immediately moving away. Something had eased in her overnight. I could see it. But ease and certainty are different things, and I don’t mistake one for the other.
“She’s not ready to make that call yet,” I say. “She’s closer than she was a week ago. But not ready.”
“The omega center,” he says. He says it the way you say something you’ve been avoiding.
A flash of disgust moves through me before I can stop it.
“I know,” Adrian says, reading my face. “I know. I felt the same thing when she mentioned it at the clinic.” His voice is even. “But that’s not the point.”
“No,” I agree.
“If she needs more time before she decides she wants this,” he says, “we give her more time. If the heat comes and she panics and she doesn’t want bonding, we support her through it without it. If she needs us there and chooses not to bond, that’s still a choice she made. She gets to make it.” He says it like it costs him something. I know it does. “She keeps the choices. All of them.”
I sit with that for a moment.
It's the right position. I believe it. I also know it will require active effort from all three of us when her heat is actually upon her, when her scent fills the house and our instincts are louder than they've ever been.
The decision is easy to make now.
Holding to it then will be harder.
“She’ll feel the pull toward bonding,” I say. “When it’s actually happening. It may surprise her.”
“I know.” He rubs the back of his neck once. “I’m trying very hard to not get ahead of where she actually is. Which is difficult because emotionally we’re—“
He stops. Starts again.
“We already think of her as ours. I know that. Bash knows that. She doesn’t fully know it yet. And I’d rather she figure it out on her own terms than feel like she’s been decided for.”
That’s what it comes back to. Every time, from every angle. She needs to choose it herself. Not because of heat, not because of instinct pressure, and not because three alphas have already arranged their lives around her. But because she looked at this and decided she wanted it.
“She’s getting there,” I say. “She stayed the night. That matters.”
