I drink my coffee and wait for him to crack.
He focuses on plating the eggs with suspicious intensity, then sets a plate in front of me and sits across the island from me.
Finally, finally, he gives up and lets himself smile.
He looks suspiciously pleased about something. “I made arrangements for today,” he says finally.
A knot of anxiety immediately begins forming in my stomach. I'm braced for an omega-related appointment. Some calm, thoughtful, reasonable plan that is undoubtedly good for me and requires me to spend several hours processing my designation in a clinical setting.
“Okay...” I say cautiously.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” he says.
“You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
He gives me a look that says, very clearly, that he does. “I rented a paintball course.”
I stare at him.
“A private one,” he adds. “It’ll just be us.”
The wordpaintballis sitting in my brain, refusing to connect to anything else in the conversation. “I’m sorry?” I ask.
“Paintball. You shoot people. With paint.” He takes a bite of eggs with complete composure.
“I know what paintball is.”
“Great. We’re going at eleven.”
I look at him across the island.
He’s eating breakfast with the composure of a man who rented an entire paintball facility on a random weekday and sees absolutely nothing unusual about that.
“But why?”
He sets his fork down and looks at me. The lightness is still there, but beneath it is something more serious. “Because you've spent too much time being scared lately,” he says. “Always having to brace for the next bad thing. You deserve one day where none of that gets to be the center of your world.”
He picks his fork back up. “So, paintball it is.”
I try to find something reasonable to say. “Why a private session?” I ask.
He gives me a look. “Maya. As you may be aware, I am a somewhat recognizable face. The last time I went to a public paintball arena, someone tried to tackle me for a photo. I was twelve years old at the time.”
“Were you famous at twelve?” I ask.
"The important part is the attempted tackle."
I knew Adrian and Bash were famous, but I'd never really thought about what that meant. To me, they were just Adrian and Bash.
I set my coffee cup down. Something loosens in my chest.
The private course. The specific choice of activity. The fact that he'd thought about what I might actually enjoy instead of what my designation supposedly required.
All of it feels deliberate in a way that has nothing to do with my heat and everything to do with me.
“Okay,” I say.
He looks up. “Really ?”
