Chapter Fifteen
AVERY
He arrived at my door at seven on a Wednesday.
Not Micah. Dean. With his coat still on and his bag over his shoulder and that particular quality in his face that meant his pre-heat was close and he'd been managing it all day.
"Can I?" he said.
"Come in," I said.
I was in the middle of a deadline. My laptop was on the coffee table and I had three reference files open and an email I'd been composing for forty minutes.
None of that was his problem. He knew that and I knew that and we'd had enough conversations about not consuming each other's time that the agreement was implicit.
He came in and took off his coat and kicked off his shoes and built a nest.
This was a thing about Dean that I'd been slowly calibrating to over the past months: he nested.
Not in a helpless-omega way — he was entirely capable of functioning without it, he did so constantly in his professional life.
But when his biology was under pressure, the nesting instinct was real and specific, and my apartment, for reasons I didn't want to examine too carefully, had become the place where it happened.
He was doing it with the efficiency of someone who'd done it before.
The blanket from the back of my couch. The pillow from the reading chair.
The throw that lived in the basket by the window.
Arranging them into a configuration in the corner of my living room that I privately thought looked extremely comfortable.
"I have to finish this," I said.
"I know." He sat down in the nest. "I'm not asking you to stop."
"The Price-Kent call is going to come through in about twenty minutes and it's going to be loud because Isaac is incapable of indoor voice when he's running numbers."
"I can hear loud." He had his own laptop out now, pulled from his bag. "I have reports to draft anyway."
I looked at him for a moment.
"Dean."
"Yeah."
"Are you okay?"
He looked up with the particular expression he wore when he was going to answer honestly: measured, like he was finding the right version of the true thing.
"Pre-heat's been rough this week. The legislative session has been stressful and stress makes it worse.
Tomas wants me to cancel three appearances next week and I don't want to cancel three appearances next week. " He paused. "I wanted to be near you."
The specific straightforwardness of that landed somewhere in my chest.
"Okay," I said.
We worked.
The Price-Kent call came through — Isaac's voice on the laptop speaker, running quarterly projections with Micah in the background, and Isaac was capable of indoor voice, but he was brisk and efficient and the numbers were not simple numbers, and somewhere in the middle of it I heard Micah's voice ask a question and my whole body went slightly strange for a moment.
I managed it. I answered my own email. I did not allow myself to think about cedar and cold air.
The call ended.
Dean had fallen asleep. He did that sometimes when his pre-heat was close — the biological exhaustion that came before the hormonal spike, the last quiet before the storm. He was deeply asleep in the corner of my living room in a nest made of my things.
I looked at him for a longer moment than was strictly necessary.
He'd asked to be near me. Not because I was a stabilizer. Not because the law said he needed me. Because he'd had a hard week and I was the person he wanted to be near when things were hard, and that was a very specific thing, and I was going to let myself feel it.
My phone lit up. A text from Micah — the first direct contact we'd had since Marin's office, because we were both respecting the pace and I'd set the terms and he'd held to them exactly.
I heard the call was productive. Thank you for your patience with the scheduling conflicts.
Professional. Careful. Giving me nothing I hadn't asked for.
I typed back: The numbers look good.
A pause. Then: Dean is with you.
Not a question. He could probably sense it — the alpha/omega regulation triangles that ran through this pack were things I still didn't have complete models for. Or he'd just done the math: Dean had left the office early, stressed, and Avery's address was the one he'd go to.
Yes, I typed.
Good, he replied.
That was it. No pressure. No pivot. Just: good.
I sat with my phone for a moment.
Then I picked up my laptop and moved to the end of the couch closest to Dean's nest and kept working.
He moved in his sleep, just slightly. His hand rested near the edge of the nest. Without making a decision about it, I reached down and touched his fingers briefly.
His breathing evened out.
I kept working.
Outside, the city kept going. Inside, in my apartment that was too small for what was happening in it and exactly the right size, the quiet held.
I didn't leave.
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