Chapter Twenty
ISAAC
I came to her apartment on a Sunday morning.
Not to continue anything. Not because Dean was there or Micah had been or because the pack required something.
I came because I'd been thinking for a week about the conversation I needed to have with Avery and I hadn't had it yet, and the longer I waited, the more it would calcify into an unspoken thing we were all trying to stop letting things calcify into.
She opened the door in pajamas and an expression that said she hadn't entirely expected me. "Isaac."
"Good morning. I should have texted first."
"You should have, yes." She stepped back. "Come in anyway."
Her apartment had a quality I'd noticed the first time I was in it — the specific composition of a space that someone had built deliberately around their own life.
Not performative. Chosen. The books were organized in a way that told you something about how she thought.
The plants were the three surviving members of what had clearly once been a larger collection.
The coffeepot looked like something she'd researched.
"Coffee?" she said.
"Please."
She made it with the economy of long practice without thinking.
I sat at her kitchen table and looked at her apartment and thought about the fact that Micah and Dean both had homes that were larger and more formal than this, and that this was where the pack kept coming to.
The smallest, least dynasty-appropriate space in the entire configuration, and somehow the one that functioned like a center of gravity.
She set the coffee down and sat across from me.
"You have something to say," she said.
"I do."
"Go ahead."
"I need to be honest with you about something I think you're getting wrong," I said. "Specifically about me."
She held her mug. "Okay."
"You've told Dean, and I think you've told Micah, that I'm the hardest for you to trust. Because of the scent-match. Because you feel like you can't compete with a biological bond."
She was quiet for a moment. "He told you."
"Dean tells me things he thinks I need to know. He's good at that." I kept my voice even. "I want to address it directly because I don't think the competition model is accurate. And I think you do, which is making you hold a distance from me that I don't want."
"I'm here. That's not distant."
"You're here in the way you're here for Dean's pre-heat — managing something.
Staying adjacent. Not letting yourself actually arrive.
" I watched her face. "I notice you, Avery.
I've been noticing you since you walked into Marin's office and told four people what the terms were.
I was not noticing you because your biology regulates mine.
I was noticing you because you walked in knowing you were outnumbered and you said your terms anyway. "
She looked at her coffee.
"What I feel for Micah is also real," I continued.
"It has been real for nine years and I'm only now getting to where I can name it in a room with him.
He is not a competitor to you and you are not a competitor to him.
The pack doesn't have a hierarchy of bonds.
It has bonds that are different from each other and all of them real. "
She was quiet for a long moment.
"What do you feel for Dean?" she said.
"Something I would call love if I were further along in practicing saying true things." I kept my eyes on her. "And I would use the same word for what I'm building with you, if you let me build it."
"That's a lot of words," she said.
"I know. I've been composing them since Tuesday."
A beat. Then she almost laughed — the eye-version of it, the one that was better than the real one.
"Micah," she said. "The two of you. Is that — how long?"
"Nine years of both of us being bad at the naming," I said. "We're getting better. Specifically because building something with three other people and leaving your own bond unnamed is, as he pointed out, building on unacknowledged foundations."
"He said that."
"Yes. He's more articulate about emotions than he wants people to think."
She held her mug for a moment. "You came here to tell me you see me."
"Yes."
"Not the stabilizer biology. Me."
"Avery Yates, who uses chopsticks and has too many books and runs a design firm and is helping rewrite a legal framework while managing a client deadline and has never once in the time I've known her asked for help before she absolutely needed it.
" I looked at her steadily. "That's who I'm here about. Not the biology."
She was quiet for a long time.
Then: "Stay for breakfast," she said.
It was a small thing. It was not a small thing.
"All right," I said.
She made eggs. We sat in her kitchen and ate them and talked about Dean's most recent legislative session and Micah's upcoming board reckoning and whether her client's artisanal salt rebrand had finally been resolved (it had, in favor of a nautical motif she'd described as "fine, I guess").
The morning came through her windows and it was, in a way I hadn't expected this particular Sunday to be, very good.
When I left, I texted Micah: I talked to her.
He replied: How did it go?
I stayed for breakfast.
A pause. Then: Good.
Then: Isaac.
Yes.
I meant what I said. About the naming. About all of it.
I stood on the street outside her building with the Sunday morning around me and texted back: I know. So did I.
Then I put my phone away and walked home, thinking about four people becoming a thing that the law hadn't decided the shape of yet, and thinking that the shape might not be the law's to decide.
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