Chapter 19 Ray
Ray
Idon't remember driving here.
I remember the stairwell door closing behind me.
I remember standing in the hallway on the other side of it and everything being wrong — temperature wrong, skin wrong, everything too loud and too bright and my hands shaking against my thighs.
I remember walking to the parking garage.
I remember sitting in my car for a while.
And then I'm here, in front of Devon's building, and I don't remember the drive.
The pre-bond withdrawal is a real thing.
Devon warned me. It's physical — not just sadness, not just missing someone, but my body's regulatory system losing the signal it's been calibrating to for weeks.
My hands won't stop shaking. I'm cold even though it's not cold.
There's an ache behind my sternum that feels like something is reaching out of my chest toward a person who isn't here.
I text Devon. Can I come up?
He doesn't ask why. Door's open.
Devon takes one look at me and doesn't say anything. He just steps aside and lets me in and then his hand is on the back of my neck — the big-brother grip, the one that says I've got you without words — and he steers me to the couch and pushes me down onto it.
"Alex is putting Gabriel down," he says. "You want water or something stronger?"
"Stronger."
He brings me a beer and sits in the chair across from me and waits.
He doesn't push. He just sits there with his legs crossed and a look that's part worry and part the very specific expression Devon gets when someone has hurt someone he loves and he's calculating the appropriate level of retribution.
"Miles told me it's over," I say. My voice sounds weird. Flat. "Whatever we were — he ended it. In the stairwell at work. He said HR flagged us and the partnership is conditional and he can't do this anymore."
"He told you it's over in a stairwell."
"Yeah."
"After sleeping in his bed."
"Yeah."
Devon is quiet for a second. "Do I need to go down there?"
"No." I take a drink. It doesn't help. Nothing is going to help except the one thing I can't have.
"It's — there's more to it. He has reasons.
He has—" I stop. Because the barrenness is right there, sitting on my tongue, and it would explain everything — why Miles has been scared, why he pushed me away, why he thinks he's protecting me.
It would make Devon understand. And I can't say it.
It's not my secret. It's the thing Miles has been carrying since he was sixteen and he threw it at me like a grenade and even though it's in my hands now it still belongs to him.
"He has reasons he won't let me explain. "
Devon gives me a look. "Reasons like what?"
"I can't tell you. It's his thing. But it's real. It's not — he's not being a dick for no reason. He's scared."
"That doesn't make it okay."
"I know."
Alex comes out of the bedroom. He's in a t-shirt and sweatpants and his hair is pushed back and he looks at me on the couch with the beer and the tremor in my fingers and he doesn't ask what happened.
He just sits on the arm of Devon's chair and puts his hand on Devon's shoulder and waits for someone to fill him in.
"Miles cut him off," Devon says.
"In a stairwell," Alex says flatly. Not a question.
"How did you—"
"You look like someone who just got their guts rearranged in a stairwell." He shrugs. "I've got eyes."
I almost laugh. It comes out more like a cough. "He told me things. Things he's been hiding. Then he didn't let me respond. He just — pushed me out. I told him it wasn't over and he told me to leave."
"What did he tell you?" Devon asks.
I shake my head. "I can't."
Devon starts to push and Alex's grip tightens on his shoulder, very slightly, and Devon stops. They have an entire conversation in that gesture — Devon wanting to know, Alex saying let it go, Devon deferring. It takes about two seconds.
"Okay," Devon says. "You can't tell us. But you think his reasons are real."
"They're real. They're just — they're not the reasons he thinks they are. He thinks he's doing the right thing. He thinks he's protecting me." The word barren is right there and I swallow it. "He's wrong, but he can't see he's wrong, and he won't let me close enough to show him."
We sit with that for a while. Gabriel makes a noise from the bedroom — not a cry, just a fussy murmur — and Alex tilts his head to listen and it passes.
"So what are you going to do?" Devon asks.
"I'm going to get him back."
"How?"
"I don't know. I'll figure it out. I'll—"
"Ray." Devon leans forward. His voice is gentle but his eyes are doing that look when he's about to say something I don't want to hear. "I'm going to ask you something and I want you to actually think about it before you answer."
"Okay..."
"What were you doing before Miles?"
I blink. "What?"
"Before the conference. Before the case. Before whatever happened between you two. What were you doing with your life?"
"I was working. The job—"
"The job I guilted you into taking because you were bartending and sleeping till noon." Devon isn't being mean. He's being Devon, which is worse because Devon is usually right. "What's your plan, Ray? Not your plan for getting Miles back. Your plan. For you. For your life."
"I don't — this isn't about me right now. Miles is—"
"Miles is a grown man who made a choice and you can't control that. What I'm asking is: if he never comes back. If this is it. What does Ray Garcia's life look like?"
I open my mouth and nothing comes out. Because the honest answer is: I don't know.
Before Miles, I was showing up to a job I didn't care about and going out on weekends and calling Devon when I was bored.
I was fun. I was charming. I was the guy who makes everyone laugh and has no plans past next Thursday.
"That's what I thought," Devon says quietly.
"That's not—"
"You've been orbiting him for months." Devon's voice is careful, like he's handling glass.
"The case, the dinners, the late nights.
Everything you've done since the conference has been about Miles.
I get it — I do. He's important to you. But you can't build a life out of someone else, Ray.
You can't show up and say 'choose me' when you don't even know what you're offering besides—" He gestures vaguely. "Yourself."
"What's wrong with myself?"
"Nothing. But who is that? Without Miles, without the case, without the charm-your-way-through-it routine — who are you? What do you WANT?"
The question sits in the room like a weight. Gabriel fusses again and this time Alex gets up to check on him, and I'm left with Devon looking at me with an expression that's the most loving version of get your shit together I've ever seen.
"I don't know," I say. And the honesty of it is worse than the heartbreak.
Alex comes back with Gabriel on his shoulder. The baby is half-asleep, thumb in his mouth, doing that heavy-breathing thing babies do when they're fighting it. Alex sits back on the arm of Devon's chair and looks at me.
"When Ethan died," he says, and the room goes very still because Alex almost never talks about his brother, "I spent two years trying to disappear.
I drank, I isolated, I made myself into someone nobody could love because I thought that was safer.
" He adjusts Gabriel on his shoulder without looking away from me.
"Grad school was the first thing I did for myself.
Not to escape, not to impress anyone. Because I heard a sound in a studio and I thought, I want to make that.
That one thing that was mine was the foundation I built everything else on. Devon. Gabriel. This."
He doesn't say go do that. He doesn't give advice. He just looks at me steadily and says, "You can't save someone else from drowning if you don't have your own ground to stand on."
They go to bed eventually. Devon hugs me at the hallway entrance — a real hug, long, the kind where he puts his chin on my shoulder and squeezes — and says "I love you, idiot. Figure your shit out." Alex nods at me from the doorway and that nod carries more than most people's speeches.
I'm on the couch. The apartment is dark except for the nightlight in the hallway and the glow of the city through the curtains.
The couch smells like Devon and Alex and baby and home.
My body is still wrong — the pre-bond ache hasn't faded, just dulled from a scream to a steady throb — but the warmth of Devon's apartment takes the edge off the way it can't fully fix.
Gabriel wakes up at one-thirty. I hear the murmur through the wall and I'm up before Devon can be, moving on instinct, the way I always move toward a need.
I find him in the crib, fussing, his small face scrunched in the dark.
I pick him up and he settles against my chest immediately — my scent, my heartbeat, the familiar uncle smell — and I carry him back to the couch and sit in the dark with a baby drooling on my shirt.
He's so small. His hand grabs a fistful of my t-shirt and holds on and his breathing evens out and he's asleep in under a minute, just like that. Trusting without question that the arms holding him are safe.
Miles called himself a dead end. He said broken. He said my body doesn't work. He said it like a verdict, like evidence in a case he's been building against himself for twelve years.
I think about what he looked like when he said it.
Not the words — the face. The way his voice cracked on love and kept going.
The way he wrapped his arms around himself afterward like he was trying to hold himself together and failing.
The way he pressed his back against the wall and said if you touch me I won't be able to do this and what that sentence actually means — not I don't want you to touch me but I want it so much that I can't survive wanting it.
He can't have children. His body can't do what omega bodies are supposed to do.
That's real. That's a loss. I'm not going to sit here and pretend it's nothing because it's not nothing — it's a piece of the future he thought he'd have, and it was taken from him when he was sixteen, and he's been building walls around the wound ever since.
But.
Gabriel shifts on my chest. His tiny fist tightens on my shirt and his mouth makes a sucking motion in his sleep and he's here because Devon went into an unexpected heat and Alex was the only alpha around and nothing about it was planned.
None of these families were planned. Kole and Lawson weren't planned.
Adoption exists. Foster care exists. Families are built a hundred different ways that have nothing to do with whose body did what.
Miles called himself broken because he can't get pregnant.
He looked at me holding Noah at the Shaw firm and his expression shattered, and now I know why.
He saw the thing he thinks he can't have and he decided the kind thing was to take himself out of the equation before I figured it out and left on my own.
He's wrong. He's so completely, devastatingly wrong.
Not because the barrenness doesn't matter — it does, it's real, it's part of who he is — but because he thinks it's the most important thing about him, and it's not.
It's not even close. The most important thing about Miles Covington is that he kissed me back in that stairwell for one second before his fear took over, and in that second, he was the most honest he's ever been.
I want him. Not a version of him that works differently. Not a hypothetical omega who can give me biological children. Him. The man who drinks cold coffee and keeps his pens aligned and said the word love like it was being ripped out of him.
I want him and the barrenness doesn't change that. I've thought about it. I'm sitting here in the dark at two in the morning with a baby on my chest and I've thought about it honestly and the answer is the same: I want Miles.
But Devon is right too.
What does Ray Garcia's life look like?
I think about the case. The Whitfield-Crane deal — the phased diligence, the Shaw firm meetings, the way I read Whitaker's resistance and found a solution.
I was good at that. Not because Miles needed me to be.
Because I WAS. I read rooms. I find the human problem underneath the legal one.
I build bridges between people who can't hear each other.
The firm has a paralegal certification program.
I've seen the flyers in the break room. Twelve months, sponsored by McKenzie & Randall, leads to a real credential.
I walked past those flyers for months without thinking about them because I wasn't a career guy, I was just Ray, the fun one, the assistant, the fuckboy who fell into a real job by accident.
I'm not that anymore. I can't pinpoint when I stopped being that — maybe at the Shaw firm when I smoothed the Whitaker situation, maybe in the car when Miles said "you did good work" and meant it, maybe right now on this couch in the dark — but I'm not the guy who coasts anymore.
I want to build something. Something of my own, that I chose, that I'm good at because I worked for it, not because someone else needed me to be.
I want the paralegal program. I want the credential. I want to walk into a room and know I earned my seat instead of charmed my way into it.
And I want Miles.
Both. Not one for the other. Both.
Gabriel sighs in his sleep and nestles closer and I hold him and I look at the ceiling and the pre-bond aches and I let it. It hurts because it's real. It hurts because I chose someone and that someone pushed me away and the distance is a wound that won't close until I close it.
He said this isn't over and he told me to leave in the same conversation. I said this isn't over and he believed the second thing and not the first.
I'm going to show him he was wrong about that.
Not by showing up at his door with a speech.
By becoming someone worth choosing. By building my own ground.
Then by standing on it and saying: I know.
I know about the barrenness and the surgery and the wall you've been hiding behind, and I thought about it, and I'm here.
Not I don't care. Not it doesn't matter.
I know. And I'm still here.
I close my eyes. Gabriel breathes against my chest. The pre-bond hurts. Devon's question echoes. The paralegal flyer flashes behind my eyes.
Tomorrow I'll start. Tonight I hold the baby and I let the hurt be what it is and I wait for morning.