10. Soren
Soren
The mic is right at my chin, my hands are shaking so bad I can barely hold my poems, and there are at least forty people cramming themselves into these folding chairs. I’m pretty sure I’m about to forget how to read.
Not read poetry. Just read, period. I’ve been doing that since kindergarten, so this is pathetic.
Kendra materializes at my elbow with her clipboard and a lanyard that says FESTIVAL COORDINATOR in aggressive capital letters.
“Just tilt it,” she says, reaching past me to adjust the mic with the bored efficiency of someone who’s done this nine hundred times.
“The neck bends. See? Three poems, ten minutes, then we mingle. Don’t forget to mention your title card.
” She taps the printed placard on the lectern’s edge, and then she’s gone, clipboard-first, toward the refreshment table.
I suck in a breath, try to flatten out my pages, and force myself to look at the room.
If I look at the tree for more than a second, I’ll totally lose my nerve.
Second row: my people. Jude is wearing a T-shirt he clearly ironed himself that says POETRY FUCKS.
Rhys, beside him, has the quiet, resigned expression of a man who tried to talk his mate out of something and failed spectacularly.
Milo and Callum are next. Milo has a Tupperware of lemon bars balanced on his knees, because Milo shows love in baked goods.
Benji and Knox at the end of the row, Benji’s boots already propped on the chair in front of him.
Behind them, Shay and Declan, Shay texting, Declan scanning the room like he’s casing the joint.
Next to Declan, a wiry alpha with dark hair is practically bouncing in his seat, whispering something that makes Wren, at the back wall, close his eyes for a second like he’s counting to ten.
Aaron. Wren’s brother. He showed up twenty minutes ago, announced himself as “Team Wren, ride or die,” shook Jude’s hand like Jude was a celebrity, and immediately started asking Benji about the doodles on his arms. He’s loud and fidgety and grins like a golden retriever.
The complete opposite of Wren, but honestly, it’s the most endearing thing I’ve seen all week.
Professor Hannover catches my eye from the side of the room and gives me a thumbs up.
Okay. I can do this.
I adjust the mic one last centimeter and start.
The first poem is “Inventory.” It starts I have a drawer of things I did not ask for, which I was proud of at two in the morning with all seven birds lined up on my windowsill like tiny wooden judges, and which, out loud, to forty people, sounds like peeling my skin off and pinning it to the wall next to the paintings.
But the words come out. The room stays quiet. I find a rhythm.
The second poem is about the bench. The waiting.
The specific kind of hollow it carves in you when you check the same spot every morning and sometimes there’s a gift and sometimes there’s just the empty groove in the wood where a gift could have been.
I hear Milo take a soft, sharp breath in the second row.
The third poem is the one that costs me.
It’s called “If You Came Out.” It is exactly as subtle as it sounds.
I lose my place halfway through the second stanza because Wren shifts at the back of the room and my eyes snag on him.
He’s standing with his arms loose at his sides, shoulders soft, watching me like I’m the only person here.
Like the forty other people and the folding chairs and the shitty fluorescent lights dissolved.
He is completely fixed on me, and I lose the line.
Which is funny, because this poem is about my anonymous admirer, my wood elf, the ghost who carves birds and leaves them on benches. Not the alpha I’ve been kind of sleeping with for two weeks.
Except Wren looks at me like I read his diary out loud, and my stomach flips sideways.
His throat works as he swallows. My gaze catches there, the slow roll of muscle under warm skin above his open collar.
My brain, which should be focused on the poem I’m performing for forty people, decides this is the moment to wonder what sound he’d make if I pressed my mouth to that exact spot.
If I licked the hollow of his throat and tasted the clean sweat and warm sawdust that clings to him.
If I bit down just enough to leave a mark and he made some quiet, wrecked noise that only I would ever hear.
My fingers tremble against the page. I find my line. Finish the poem.
There’s one perfect, terrible second of silence before Jude starts clapping like he’s at a rock concert and everyone else piles in.
I step back from the lectern on legs that feel boneless, and Milo is already there with a paper cup of cheap white wine and a lemon bar.
“You were incredible,” he says, pressing both into my hands.
“I almost threw up twice.”
“You hid it well.”
Mingling starts. People drift with their wine, low hum of conversation filling the gallery.
Knox and Wren end up side by side by the tree, and seeing them together makes me want to write something down.
Knox points at the joinery where the trunk meets the first branch, asking about the technique, and Wren answers in that quiet, careful way he has.
Short sentences. Precise words. His hands move to show how the grain runs, and Knox nods like he’s taking mental notes.
Those hands. I keep watching them: broad palms, long fingers, the faint white scars from years of knives and chisels.
I remember one of them braced beside my head the night he stepped between Derek and me, the other cradling the back of my neck, how his thumb had brushed my jaw like I was something breakable and precious at the same time.
How they felt two nights ago, steady and sure, spreading me open while he knelt between my thighs and took me apart with his mouth until I forgot my own name.
I wonder what they’d feel like wrapped around my cock right now, patient and unhurried, working me until I’m shaking against him, whining into his shoulder while he murmurs something low and possessive against my hair.
I take a sip of wine and try to think about literally anything else.
“You should meet Mars,” Knox says, loud enough for me to hear across the room. “He runs the shop where I apprentice. He’s been wanting carved accent pieces for the custom furniture line. This is exactly—“
“I’m not that good,” Wren cuts in.
Knox stares at him. “Dude. Look at your tree.”
Aaron appears between them, throwing an arm around Wren’s shoulders. “He does this. Don’t worry about it. He once built our mom a jewelry box with inlaid mother-of-pearl and told her it was ‘just practice.’”
Wren’s ears go bright red. He ducks his head, mouth twitching against a smile he clearly thinks would be too much, and I have to bite the inside of my cheek because honestly? He’s so cute it’s stupid.
Then Benji’s at my elbow, voice low enough for just me.
“So. Your anonymous admirer.”
“What about him?”
Benji takes a sip of wine. His eyes track from Wren’s tree to the drawstring pouch at my hip, where Keats’s outline is just visible through the fabric. Then back to the tree.
“That’s long-term siege behavior,” he says. “Whoever’s doing this has it bad.” He pauses. “And I’m thinking that maybe your mystery alpha is a lot closer than you think he is.”
I laugh, but it comes out too fast and too high. “Benji, come on.”
“I’m just saying.”
“You’re seeing things.”
“Am I?”
He holds my gaze a beat too long, then shrugs and drifts back toward Knox. I watch him go, telling myself the flutter in my stomach is the wine.
The idea doesn’t leave, though. It lodges behind my ribs, this warm, sharp little splinter I can’t dig out.
Kendra finds me next, which is way less pleasant. She corners me by the photography wall with her clipboard and her branding voice.
“Soren. Your cycle is exactly what the final showcase needs as its anchor piece.” She’s already sketching it in the air with her hands.
“The anonymous admirer angle—it’s compelling, it’s romantic, it’s a built-in narrative.
We pair your poetry with Wren’s tree as the visual centerpiece, the carved birds as the through-line, and we’ve got a story that practically markets itself. ”
“I don’t know if—“
“The audience tonight was eating it up. You saw that.”
I did. That’s the problem.
“Lean into it for the final showcase. The mystery, the yearning, the not-knowing. It’s basically a love story without an ending, which is catnip.”
I glance across the room at Wren. He’s half-turned from Aaron, his hand on the back of his neck, that thing he does when something hits a nerve.
He heard that. A love story without an ending.
His mouth presses flat, and there’s something braced in his posture, like someone just took the most private thing about him and put it behind glass.
“Okay,” I hear myself say. “I’ll think about it.”
“Think fast. I need concepts by next week.” She pats my arm and moves on.
My eyes stay on Wren. He’s stepped behind the tree now, putting its trunk between himself and the rest of the room.
Aaron is talking to Knox, animated and oblivious, so Wren is alone with whatever shut his expression down.
His thumb works at an invisible rough spot on one of the lower branches, sanding at edges only he can feel.
Then Aaron breaks off and heads for Wren, speaking low and urgent. Wren shakes his head once, sharp and final, and Aaron throws his hands up.
I don’t know what they’re arguing about. But Wren’s hand grips the back of his neck, and his eyes never leave me even while his brother is practically whisper-yelling at him.
And I think about what Benji said.
It’s a coincidence. It has to be.
The gallery is thinning out. Jude is taking a selfie with the tree. Shay is in a heated debate with Kendra about data-driven marketing, and Declan is leaning against the wall behind him, looking like a man who knows his mate is about to win.
I cross the gallery. My heart hammers. Wren straightens up when he sees me coming, his hand dropping from his neck, and this expression flashes across his face, half terrified, half hopeful, and I think: yeah, I know exactly how that feels.
“Hi,” I say when I reach him. Possibly the least poetic opening I’ve ever managed.
“Hi.” His voice is low and rough. His eyes drop to my mouth for exactly one second before he catches himself. “You were good up there.”
“You keep saying that.”
“You keep being good.”
My face goes hot. I bump my shoulder against his arm because I need to touch him, and a shoulder bump is the most I can get away with in a room full of my entire friend group. He smells like pine and warm cotton, and standing this close makes my whole body hum.
“Come home with me?” I ask, smaller than I intended. “After. Callum said he’d give us a ride.”
Wren’s expression goes soft in a way that wrecks me. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”