12. Soren
Soren
Three days have passed since Wren bit me. Now it’s midnight, and I’m at my windowsill, shifting carved birds around, feeling like I’m losing my mind.
Keats isn’t in her usual spot. But she’s perfect: tiny body, tilted head, wings so thin the light shines through.
She’s been at the center of my collection since I found her, right between Stumble, the robin with the crooked wing who wobbles but never falls, and Snowdrop, my junco, who’s so small and round I thought she was a strange sparrow for the first two weeks.
I slide Keats two inches to the left, then back, then forward again, turning her to face the bed.
Before Keats, there was always a rhythm. It wasn’t regular or predictable, but it was steady enough.
Then everything changed. Wren bit me.
I put Keats down a little too hard, and her beak taps against Stumble. I flinch, as if I really hurt her.
“Sorry,” I whisper. She’s just wood. Here I am at midnight, apologizing to a carved bird, and it feels like I’m losing my mind.
I pick her up again and run my thumb over the groove between her wing and body, the spot that’s smooth from being held so often.
I know what Milo would do. He’d make tea, sit with me on the kitchen floor, and gently ask what I’m really afraid of. And I’d have to tell him the truth.
My admirer saw the bite, saw that I’m claimed, and decided I didn’t need the birds anymore.
It makes sense. It’s logical. An anonymous admirer wouldn’t keep leaving gifts for an omega who already belongs to someone else.
But what really makes me want to scream into a pillow is that I never got to choose.
I never had the chance to stand in front of both of them and say, you, it was always you.
One stepped out of the shadows and the other disappeared.
Now I have this perfect, overwhelming alpha in my bed and a shelf of wooden birds that feel like letters from a ghost.
If the universe had given me a choice, I would have picked Wren.
But knowing that doesn’t make the ache go away.
My friends all have their own ways of dealing with being overwhelmed.
Milo bakes, Benji draws, and Jude talks until the feeling fades.
I do this: I pace, rearrange things, and touch each of the seven birds one by one, like counting rosary beads.
My whole body buzzes with energy that feels too big for my apartment, too much for the quiet, too much for the version of me who sits and writes poems and waits.
I try to write. I take out the notebook Wren gave me—the hand-bound one with a leather wrap and thick cotton pages he found at a craft market—and sit at my desk.
The birds stopped coming and I—
Nothing. The line just sits there, staring back at me.
The birds stopped coming, but I still check every morning.
I scratch the line out so hard the ink bleeds through the page.
He gave me everything I asked for and I’m still
Still what? Still hungry? Still ungrateful? Still convinced that if I stop looking over my shoulder, all of this will disappear like sugar in rain?
I close the notebook, press my palms flat against the cover, and take a breath.
This always happens. I want something too much and then it slips away. Birthday candles, shooting stars, the time I wished so hard to get into the creative writing program that I made myself sick for a week. Wanting feels like it jinxes things.
The apartment is too quiet. It’s been that way since Shay moved out, since the last bedroom door stopped opening and closing at odd hours. Now it’s just the AC unit dying in the window, the fridge humming, and my own pulse, too fast for someone sitting still.
Wren texted me forty minutes ago: Finishing a repair on the east hall lighting. Coming over after if that’s okay.
I texted back always with three hearts, because I really do use heart emojis without irony, and because it’s true. I couldn’t figure out how to say please come over, I’m reorganizing birds and I think I’m having a breakdown, without it sounding like I’m asking for help. Maybe I am. I’m not sure.
I get up, sit on the bed, then get up again.
I open the closet and pull out Wren’s red-and-black flannel, the one he left last Tuesday, and press it to my face.
It still smells like him, even after three days.
My whole body feels soft and sharp at once, and I want him here so much it hurts.
I put the flannel on. It hangs past my wrists. I love it, but tonight it isn’t enough.
I go back to the birds. I set Keats in the center of the shelf, the place of honor.
Who are you? I wondered, running my thumb over her tiny head. Who puts this much care into something for someone they’ve never even met?
It’s been almost a year of birds, and I still don’t know. Now I might never find out.
My throat tightens. I press my knuckle to my teeth and breathe through it.
This is ridiculous. I have a mate. I have a claiming bite I’ve been showing off like a new tattoo, a nest full of blankets that smell like both of us, an alpha who treated me like I was something sacred and then held me like I might break.
I have the thing, the real thing I’ve been writing poems about since I was fifteen.
So why am I feeling this way?
There’s a knock on the door, and I open it to find Wren.
His eyes are tired, tool bag slung over one shoulder, sawdust in his dark hair, and a grease smudge on his jaw he probably hasn’t noticed.
He’s wearing his gray campus maintenance shirt and jeans stained at the knees.
His eyes light up when he sees me, resting possessively on the bite mark on my neck.
He opens his mouth. “Hey, I—“
I grab the front of his shirt with both hands and haul him inside.
I kick the door shut with my heel, and then I’m pushing him against it, up on my toes, kissing his jaw, his neck, the rough patch of stubble under his ear.
His tool bag hits the floor with a thud.
His hands come up to my waist, big and warm and automatic, steadying me even when I’m clearly not steady.
“Soren—“
I bite his earlobe. Not gently.
“Sor—“
“Don’t talk yet.” My voice is too sharp. “I just need you before I start thinking myself in circles.”
His hands tighten on my waist. His fingers span almost all the way around, and that fact does something filthy to me every time.
“Hey. Hey.” He catches my chin, tilts my face up.
His eyes search mine in the dim hallway light, and I watch him get it.
The manic energy. The buzzing under my skin I can’t turn off.
“What happened?” Low and serious. His quiet-alpha voice, the one that goes soft instead of loud when something is wrong.
“Nothing happened. I’m fine. Kiss me.”
“You’re shaking.”
“I’m fine.“ I pull his shirt over his head; he lets me, arms up, because Wren always lets me take what I need, and press my mouth to his collarbone.
Salt and warm skin under my lips. His hands slide into my hair, cradling the back of my head, and the gentleness of it cracks something behind my ribs sideways.
I don’t want gentle right now. I want to be so full of him there’s no room for anything else. No room for the empty bench, the silent shelf, or the terrible, greedy thought that I got my fairy tale and still ended up grieving. If I can get him close enough, deep enough, maybe the noise will stop.
I grab his belt and pull him toward the bedroom. He follows, of course he does, steady and sure-footed even when I’m a complete disaster, but his hand catches the doorframe as we pass through.
“Soren. Talk to me.”
“After.” I tug him to the bed. The nest swallows us: blankets, the flannel I’m wearing, the quilt Milo’s mom sent.
The seven birds watch from the shelf. A tiny wooden audience.
I shove a pillow aside and pull Wren down on top of me, hooking my leg over his hip, grinding up into him before he’s even settled.
He groans, low in his chest. His cock hardens against my thigh. He’s always so responsive, always ready for me, like his body has a standing policy about saying yes to mine. Usually that makes me feel powerful and chosen.
Tonight it just makes me want to cry.
I kiss him harder, biting his lower lip. He kisses me back, deep and thorough, one hand braced by my head. The other slides under the flannel to my bare waist and his thumb traces my hipbone. I arch into it, chasing the contact, starving for it.
His calluses catch on my skin. Rough, working hands, broad-knuckled and calloused, smelling faintly of sawdust, and heat goes through me.
My body answers with a rush of slick, sudden, and embarrassing, soaking straight through my joggers.
I press my face into his throat so he won’t see how fast I’m unraveling.
“I need you inside me before I can think,” I say against his mouth, rougher than I mean it to. “Wren. Please. Before I think.”
His forehead drops to mine. He’s breathing hard. “I’m here,” he says. Low and sure, the way he always says it. Like gravity. Like the floor.
“Then stop being patient and touch me.”
His eyes change. Not the soft, careful Wren, but the other one. The one who stopped Derek with a look. The one who growled mine against my throat while his teeth broke skin. The one who goes quiet and wild instead of loud.
He flips me onto my back so fast I gasp. His mouth finds my throat, the claiming bite, and he drags his lips across the mark, not biting, just pressing, and the sensation zings through me like I grabbed a live wire. My back arches off the bed.
“Like that?” he murmurs against my neck. He already knows the answer. He’s known it since that hallway. It’s almost unfair how quickly he learned me.
“Yes—yes—come on—“
His hand slides down my spine, under the waistband of my joggers.
His fingers find me slick; my body doesn’t wait for permission with him, just opens up and gets wet, and the sound he makes is low and hungry and possessive.
His middle finger drags through the mess, slow and deliberate, circling my hole without pushing in.