15. Soren
Soren
My apartment is spotless. I scrubbed the bathroom and washed every piece of fabric I own. I ran the sheets through the wash twice because they still smelled like him. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to keep that scent or get rid of it, so I washed them again and then felt instantly, stupidly sad.
My phone has been on Do Not Disturb since this morning. I got up, made tea, and sat on my bedroom floor, staring at the nest I’ve somehow built around a man.
I can’t look at the things in the nest right now. If I do, all I see is his face.
Wren. Quiet, always bumping into door frames. He stepped between me and Derek without hesitation. He kissed me in a hallway like I was air. He knelt on my bed and touched me so gently I forgot how to speak. My alpha. My mate.
I press my palm to the bite on my neck. It throbs, warm and steady, and my body responds right away. My body isn’t confused about any of this. It’s all in.
My mind is the one causing trouble.
A soft knock at the door makes me jump.
“If you don’t answer in ten seconds, I’m using the emergency key,” Milo calls through the door. “I brought groceries, so my hands are full. If you make me wait, I’ll drop eggs on your doorstep and you’ll have to clean it up.”
I walk across the living room and open the door. Milo stands there with two canvas bags, his dark hair held back by one of Callum’s headbands. His face is gentle, but he’s clearly not taking no for an answer.
“Hi,” I say.
“You haven’t answered your phone in nineteen hours.” He steps inside without waiting for me to invite him. “Jude wanted to come, but I told him I’d handle it.”
“Handle what?”
He sets the bags on the counter next to the birds. He glances at them, then at me, starts to say something, but his eyes catch on my neck.
He stops.
The canvas bag in his hand sags, and for a moment Milo just stands there, staring at the bite on my neck like he’s forgotten how to blink. It’s silly, since he has one too, and Jude already put a photo of mine in the group chat about four minutes after he saw it at the mixer.
“Soren.” His voice is soft and shaky, nothing like his usual self. “Look at you.”
I touch the mark. “Yeah.”
He sets the bag down gently, as if he forgot he was holding it. He lifts his hand, hovers near my jaw, and tilts my chin with two fingers to see better. His eyes are shining.
“Oh my god.” His voice cracks. “It’s so much better in person. You have a mate.”
Then he hugs me, hard. Both arms go around my shoulders, his chin resting on top of my head because he’s a little taller. He takes a shaky breath, the kind he does when he’s trying not to cry. His chest presses against the bite and it throbs, and my eyes sting too.
“I’m so happy for you,” he says into my hair. “So happy. You have no idea.”
“Don’t.” My voice is shaky. “If you cry, I’ll cry, and I’ve already cried twice today. I’m dehydrated.”
He laughs, the sound thick with emotion. He pulls back and holds me at arm’s length, studying my face the way only Milo does, like he’s trying to read what I’m really feeling.
Then Milo’s concerned side takes over.
“But you’re not happy right now,” he says.
“It’s complicated.”
“Tell me everything.” He turns to the grocery bags and starts taking things out: butter, eggs, cocoa powder, chocolate chips. “Sit down.”
I sit down. Not because he told me to, but because my legs are tired from pacing and Milo is already moving through my kitchen like it’s his own. He lived here for two years before Callum, so he knows where everything is. He doesn’t ask what happened. He measures cocoa powder into a bowl and waits.
It takes me a few minutes.
“He’s the ghost,” I say to the table. “The birds. The bench. All of it. Wren is my secret admirer.”
Milo’s whisk pauses for a moment, then keeps going. “Okay.”
“He told me while we were together. He let it all come out. Every bird. The bench he fixed. Everything.”
“How did it feel?”
“Like getting hit by a truck made of feelings.” I dig my thumbnail into the table.
“I’m not exactly angry. I get why he hid.
He’s scared he’s not enough without the things he makes.
I’ve seen that in him. But knowing why someone hurt you doesn’t make it stop hurting, you know?
And now I’m sitting here with his bite on my neck and his birds on my counter, and I can’t tell if I’m upset or embarrassed that I wanted it so much I couldn’t see what was right in front of me the whole time. ”
Milo pours the batter into a pan, slides it into the oven, and sets the timer. Then he pulls out the chair across from me, sits down, and folds his hands on the table.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You’re going to anyway.”
His mouth twitches. “If Wren had come up to you last fall, before any of the birds or anything else, and said, ‘Hey, I think you’re amazing,’ would you have believed him?”
I open my mouth, then close it.
“Or would you have panicked?” Milo asks gently. “Would you have told yourself it was too good to be true? That he’d get bored? That you’d want it too much and scare him off?”
His question hangs in the air.
“I would’ve panicked,” I admit, my voice small. “I would’ve thought he was messing with me, or that he’d realize I’m too much and leave.”
“So he found another way in,” Milo says.
“A slower way. He let you fall in love with being loved before you had to face the person loving you.” His eyes are steady and warm.
“It doesn’t make it okay that he didn’t tell you.
He should have, much sooner. But the devotion behind it?
Soren, that man carved you individual feathers on a bird small enough to fit in your pocket.
He’s not hiding because he doesn’t care.
He’s hiding because he was scared the real him wouldn’t measure up to the version you imagined. ”
My eyes burn. That’s what I’ve been circling for nineteen hours—laundry, moving birds, rereading my own poems like they might hold some answer.
“And your jinx thing,” Milo continues, kindly. “This idea that wanting something too much keeps it away. You know that’s not real, right? That’s just fear in disguise.”
It hits differently when someone you trust says it out loud. The jinx was never fate. It was me, flinching before anything could hurt me first.
“Look at us,” Milo says. “Look at everyone. Jude wanted Rhys so much he almost went into heat in a lecture hall. I wanted Callum so much I nearly ruined my friendship with Ava. Benji wanted Knox back so badly he punched a wall. And Shay, who built his whole personality around not wanting anything, fell so hard for Declan he reorganized the man’s bar inventory as a love language. ”
I almost laugh. Almost.
“None of us got our person by wanting less,” Milo says.
“We got them by wanting enough to stay when it got scary. Your wanting isn’t a curse, Soren.
It’s what kept you on that bench. It’s why you carry birds every day.
It’s why you wrote poems about a man you’d never met and meant every word.
Hiding from it is the only thing that actually keeps it away. ”
“But what if—“
“There’s no jinx.” His voice is firm now, all Milo.
“There never was. You got so scared of losing something beautiful that you convinced yourself wanting it was the danger. And Wren got so scared of being ordinary that he convinced himself the birds were better than the man. You’re both wrong. And you’re both here.”
I look down at my hands on the table. There’s an ink stain on my left index finger from yesterday’s pen leak. There’s a faint groove on my ring finger from rubbing Keats’s belly for weeks, a tiny indent made by a wooden bird small enough to lose in a pouch.
“I love him,” I say, and the words come out easily, like I’ve finally stopped holding my breath.
“I love him. The real him. The one who walks into door frames, can’t make eye contact when he’s emotional, and puts himself between me and anything that might hurt me.
I love the birds and I love the man, and what hurts is thinking he doesn’t know that.
That he thinks I only wanted the mystery. ”
“Then that’s what you tell him.”
“What if I mess it up?”
“You won’t.”
“Milo—“
“You won’t. Because you’re not going to give a big speech.
You’ll just tell him the truth, like you always do—honestly, probably while crying a little.
And he’ll hear you, because that man has been listening to you from fifty feet away for a year.
Imagine what happens when you’re right in front of him. ”
The oven timer goes off. Milo gets up, pulls out the brownies, and sets them on the cooling rack. The apartment fills with the smell of dark chocolate and melted butter, warm and rich over the lavender from my candle.
I pick up Keats from the counter and turn her over in my fingers. There’s a tiny imperfection on her underside, a spot where the knife slipped. I’ve felt it a hundred times. I always thought it made her more real.
Wren’s hands made this. The same hands that shake when he’s nervous but go perfectly steady when he touches me.
“Okay,” I say.
Milo looks up from cutting brownies. “Okay?”
“Okay. I’m going to talk to him. Before the showcase.” I swallow. The jinx is still there, small and mine, but not real. “I’m done pretending that wanting him will break this. I’m going to tell him the birds were never the point. He was. He was always the point.”
Milo smiles. “Good.”
“Can I have a brownie first?”
“They need to cool.”
“Milo.”
“Five minutes.”
“I might die in five minutes.”
“You’ve survived worse.” He slides a plate across the counter anyway, the brownie still steaming at the edges. “Eat. Then text him.”
I eat the brownie. It’s perfect, because Milo’s baking is always perfect. Because my friends show up with butter, tell me the truth, and refuse to let me rearrange my birds in peace.
I pick up my phone and turn off Do Not Disturb.
Ninety-three notifications come in at once: Jude in all caps, Benji with a raised-eyebrow emoji six times, Shay with a clinical “checking in, respond at your convenience,” Jude again, Jude a third time, and a separate text from Aaron asking if I’m okay because Wren is “being a freak about it.” Jude a fourth time.
I scroll past all of them to Wren’s name.
I type: Can we talk before the showcase?
Send.
The read receipt appears instantly. He was waiting. Of course he was. My quiet, stubborn alpha, sitting in his workshop with his phone in his hand, too scared to knock on a door I left open for him.
The three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
Yes. Please. Whenever you want.
I close my eyes and press the phone against my chest.