Chapter 6 Wren
Wren
Iwake up slowly and everything hurts.
Not sharp pain. A deep, full-body ache, like I ran a marathon in my sleep. My thighs are sore. My hips are sore. There's a tenderness between my legs that pulses with my heartbeat and I'm aware of it the way you're aware of a bruise you keep pressing on just to feel it throb.
The heat is gone. Or mostly gone. There's a residual warmth banked low in my gut, but the screaming need that's been running me for the past however many hours has faded to something manageable.
Quiet. My brain feels like someone wiped it clean and rebooted it.
Thoughts are coming back in pieces. Where I am. What happened. What I let happen.
I'm in a private room. Small, dim, just a bed and a side table and a door.
The club must move people here after. After everything.
The leather couch in the alcove is a memory I hold in my muscles more than my mind.
I'm under a blanket that smells like laundry detergent and underneath it I'm wearing my shirt and nothing else.
Somebody dressed me. Partially. Somebody carried me here.
The alpha.
He's in the room. I can feel him before I see him.
A presence near the wall, a warm weight of scent in the air.
I keep my eyes closed and breathe and his scent fills my lungs.
For one long stupid second I just let it.
It feels good. It feels like safety and sex and the particular ache of being known, which makes no sense because he's a stranger, and I lie there breathing him in and something in my chest turns over slow and warm.
Then my brain finishes rebooting.
The scent is different now. Without heat amplification it's not this huge overwhelming wave that shuts my thoughts down.
It's specific. Detailed. I can pick out the layers I couldn't parse before when I was too far gone to analyze anything.
There's the alpha musk, standard. Underneath that something warm, almost like cedar but not quite.
And under that, threading through all of it like a note in a chord I've been hearing for years without identifying.
My stomach drops.
I know this scent. I know it the way I know the smell of Tate's apartment on a Sunday afternoon.
I know it because it's been on Tate's couch, on Tate's hoodie that I borrowed once and then gave back too fast, in Tate's kitchen on mornings when I came over early and someone had already been there making coffee.
I know it because two years ago at Tate's birthday party someone stood too close to me and I caught a wave of it and my whole body lit up and I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face and told myself it was a pre-heat symptom.
I open my eyes.
He's sitting against the wall near the door.
His mask is still on but it's shifted, riding up on one side, and I can see his jaw.
The lower half of his face. A jaw I've looked at across Tate's living room and from the other end of a couch and one time across Tate's kitchen when he was standing at the counter shirtless making coffee and I turned around and left before anyone noticed.
Sullivan.
Tate's best friend. Tate's best friend just knotted me.
Twice. While I cried. While I begged. While I said please and I need your knot and made sounds I didn't know I could make, and he held me after and cleaned me up and told me I was perfect and he knew.
He knew the entire time. He knew it was me from the second I walked onto the floor and he stayed and he touched me and he knew.
"You're awake."
His voice. Without the heat roaring in my ears I can hear it clearly and it's him, it's so obviously him, and I don't know how I missed it except I do know. I wasn't thinking with my brain. I wasn't thinking at all.
I sit up. The blanket falls to my waist and the air is cold on my arms. I'm shaking but not from the temperature.
"Take off the mask."
He doesn't move for a second. Then his hand comes up and he pulls the mask off and it's Sully. Brown eyes, dark hair pushed back, the face I've seen a hundred times in Tate's apartment looking relaxed and easy and friendly. He doesn't look relaxed now. He looks like a man bracing for impact.
Good.
"You knew." My voice comes out flat and steady and I'm grateful for it because inside I'm falling apart. "On the floor. When I walked in. You recognized me."
"Yes."
"My scent."
"Yes."
"And you stayed."
He holds my eyes. "Yes."
"Did Tate—does Tate know about this place?"
"No." Something crosses his face. "Tate has nothing to do with this."
"Tate has everything to do with this." My voice is climbing and I force it back down. "He told you about me. That I don't deal with my heats. He worries about me, he talks to you about it because you're his best friend, and you took all of that and you used it."
I stop. I'm losing the thread and I had it a second ago.
I had the whole argument laid out and now it's falling apart because his face is right there, Sully's actual face, and my brain keeps flashing between this face and the mask and the sounds I was making an hour ago and I can't hold it all at the same time.
"You knew I was scared." Slower now. Finding it again. "And you were gentle. And you knew I was proud, so you used praise instead of—you told me I was perfect. You told me I was built for this. Do you understand how that—"
I press my hand over my mouth for a second. Breathe.
"I've never had anyone say that to me." I didn't mean to say that. It came out on its own and I can't take it back and the look on his face when I say it makes me want to throw something. "And it wasn't real. It was because you knew it would work."
"It was real."
"Don't."
"Wren—"
"Don't say my name." It comes out sharp enough to cut and I see him flinch. "You've been saying my name in your head this whole time, haven't you? Every time you touched me. Every time you told me I was good. You were thinking Wren and I was thinking stranger and that's—"
My voice cracks. I clamp down on it.
"I thought a stranger saw me tonight. I thought I could fall apart and nobody would know." Quieter now. "You took that from me. You watched me break and you knew who I was and I didn't know who you were and that's not what I agreed to when I walked in here."
He nods. Slow. "You're right."
I wasn't expecting agreement. I was ready for excuses, for let me explain, for something I could tear apart. The agreement just sits there between us and I don't know what to do with it.
The silence stretches. I look at him because I can't help looking at him, and I notice things I don't want to notice.
His chest, bare, and across his shoulders and down his arms there are red lines where my nails raked his skin.
I did that. During the second wave, when he was inside me and I was holding on so tight I drew blood.
There's a bruised mark on his neck too, reddish-purple, right over his scent gland.
I don't remember putting it there. My body remembers.
My body remembers a lot of things my brain is still catching up to.
He looks tired. Not performatively wrecked, not sad-eyed and apologetic.
Just tired, the way someone looks when they've been awake all night holding someone else's weight.
His hands are resting on his knees and they're the hands that cleaned me up, that wiped the slick off my thighs with a warm cloth, that pressed a water bottle to my lips while I drank without opening my eyes.
I trusted those hands an hour ago. I trusted them completely.
And they were Sully's hands the entire time.
"Why?" The question comes out before I can stop it. I don't want to ask him why. I don't want to hear the answer. "Why didn't you leave? When you recognized me, why didn't you just walk away?"
He's quiet for a long time. Then he says, "I couldn't," and the way he says it is so simple and so honest that I want to hit him because I couldn't isn't an answer.
It's an excuse. Except I can hear in his voice that it isn't an excuse.
It's the truth, and the truth is that he wanted me more than he wanted to do the right thing, and I don't know what to do with that either.
"You could have," I say. "You just didn't."
"Yeah." He looks at the floor. "That's more accurate."
The room is quiet. I can hear the faint thud of bass through the walls, the club still going somewhere beyond this room, other people's heat nights still happening while mine collapses into rubble.
The worst part is that I still want him.
Even now. Even knowing. The scent-bond is pulling at my chest every time I breathe in, and his scent in this room is making my skin prickle.
There's a low warm tug between my legs that has nothing to do with heat and everything to do with the specific memory of his hands on me.
My body doesn't care about the betrayal.
My body remembers being held and cleaned and praised and it wants more and I could kill it for that.
And underneath the wanting there's something worse.
The quiet understanding that I can't go back.
Before tonight I had a system. It was a bad system, it was lonely and painful and I woke up every time with bite marks on my own arm from clenching my jaw so hard, but it was mine.
I managed. I got through it alone and I told myself that was enough because it had to be.
Sully took that from me too. He showed me what it feels like to have someone's hands on me during my heat, to be held through the worst of it instead of gripping a pillow, to hear someone say you're doing so well instead of biting down on silence.
He showed me what I was missing and now I know.
I know what I'm supposed to have and I know what it feels like when I get it.
The next heat is going to come in three months and I'm going to be alone in my bed remembering this and it's going to be so much worse than before.
Before, I didn't know what I was missing.
Now I do. He gave me that and took it away in the same night.
"I need you to leave," I say.
"Wren." He catches himself. "Sorry. Can we just—"
"No. I can't think with you in here. I can't think with your scent—" I gesture at the air between us. "I need you to go."
He stands. He looks at me and there's something in his expression that I refuse to acknowledge, refuse to examine, because if I look too closely at what's on his face right now I might find something that makes this harder and it's already the hardest thing I've ever done.
Harder than walking onto that floor. Harder than begging for his knot.
This, right here, telling him to leave while every cell in my body is screaming at me to pull him closer.
"I'm sorry," he says. He says it simply. No performance, no drama. Like a fact. And I believe him and it doesn't help.
"Go."
He goes. The door closes behind him and I'm alone in a small dim room that smells like him and me and sex and I pull my knees up to my chest and press my forehead against them and breathe through my mouth so I don't have to smell him and my hands are shaking and I am not going to cry again.
I'm not.
My phone is on the side table. He must have put it there. I pick it up and there are three texts from Tate.
hope ur feeling better
lmk if u need anything tomorrow
love u bro
I put the phone face down and press my palms against my eyes. Sit in the quiet and try to figure out how to be a person who knows what I now know about myself and about Sully. About the sounds I made while his best friend's little brother begged for his knot.
The scent-bond tugs at my chest. Steady. Relentless. Like a hand pulling me toward a door I just closed.