Chapter 7 Wren
Wren
Four days later I'm sitting in my organic chemistry review session and I smell him.
He's not there. I know he's not there. It's a phantom, a ghost scent, my brain misfiring because the scent-bond is fading and something in me is panicking about it.
It's been happening since I got home from the club.
I'll be brushing my teeth or heating up leftovers or staring at a textbook and suddenly the cedar-and-storm smell will roll through me like a wave and I'll light up and reach for something that isn't there.
I washed my sheets twice. I can still smell him on the pillow. I can't tell if that's real or if my brain is manufacturing it because it wants him there. Both options are terrible.
Tuesday night Tate came over to drop off soup because he still thinks I had a stomach thing.
He sat on my couch and talked about work and I sat next to him and nodded and said the right things.
The entire time I was thinking about how his best friend's scent was probably still on my skin, soaked in deeper than soap could reach.
I wanted to ask Tate if he could smell it.
I wanted to ask Tate a lot of things. Like whether Sully had seemed different this week.
Like whether Sully had said anything. I bit down on every question and ate the soup and Tate left.
Then I stood in the shower for thirty minutes and pressed my forehead against the tile and breathed through my mouth.
The nights are the worst. The scent-bond aches like a pulled muscle, constant and low, and it gets louder when I'm lying still with nothing to distract from it.
I caught myself reaching for my phone at two in the morning.
I don't even have his number. I was reaching anyway, my hand moving toward the nightstand like sheer need could bridge the gap.
I pulled my hand back and rolled over and stared at the wall and told myself this was just chemistry.
Just hormones and pair-bonding and the predictable aftermath of being knotted by an alpha with high scent compatibility.
The clinical explanation sat there in my head, perfectly accurate, perfectly useless.
I haven't told Tate. How would I even start.
How do you sit across from your brother and say your best friend knotted me at an anonymous sex club while I cried and begged.
He called me perfect and I didn't know it was him but he knew it was me the whole time.
Also I think I might have wanted him for years and I'm only admitting that now because the alternative is admitting I'm just angry.
I'm not just angry. That's the problem I keep circling back to.
If it were just anger, it would be simple. Some alpha violated my anonymity, used insider knowledge to exploit my heat, and I'd never have to see him again. Clean break. Righteous fury. Done.
But it's not some alpha. It's Sully, who makes terrible pancakes at Tate's apartment on Sunday mornings and argues with me about whether pre-med is actually harder than engineering.
Who once spent forty-five minutes helping me fix my car in Tate's parking garage while I held the flashlight and tried not to stare at his hands.
Sully, who I've been carefully not looking at for years because every time I looked too long something behind my ribs did a thing I wasn't ready to examine.
Tate's birthday. Two years ago. Sully mentioned it in the club, or near enough.
I didn't register it at the time because I was in heat and couldn't process anything beyond touch me, more, please.
But I remember that birthday. I remember showing up late, soaked from the rain, and walking into Tate's apartment and there was a moment, maybe two seconds, where Sully looked at me and I looked at Sully.
The room got very small and very warm and then Sully left to get more ice and I told myself it was nothing.
It wasn't nothing.
The pool party. Climbing out of the water and catching Sully's eyes on me before he looked away.
The scar on my hip visible above my waistband and his gaze snagging on it.
I told myself he was looking at the scar.
Just the scar. And I grabbed a towel and covered up and spent the rest of the afternoon on the opposite side of the pool.
Tate's kitchen. Sully shirtless at the counter making coffee.
Me in the doorway for maybe three seconds before I turned around.
I told Tate I forgot something in my car.
I sat in the driver's seat for ten minutes with the air conditioning on, waiting for the heat to pass, and I told myself it was a pre-heat symptom.
It was never a pre-heat symptom. It was Sully. It was always Sully.
And that's the thing that makes the anger complicated.
Because if I wanted him before the floor, if some part of me has been wanting him since that rainy birthday party, then what happened at the club isn't just a violation.
It's the ugliest possible version of two people finally colliding, all the timing wrong, all the power wrong, everything wrong except the fundamental fact underneath it which is that when his scent hit me across that room I didn't just respond to an alpha.
I responded to him. The specific him it had been ignoring for years.
That doesn't make what he did okay. I need to be clear with myself about that.
He knew and I didn't and that imbalance is real and it matters.
But I'm sitting in an organic chemistry review session smelling a phantom and my chest aches and it's not just the scent-bond.
It's missing him. It's missing a person, not a biological response, and I have no idea what to do with that.
My phone buzzes.
Unknown number. I almost ignore it. Then I read it.
I know you probably don't want to hear from me.
You don't have to respond. I just need you to know that I'm not going to tell Tate.
I'm not going to show up at your apartment, and I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen.
If you never want to see me again, I'll figure out how to live with that.
But if any part of what happened was real for you the way it was real for me, I'll be at the coffee shop on Meridian every morning this week. Your call.
I stare at the text for a long time. The audacity of it. The restraint of it. The fact that he's not begging or explaining or showing up at my door with some grand gesture. He's just telling me where he'll be and letting me decide.
I hate that it's exactly the right move.
I hate that he knows me well enough to know that pressure would make me run and space would make me think and thinking is more dangerous than running because when I think, I end up where I am right now, which is sitting in a lecture hall not hearing a single word about molecular orbital theory because I'm too busy remembering the sound of his voice saying you're perfect and trying to figure out if the ache under my sternum is the scent-bond or something older.
I don't text back. I put my phone away and I sit through the rest of the review. I go home and I eat dinner and I wash my sheets for the third time and I lie in bed and smell him on the pillow that's been through three wash cycles. I think about the coffee shop on Meridian and I don't sleep.
***
Wednesday morning. Meridian Street. I'm standing outside the coffee shop with my hands in my jacket pockets, which is how I was standing when I walked onto the floor at Knot Club six days ago. The parallel is not lost on me.
I can smell him through the window. That's not phantom scent.
That's real, warm, present, and my body responds immediately, a flush of heat across my skin and a pull low behind my ribs that I breathe through carefully.
This is not a heat response. This is just me.
Just recognizing his scent and reaching for it, and for the first time I'm letting myself reach without fighting.
I go in.
He's at a corner table with a coffee he doesn't seem to be drinking.
He looks up when I walk in and the expression on his face cycles through about five things in two seconds before it settles on something careful and still.
He doesn't stand up. Doesn't come toward me.
Just watches me cross the room the way he watched me cross the floor, except this time he looks terrified.
Good. He should be.
I sit down across from him. I don't say anything for a minute. I let him sit with it. I let myself sit with it, too. His scent up close is pulling at something in my chest that I'm not going to think about right now.
"You're an asshole," I say.
"Yeah."
"What you did was wrong."
"I know."
"I'm not forgiving you. I want to be clear about that. What happened at the club, the fact that you knew and I didn't, that's not something I'm going to get over because you found the right coffee shop and waited."
"Okay."
"Stop agreeing with me."
The corner of his mouth twitches. He catches it, kills it.
"Tate's birthday," I say. "I showed up in the rain."
Something shifts in his eyes. He goes very still.
"You left to get ice. I told myself it was nothing.
" I'm looking at my hands on the table because I can't look at his face for this part.
"It wasn't nothing. And the pool party, and the kitchen, and every time I made sure I was on the other side of the room from you at Tate's place.
That wasn't because I didn't notice you. It was because I did."
The silence is heavy. I make myself look up. His jaw is tight and his eyes are bright. His hands on the table have gone white-knuckled around his coffee cup.
"I wanted you before the club," I say. It costs me something to say it.
I can feel it leaving, some piece of armor I've been wearing for years, and underneath it I'm exposed in a way that has nothing to do with heat or biology or a room full of strangers.
This is just me. Sitting in a coffee shop.
Telling Tate's best friend that I've been lying to myself about him since I was twenty.
"That doesn't make what you did okay. But it means I can't pretend the club invented this. It didn't."
"Wren." He says my name like it's the first time. Like I just gave him permission and he's being careful with it.
"I'm still pissed at you."
"I know."
"I don't know how we tell Tate."
"We'll figure it out."
"I don't know if I trust you."
He takes that one slower. Nods. "That's fair. I'll earn it."
"You'd better."
I reach across the table and take his coffee and drink from it because mine isn't here yet and because I want to see what he does.
He watches me drink his coffee and the look on his face is something I'm going to remember for a long time.
It's the look of someone who got handed something they didn't think they'd get to hold again.
"I have class at ten," I say. "Walk me?"
He stands up so fast he bumps the table and I let myself smile, small, private, turned down toward his stolen coffee. He comes around to my side and stands there. I can feel his warmth and his scent and his want and I want to lean into it so badly my teeth ache.
I stand up. We're close. Closer than we've ever been outside of that club, outside of heat and masks and anonymity. This is just a coffee shop and I'm just a guy and he's just a guy and I can see his face and he can see mine and neither of us is pretending.
He reaches out, slow, giving me time to pull away. His fingers brush the side of my neck, over my scent gland, the lightest touch. My eyes close. My body leans toward him before I can decide about it, and this time I let it.
"Wren." Quiet. Close.
"Yeah."
"I meant it. Everything I said. All of it."
I open my eyes. He's right there. "I know," I say. "That's why I'm here."
We walk out into the morning. His hand finds the small of my back as he holds the door, warm through my jacket. I don't pull away. I step into it. A deliberate choice, clear-eyed, made by my brain and my body at the same time for the first time since this whole thing started.
The scent-bond hums in my chest. Steady. Certain. And for once, the rest of me agrees with it.