Chapter 16 #3
End of October. That was the math. My cycles ran regular when I let them, and this one I'd been letting run, no suppressants, no pushing back, which put the heat proper roughly two weeks out, at the tail of the month.
Pushing the last one, for Celia's wedding, was the whole reason I'd ended up in that suite with three strangers who turned out to be my scent match.
The rebound had put me there. Doing it again with the pack this close would be begging for a surge I couldn't steer.
Their scents alone could tip me over the edge if the timing landed wrong.
And wrong timing was exactly what happened when you spent your days with three men whose biology had already decided you belonged to them, whose behavior had been careful enough to make the decision feel like an offer instead of a claim.
So I held distance before the heat could make everything undeniable.
I stayed in the city. No more trips to the woods.
I cut my replies to the project channel down to once a day, mornings, three lines or fewer.
I kept every point of contact welded to the work, with the grim rigidity of a woman building a dam against a tide she could already feel closing around her ankles.
Denil sent messages about dinner and the drive, then another got home safe.
I left them unanswered for a day. Then two.
Then three. On the fifth, when the silence had grown pointed enough to be its own kind of message, I typed Glad you made it home, and left it at that, and hated how much I'd wanted to type more.
It wasn't cruelty. It was preservation. Heat made everything loud.
Heat made biology the only voice left in the room.
I had spent two months building something real with these men in the narrow country between professional and personal, and I would not let one surge tear it down because my body had opinions my brain was still learning how to hear.
Alone in the apartment, with the shop locked two blocks away and the street gone quiet and the heat-warmth moving under my skin with an insistence no cold shower or early morning or rearranged display could touch, I opened Heat Seekers.
To prove I still had a choice. That was the story I told myself, thumb already moving.
I could pick someone else. There were other packs, other alphas, other betas with steady hands and clean profiles who'd show up when I called, do the work competently, and leave when it was done, no history, no scent match, no ache.
The app existed for precisely this. To make a biological necessity feel like a decision.
I'd used it that way before and been glad of it.
I set my profile visible and started to scroll.
A pack came up first out of a place called Harrow's Bend, two alphas and a beta, a cabin on a lake north of the city, experience notes polished by people who'd done this many times and knew how to present it without performing.
Thorough. Their availability lined up with my cycle almost to the day.
Photos of the cabin, the water going silver at dusk, a bed made up with linens that were clearly chosen by someone with taste and money both.
I read the whole profile twice. A year ago I'd have messaged them inside five minutes.
A year ago this was exactly the profile I'd have stopped on and thought, yes, them, this will be good.
Clean, competent, no complications, no aftermath.
Even after the second read, I felt nothing move at all.
None of it was wrong. That was the problem. There wasn't a single flag in it. There also wasn't one reason to say yes.
I kept scrolling, and the scroll turned into an inventory of everything I used to want.
A female alpha out past Denmere who specialized in post-heat recovery.
Actual certifications, letters after her name, a testimonial from an omega describing the gentlest comedown she'd ever had.
I'd have prized that once. The competence of it, the safety, someone who'd studied how to put you back together after.
I looked at her calm, credentialed face and thought about brown butter instead, about a man who'd built a whole kit from scratch, labeled the bottles by hand, and called being overprepared guest experience.
The certifications went flat on the screen.
Then a beta-led pack with a dedicated heat suite in a converted loft: exposed brick, tall industrial windows, warm light, a considered space I'd have admired down to the fixtures.
I zoomed in on the room and caught myself looking for a sage-green island that wasn't there and never would be. I made myself stop.
A three-beta operation running a scent-neutral B&B somewhere upstate, taking one omega a cycle as a quiet sideline to the main business.
Boundaries laid out plainly and kindly. The sort of low, clean, uncomplicated arrangement I'd built my own post-heat rules to resemble: no personal conversation, no aftermath, business channels only.
Strangers were offering everything I'd told the pack I wanted.
They would actually deliver it and mean it, and I still couldn't make myself want a single thing about it.
That was the cruelty of the whole list. These were good people.
These were the right people, by every rule I'd written for myself before a hotel hallway rearranged the furniture.
Careful. Clean. Uncomplicated. The exact packs I'd have chosen and enjoyed and walked away from without a scratch, and I scrolled past every one of them with the same dead-flat feeling, because somewhere in the last two months my own criteria had changed underneath me and hadn't asked permission first.
My thumb hovered over the message button on the Harrow's Bend profile. It was the good one, the safe one, the one there was no earthly reason to skip.