Chapter 16 Remi
It's two in the morning and I'm lying awake in Steele and Crew's apartment staring at the ceiling.
Two months ago, two AM was the middle of the night. The time between my nine PM bedtime and a five AM alarm, the bit I never saw.
But that was when my life had a center.
Now I have nothing.
I breathe in.
My knee aches in its brace. It’s an annoying dull thrum, like a sound system running below the main track.
My hands find the blanket, the soft white one that appeared in the hospital but didn’t have its name on it. The one which I haven't asked about and nobody has mentioned. I press it against my nose and inhale.
The tears come as they have every night since the hospital.
My quiet sobs seem to have excellent timing.
The exact hour when there is nothing left to be disciplined for.
I've cried about my career before, but then it was a bad jump, a stupid fall, never about the image of the ice rushing up that still arrives behind my eyes in the dark.
But tonight it's something different. Tonight, it's the smaller losses that make my heart ache. The ones that don't have headlines.
I'll never hear my score read aloud over an arena speaker again.
I'll never have the three minutes between the final landing and the final bow, when the crowd is still deciding what it heard and my body is still speaking in the language it was built for.
I'll never see my name—
I turn to the knock at my door, and before I can arrange my face, it opens.
Steele leans in the doorframe in a gray t-shirt and sweatpants. His dark hair is unstyled, sleep-soft, falling slightly toward his forehead. He looks at me but doesn't say I heard you or are you okay or any of the things that would require me to pretend he didn't, and lifts his chin slightly.
I pull the blanket from my mouth.
"I'm fine," I say, answering the question he never asked. My voice is wrecked from crying, which makes a liar of me.
He comes into my room and sits at the foot of the bed, his profile to me, his face to the window.
We sit in silence in the dark for a while.
"I feel like a fraud," I say eventually. "An omega fraud."
He turns his head slightly.
"Every omega I know has this whole—" My gesture is vague, but encompasses something I don't have words for.
"This nesting thing. My friend Camille has a whole ritual.
Blankets in an order. If you move one she can tell.
I've been here a week and I've—" I look around the room, which I have left exactly as Crew arranged it.
"Nothing. I've moved nothing. I don't have an instinct.
I pick up a blanket—" I hold up the white one.
"And apart from this I don't care about anything. What kind of omega doesn't nest?"
Steele looks at the blanket for a moment.
"One who's been on suppressants since she was fourteen," he says. Like it's the simplest thing in the world. "You've been chemically telling your instincts to shut up for that long, they don't just come back in a week."
"What if they don't come back at all?"
"They will." No hedging in it. Just a statement.
"You don't know that."
"I know that every time I come home, you've moved the blanket to a different chair and then back again.
" Flat, like he's reporting a fact. "The coffee mug on the kitchen shelf, the blue one.
You moved it to the front three days ago and you've been using it every morning.
You don't nest the way a textbook says. You do it like someone who doesn't know they're doing it yet. "
I stare at the blanket in my hands.
The blue mug is my favorite. I didn't think about moving it.
He stands.
"Steele."
He pauses.
"Do you like me or am I just like Sloane? No compatibility."
The question comes out smaller than I meant it to, which is the problem with questions you've wanted to ask but daren’t.
He turns. In the low light from the hall, I notice the set of his jaw. He looks at me for a second before he answers.
"More than you'll ever realize," he says. “Sloane was nice, but she wasn’t you.”
My heart thumps as hard as it did when I was being chased through in the club.
“But I’m not enough?”
He stares at me.
“Why do you say that?” he finally replies.
"Because you haven't tried to kiss me again?" A beat. "Do I have to wear a mask?"
The room is very quiet.
He looks at me. I look at him. Something in the air of this room rearranges itself, the way it did once before, except that time there was no cold stone at my back or a hedge wall at my shoulders and instead of running on adrenaline and years of suppressants. Now I was running on pure want.
"I know it was you," I continue. "And Crew. In the maze." My voice is steady because I've had weeks to practice being steady about this. "And I know you know it was me."
He doesn't move. He doesn't deny it.
"How?" he asks.
I nod toward his hand.
The phoenix. The clean lines running between his thumb and index finger. Identical to the one I saw in the dead end of that maze.
His breath comes out slow.
"And then you came back for me," I say quietly.
He turns and stares at me.
The thing that crosses his face doesn't have a name exactly. I wouldn’t call it guilt and it's not relief but it's not quite the expression I'd imagined if I'd let myself imagine it, which I hadn't, because imagining it would have made it real and real was something I couldn't afford until the career was gone and there was nothing left to protect.
That time is now.
"Why were you there?" he asks. "At the club. That night."
"There's a darkness inside me," I say. "Been there my whole life. I've been covering it in perfect triples and GP scores and medals that were never enough." I stop. "What kind of person wants to be chased? To be caught?" I look at him. "But I'm that kind of person."
Steele is very still.
Then he walks across the room to the window and back to the bed.
“Why were you there?”
“Privacy.”
I nod.
He sits at the edge of the bed, and his hands come up to my face, framing it, thumbs at my jaw. He tilts my face until we’re looking at each other.
Then he leans down and he kisses me.
It’s nothing like the maze. The maze was adrenaline and anonymous darkness and my body making decisions without consulting me.
This is deliberate. This is a man who has spent weeks beside me, making coffee and asking how I slept and holding all of it inside him.
The want, the restraint, the promise he made to River and the thing that makes the promise difficult.
I know because I feel it in the way he holds me.
The kiss is not hungry. It’s gentle and devastating.
When we break apart, both of us breathing harder than we were, his forehead drops to mine.
I breathe him in.
Bourbon. Orange.
Something warm and right, and something that should be there, hovering at the edge of what I'm smelling, that isn't. It's like the melody of a song with one note missing. My nose keeps reaching for what isn't there and finding the gap instead.
I don't say anything about it. I don't know how.
"Will you stay?" I ask. "Just stay and hold me. I don't want to be alone tonight."
He pulls back slightly and looks at me.
"Crew and I are a pack," he says. "We don't split that down the middle. If I'm here—"
"The bed is big enough for three."
His eyes widen.
The hall light is behind him. His hands are still at my jaw and his eyes are very gray in this light, and the apartment is quiet, only the low tick of flickering neon light outside and a car is going past.
"You're playing with fire," he says.
I hold his gaze.
"You know I want to get burned."