Chapter 17
Ren dodged Jax’s hook with a twist of his hips and landed a straight punch to his side that should have drawn a growl.
It should have. But Jax absorbed the blow with his elbow and took half a step back returning nothing.
Not a counterattack. Not a low kick. Not even one of those feints that always ended with Ren hitting the canvas.
Ren frowned.
They’d been going like this for forty minutes.
Forty minutes of Jax moving as if Ren were made of blown glass.
He blocked, dodged, redirected, but he didn’t strike.
Not for real. Every time Ren left an opening—his left side, his guard down after a hook—Jax saw it, Ren knew he saw it, and he didn’t go in.
Ren clenched his teeth and charged in with a quick combination: jab, jab, cross. The cross connected with his chest, and Jax took two steps back, raising his open hands.
“Water.”
He went to the edge of the tatami, grabbed the bottle, and drank.
Ren stood in the center with his bandaged fists hanging at his sides and sweat dripping down the back of his neck.
He watched him drink. He watched how Jax avoided looking at him while wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and then looked at him, but out of the corner of his eye, quickly, like someone checking to make sure an expensive vase is still intact on the shelf.
Three days. He’d been fighting like this for three days. Ren had thought the first day was just a bad training session. The second, a coincidence. But by the third, the pattern was so obvious it stung.
Jax set the bottle on the floor and sat down on the bench against the wall. His shoulders, massive even when relaxed, rose and fell with slow breaths. He threw a towel to Ren, who snatched it before it hit the ground, yet Ren did not use it to dry his face.
“Hey, I’m going out for a bit later. Do you need anything?”
The question sounded casual. Too casual for a man who was never casual about anything.
“Going out where?”
“Runs.” Jax shrugged. “I’ll stop by the drugstore to buy some bandages. Do you need anything?”
Drugstore.
The word hit him like a bucket of ice water. Drugstore. And the way Jax had treated him for three whole days, as if he were fragile, as if a well-placed punch could break more than just his pride. And that constant sidelong glance, checking, measuring, evaluating.
Ren felt the heat rise up his neck to his ears.
“Son of a bitch!”
Jax didn’t even flinch.
“What a bastard!” Ren ripped the bandages off his right hand with his teeth and threw them on the floor. “Damn his mouth! He told you!”
“Ren…”
“No!” He tore off the other bandage and hurled it at Jax, who let it bounce off his chest without moving. “Brody and his damn mouth! He had no right! It’s my body, it’s my decision, it’s my fucking business, and he goes and tells you!”
Jax waited for the echo of the scream to die away against the gym walls. Then he crossed his arms.
“He’s worried.”
“I don’t give a shit if he’s worried.”
“And if he didn’t tell you directly, it’s because he knows you would have ripped his head off. He thinks I’m more on your side.”
Ren opened his mouth to reply and closed it.
Because Jax was right, and that infuriated him more than Brody’s indiscretion.
Yes, Jax and he had built something during those training sessions.
A kind of shared code that worked through blows and silences and the occasional truth spoken between gasps.
Ren trusted Jax differently than he trusted Brody.
Cleaner. Without the weight of the bond clouding everything.
But that didn’t give Brody the right to use that trust as a shortcut.
“Whatever. I didn’t have to tell you anything. It’s not even certain.”
“Exactly.” Jax leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “It’s uncertain. It’s a suspicion. And we confirm or rule out suspicions; we don’t leave them to fester in our heads.
“I know.”
“Then get tested.”
“I’ll do it when I feel like it.”
Jax looked at him with that calm of his that was worse than any shout.
“Look, Ren, I’m old enough to be an uncle. More than old enough. So make up your mind and get tested because I can’t stand the uncertainty.”
“Uncle?” Ren let out a dry laugh that scratched his throat. “Did you really just call yourself an uncle?”
“Uncle Jax. It sounds good.”
“It sounds like a nightmare.”
“Get tested.”
“Don’t treat me like a child!” Ren pointed a finger at him.
“You haven’t hit me hard in three days. Three days dodging me like I’m made of porcelain.
You think I haven’t noticed? I’ve noticed it from the very first minute of the first day, Jax.
You’ve been treating me differently ever since Brody told you. ”
Jax had the decency not to deny it. He ran a hand through his shaved hair and let out a sigh that made his chest swell.
“Okay. Maybe I’ve toned it down a little.”
“A little,” Ren snorted.
“A little, a lot.”
“You’ve been fighting with me like I’m a five-year-old in foam gloves.”
Jax’s smile was slow and huge, lighting up his face in a way that made him look ten years younger.
“I will not punish my nephew before he’s even born or anything like that. I’m just being cautious.”
“Fuck you, Jax.”
“That mouth of yours.”
“Fuck you hard.”
Jax burst out laughing. A belly laugh that echoed off the walls and, despite himself, loosened something inside Ren’s chest. Something tight that had been squeezing his ribs for days.
Ren slumped down on the bench next to him. They sat in silence for a moment. The sweat was cooling on his back, sending shivers down his spine. The gym smelled of rubber and metal and the cheap deodorant Jax used in industrial quantities.
“Get me the test.”
Jax turned his head.
“Huh?”
“From the drugstore. Bring me the damn test.” Ren looked at his hands, his knuckles red, the lines on his palms glistening with sweat. “But if you tell Brody I asked you to do this, I swear the next time we train, I’ll rip your kneecap out.”
“You can count on it.” Jax gave him a light slap on the back of the neck with his open palm. Ren stepped back, muttering something unintelligible.
They showered separately. Ren went up to Brody’s room—his room, their room, though he still had a hard time thinking of it that way—and stepped under the hot stream with his eyes closed.
The water pounded his shoulders and loosened the knots in his neck.
He lathered himself up slowly. He scrubbed his hair until it squeaked between his fingers.
He stood there a little longer with his forehead pressed against the tiles.
He thought of nothing. He forbade himself from thinking.
He stepped out of the shower, dried off, and put on a pair of Brody’s sweatpants that were way too big for him and a clean t-shirt that came down to his mid-thigh.
The bathroom mirror reflected a pale image of him, with wet hair plastered to his temples and eyes that were too big for his face. He looked away.
He walked into the bedroom.
He saw it before taking three steps. On top of the bedspread, centered with almost surgical precision on Ren’s pillow, a small white box.
No bag. No note. Jax had left it there with the stealth of someone trained to move undetected and the delicacy of someone who knew that this cardboard rectangle could change everything.
Ren sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the box. He turned it over. He read the instructions on the back even though he already knew how it worked. Every omega knew. They taught it to them in school along with the list of things an omega should fear about their own bodies.
He set it on the nightstand.
He lay on his back with his arms outstretched and his gaze fixed on the ceiling.
The box was still there. White. Small. Enormous.
The latch clicked shut with a sharp sound that echoed off the tiles like the snap of a small bone.
Ren leaned his back against the closed door and stood there for a few seconds, the white box in his right hand and his left hand still on the doorknob.
The bathroom smelled of sandalwood soap and the lingering steam from the shower he’d taken barely twenty minutes ago.
He set the box on the edge of the sink. The white porcelain against the white cardboard. Everything white, everything clean, everything about to be stained by something irreversible.
He breathed. Deeply. From the bottom of his lungs, until the air pushed against his ribs and rose up his throat and came out of his mouth with a tremor he hadn’t expected. Again. One more time. He gripped the sink with both hands and let his head drop between his shoulders.
He opened the box.
His fingers moved with the precision of someone assembling a familiar mechanism; the instructions read and reread so many times that his hands already knew before his eyes did.
He took out the stick, removed the cap, and did what had to be done.
Each step executed with an almost clinical precision because if he concentrated on the mechanics—open, place, wait—he didn’t have to think about what came next.
He put the cap back on.
He left the stick face up on the edge of the sink.
He sat on the edge of the bathtub.
He didn’t look at the test. He fixed his eyes on the wall opposite, on a line of grout between two tiles that curved slightly to the left as if the mason had sneezed mid-stroke.
“One,” he said aloud. The sound of his own voice seemed foreign to him in that enclosed space. “Two. Three.”
He counted. Or thought he was counting. The numbers melted on his tongue before he reached the next one; they tripped over each other, repeated themselves.
Seventeen. Seventeen. Twenty-three. Nine.
He wasn’t counting anything. He was filling the silence with noise so that the silence wouldn’t swallow him up.
“Forty and… fifty and…”
He stood up.
The sink was two steps away. He took the test. He looked down.