Lila
Ihad absolutely not been thinking about Azrael all morning.
I had been thinking about my coffee maker, which had started making a sound like a small animal in distress, and about the fourteen boxes in the second bedroom that weren't going to unpack themselves, and about whether the grocery store in Blackthorn Ridge carried the specific brand of oat milk I liked or whether I was going to have to drive forty minutes every time I ran out.
I had not been thinking about the way he had taken my braid apart like he had been waiting to do it since the first time he saw it.
Or the way he had said thirteen days like it was the most natural thing in the world, or the fact that I had looked at him across my own bedroom in the early morning light and felt something shift under my ribs that I was absolutely not ready to examine.
I put on my scrubs, pulled my hair into a braid with perhaps more aggression than necessary, and went to work.
Blackthorn Family Medical was a small practice with cream colored walls, a fish tank in the waiting room that one of the doctors had named every fish in individually, and a front desk that functioned as the social hub of the entire building.
I had been working there for three weeks, which was long enough to understand that nothing happened in that office without Debbie knowing about it first.
Debbie was fifty-three, married to a man named Gerald who she complained about constantly and adored completely. She had also decided within my first week that I was the daughter she’d never had. She was also completely impossible to hide anything from.
She looked at me when I came through the door, looked again more slowly, and set down her coffee.
"Girl."
"Don't," I said.
"You got laid."
I walked past her to the desk and pulled up the appointment schedule with the focused energy of someone who was absolutely not having this conversation. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"I know that walk."
I gave Debbie a look, “I walk like this every day."
She giggled so loud people in the waiting room peaked away from their phones. “You do not walk like that every day." She leaned across the desk. "Who is he?"
May appeared from the back hallway with a stack of patient files and stopped when she registered the energy at the front desk.
May was thirty-two, newly engaged, and had described herself on my first day as a romance addict without any apparent shame about it.
She looked at Debbie and then me. And then she looked even more closely at me.
"Oh my god," she said. "Is that a hickey?"
I put my hand over my neck so quickly I nearly knocked over my water bottle. Debbie made a sound that could only be described as triumphant.
"I hate both of you," I said pleasantly, and answered the phone.
By lunch Debbie had announced, in the tone of someone who was not making a suggestion, that we were going out after work.
I tried to offer several reasonable alternatives such as I was tired. And that I still had unpacking to do.
Debbie pointed at me. "Perfect. You need a drink."
May was already texting someone about parking. I went back to answering phones and accepted my fate.
Cue's on a Friday night was louder and warmer than the Thursday I had been there with Azrael, packed with familiar faces that Debbie seemed to know personally and country music coming from the jukebox at a volume that suggested whoever chose the song had strong feelings about it.
Debbie knew approximately everyone in the room and introduced me to all of them within the first ten minutes, and May ordered a round of something that arrived in mason jars with fruit in it, and somewhere around the second drink I stopped thinking about braids and thirteen days and started actually having fun.
I was mid-laugh at something Debbie had said about Gerald and the riding lawnmower when I felt it, that specific awareness of being watched.
I turned around slowly.
Across the room, standing at the far pool table with a cue in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other, was Azrael. He was already looking at me when our eyes met, and for one very satisfying second he went completely still.
I turned back to my drink but Debbie had seen the whole thing. She said nothing, which from Debbie was practically deafening.
His name was Ethan and he was a local contractor with an easy smile and the kind of uncomplicated friendliness that small towns seemed to produce naturally. He appeared at my elbow while May was at the bar and Debbie was telling someone a story that required both hands to properly illustrate.
"Can I buy you a drink?" he asked.
I smiled. "You can buy me fries."
He laughed, which was a good sign. "I can absolutely do fries."
From somewhere across the room came a sound like wood snapping under significant pressure.
I didn’t look over but I heard Debbie, however, make a quiet sound that I could only describe as gleeful.
Ethan was really good company. He was funny in a straightforward way and asked questions and actually listened to the answers. The man had a story about a bathroom renovation gone wrong that made me laugh hard enough to spill a little of my drink. I was genuinely enjoying myself.
I was also aware, of exactly where Azrael was standing at all times.
And he was missing nearly all the shots he’d taken this evening.
Azrael, who had sunk every ball at that table on Thursday with the precision of someone for whom pool was less a game and more a minor administrative task, was missing shots.
He was also, when he thought I wasn't looking, glaring at Ethan with an expression that I suspected had caused actual problems for people.
Debbie appeared at my shoulder. "Uh oh."
"Don't," I said.
"You've got two Alphas."
"I absolutely do not."
"Oh, honey." She looked across the room with the serene confidence of someone who had been reading these situations for thirty years. "You definitely do."
I drank my beer and said nothing.
Ethan asked me to play a round of pool and I said yes, because I was a grown woman who could make her own decisions.
And also because I had actually been getting better since that Thursday and I wanted to prove it to someone who wasn't Azrael.
I lined up my first shot and Ethan stepped up behind me to help adjust my angle, in a perfectly friendly, perfectly innocent way.
I was just about to take the shot when another voice came from directly behind us, low and completely unhurried.
"Wrong angle…”
I closed my eyes because I had to be dreaming.
Azrael stepped up beside me, looked at Ethan's hand position on the cue, and adjusted it himself with the calm authority of someone who had decided the situation required his involvement and had not consulted anyone about that decision.
Ethan smiled with the patience of a man who had dealt with small towns long enough to recognize a complicated situation when he was standing in one. "I think she can decide."
"I actually think so too," I said, looking directly at Azrael.
He looked at the table. "Hit the seven."
Rolling my eyes, I hit the seven and it dropped perfectly. I handed the pool stick to Ethan and walked away.
The air outside was cool and sharp after the warmth of the bar. I had been standing on the sidewalk for approximately thirty seconds when I heard the door open behind me.
"You embarrassed me," I said, without turning around.
"I corrected his angle,” Azrael’s voice sounded annoyed.
I took a breath. “You’re jealous."
His tone remained gruff. “No."
I turned around. "You broke a pool cue."
"It was defective…”
"You have used that specific cue for weeks,” I reminded him.
He paused. “Nope, definitely a manufacturing defect."
I stared at him. The absolute straightforwardness with which he delivered that was somehow the funniest and most infuriating thing I had ever encountered. I crossed my arms and looked up at him in the light spilling through the bar window.
"So what exactly is going on with you?"
The silence stretched long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer. His gaze dropped to my mouth, just briefly, and came back up.
"You should go back inside," he said.
"Answer me."
"I can't."
"Why not?"
"Because I'm trying very hard to do the right thing."
I held his gaze. "And what's the wrong thing?"
His voice dropped into something quieter. "Kissing you again."
I stood there in the cool night air and felt my heart do something completely inconvenient. Then I turned around and went back inside, mostly because if I stayed out there another thirty seconds I was going to do something I couldn't take back.
Again.
When it was closing time, he walked me home anyway.
Neither of us spoke, and when we reached my porch he stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at me.
"Lock your doors tonight," he said.
I sighed. "You always say that."
"This time I mean it differently."
Something in his voice made me turn toward the backyard. The tree line sat at the edge of the property the way it always did, dark and quiet and perfectly ordinary looking.
Except that something moved at the very edge of it, right at the border where the porch light stopped reaching, a shift in the dark that was there and then wasn't.
I looked back at Azrael. The man who had just been jealous over a pool cue, who had counted thirteen days, who had taken my braid apart like it was something he had earned the right to do, was completely gone.
The person looking at that tree line now was something older and quieter and far more serious, radiating the kind of focused stillness that made every instinct I had go very, very still right along with it.
I went inside and locked the door without being asked twice, with shivers running down my spine.