Chapter 10 The Morning After
The Morning After
~MILA~
I'm mopping.
"Are you actually mopping?"
Elowen's voice comes through the phone speaker from the kitchen counter, where I propped it twenty minutes ago so I could be hands-free and also avoid looking directly at it while having this conversation.
"Yes."
"In all the heavens," she says, with the gravity of someone making a diagnosis, "what possible pack situation has your entire nervous system in a bunch to be mopping before a bar shift?"
I press the mop head into the corner by the radiator, which hasn't needed mopping since I moved in. "I mop."
"You have never in four years mopped anything before noon. You own a mop only because I bought it and refused to leave until you found a place for it."
She's right. The mop lived in the car for two weeks before I brought it upstairs.
She'd be face-timing right now if my phone had a camera.
I'm choosing to be grateful for the ancient brick and its complete absence of visual technology, because whatever my face is doing this morning doesn't need an audience.
I drag the mop back toward the kitchen and say nothing, which Elowen correctly interprets as information.
"Mila."
"I'm fine."
"You're mopping at nine in the morning after a masquerade ball that you attended in a gown that cost a seamstress three days of work and a coin that belonged to my grandmother. You are the furthest from fine that the word fine can structurally contain."
I set the mop against the wall. Sit on the edge of the kitchen island stool.
The apartment smells like floor cleaner and the stale traces of last night's return: the damp from the rain that started as I was getting home, the faint ghost of the perfume still on my jacket where I threw it over the chair, that iris-and-amber residue that has mostly faded now but catches when I move past it.
"I lost the coin," I say.
Silence from the speaker. Brief, but substantial.
"On the stairs," I continue. "The back staircase. I heard it fall and I knew what it was and I kept running anyway because the train—" I stop. "I'm sorry, Ell. It was your grandmother's."
"Don't," she says, and her voice is quiet in the way it gets when she means something without decoration. "Don't you dare apologize for that. The coin was yours to carry last night. Whatever happened to it is what was supposed to happen to it."
She genuinely believes that.
The Scottish-Chinese heirloom lore and the fate-finds-it theory and all of it. She means every word, no performance involved.
I left a coin that belonged to her grandmother on a castle staircase and she's telling me it's fine, and somehow I believe her, which says something specific about Elowen and probably something specific about the state I'm in.
"Also," Elowen adds, with a careful shift in her voice that means she's changing subjects before I can spiral further, "are we not going to address the part where you've been mopping because of a man?"
"I'm mopping because the floor needed mopping."
"The floor has needed mopping since February."
"This is true."
"So it's the masked Alpha."
I stare at the wall opposite me, which is the slightly-off-white of an apartment that came painted and hasn't been touched since.
"I just can't get him out of my head. Which is—" I press my fingers to the bridge of my nose.
"I know how that sounds. One evening. A few hours. I don't even know his name."
Elowen makes a sound. Warm, with barely contained delight held on a very short leash.
"Is my girl falling in love?"
"Absolutely not."
"This is going to be the most classic Cinderella story—"
"I didn't drop a glass slipper down any stairs, Elowen.
I dropped your grandmother's heirloom coin while sprinting in a four-hundred-dollar gown to catch a train like a woman who absolutely cannot afford to miss her shift, and then I sat in a private cabin and looked back at a platform where he was standing and the train left anyway.
" I pause. "That's not Cinderella. That's a poor life choice with good lighting. "
She laughs—the full version, uncontained. "If you'd had a carriage like a sensible fairytale heroine, you could have taken your time and gotten his name."
"I told you I'd have sent the driver." Her voice sharpens with the specific frequency of someone who was right and has been waiting patiently to mention it. "I offered, Mila. Multiple times. With genuine persistence."
"I know."
"And you said—"
"I know what I said."
"The train station is only five to ten minutes from the venue, Elowen, I'll be fine, Elowen, one hour tops and I'll be heading out—"
"I genuinely regret everything."
She dissolves into laughter again and I let her have it because she's earned it and also because hearing it does the thing it always does, which is make the kitchen feel less hollow by approximately fifteen percent.
I let it settle before I say: "Also. We're going to circle back to something."
"Are we."
"We are absolutely going to circle back to something. The thing being the actual, enormous, castle-shaped elephant in the room that you apparently decided wasn't worth mentioning when you were arranging my transportation, my gown, my hair, my mask, my perfume, and my entire evening."
A beat of silence.
"The family name of the venue," I say. "Ring any bells?"
"Hmm."
"Elowen."
"That is a very common surname—"
"Elowen Céleste Bloom—"
A ding sounds from her end. Background noise shifts—the particular ambient quality of Bloom and Brier mid-morning, that layered green-and-floral scent I can practically reconstruct from memory. A man's voice, warm and uncertain, asking about the possibility of a special request for a bouquet.
"Certainly!" Elowen's voice transforms immediately into her professional register—warm, attentive, utterly engaged. Then back to me, two seconds, barely a breath: "Fate has other plans for this conversation, I'm afraid—"
"Absolutely not. Elowen Bloom—"
"We'll continue this! Over drinks! St. Patrick's Day tonight, it would be thematically appropriate—"
"Bullshit."
"Take a shot for me during your shift! Celebrate! Don't mope!"
"We are revisiting this conversation in full, you hear me? Full. Explanation. No convenient customers."
She is already laughing again. "Goodbye, Mila!"
The call ends.
I sit on the kitchen stool for a moment, the phone face-up on the counter, the screen going dark.
The apartment settles back into its quiet.
Outside, the sky through the small window is the particular grey of a day that has already decided what it's going to do and is warming up to do it—thick cloud cover, that specific atmospheric pressure that precedes rain, the light flat and without shadow.
St. Patrick's Day.
I spent the luckiest night of recent memory at a St. Patrick's masquerade and came home alone with a wet hem and no coin and the persistent, circling preoccupation of a woman who kissed a stranger in a rose-covered courtyard and didn't ask for his name.
I get up and start moving through the apartment.
The space is—functional. That's the honest description.
I moved to Oakridge Hollow five months ago with what fit in the car: clothes, two boxes of kitchen basics, a set of bedding I'd had since university, and a lamp because the overhead lighting in this apartment is the fluorescent variety and I had opinions about that.
Since then, I've added a bookshelf from the second-hand shop on the main street, currently home to eleven novels that I've bought with genuine reading intentions and varying rates of follow-through.
Romance, mostly.
I'm not analyzing that.
The books accumulate faster than the hours available to read them.
A new release comes out and I buy it thinking this week, this time, I'll actually find the window—and then the double shifts stack up, and the collector calls stack up, and by the time I'm home the window has closed and the book goes on the shelf to wait with the others, patient and unread, a line of spines that represents every intention I had that the week outpaced.
I look at the shelf now.
Three of those spines are Bridgerton-adjacent. I bought them before the masquerade and definitely didn't connect that to anything and am absolutely not connecting it to anything now.
The masked Alpha's scent comes back to me, unbidden and in full detail: cedarwood with age in it, leather that had been used rather than displayed, and underneath both the amber-warm Irish whiskey note that had done things to my baseline during the dancing that the scent suppressor had absolutely failed to mitigate.
His hands—the specific pressure of them, the certainty with which they held space without crowding it.
The way he'd named my scent signature back to me like something he'd been studying.
Honey. Warm vanilla. Lime—sharper underneath, like the zest rather than the fruit.
Nobody has ever done that.
In three years with the pack, across fourteen months of building a life from the debris they left, through every interaction this year with customers and colleagues and Elowen who loves me—nobody has taken my scent apart and handed it back to me like it was worth that level of attention.
I'm standing in the middle of my apartment with a mop-damp floor and eleven unread novels and the persistent, specific ache of someone who found something good and left it on a train platform.
If he was good in bed I'd be in actual crisis right now.
The kiss was enough to confirm the direction of that. The rest is speculation that I'm refusing to engage with on the grounds of self-preservation.
I close my eyes, just for a moment.