Chapter 4 #2
We talked about the technical aspects of the build for forty minutes, which was the version of this conversation I liked best — two people who understood the work, talking about the work.
No subtext. No complications. The way Briggs engaged with a fabrication problem was the reason I was already thinking about how to give her more responsibility and the title to match it.
She was going to be a lead fabricator somewhere, mine or someone else's. I intended for it to be mine.
At nine-thirty she put on her jacket and said, "You're not going to tell him, are you."
I looked up from the spec sheet.
"Tell who what?"
She gave me the look that said she wasn't going to pretend that question was genuine and I shouldn't either.
"He's going to find out anyway," she said.
"My business decisions are mine to make."
"I didn't say they weren't."
"Briggs."
"I'm just saying." She zipped her jacket. "He's going to find out, and you know he's going to have thoughts about it, and those thoughts are going to be easier to deal with if they're not also tangled up in the fact that you didn't tell him."
"I don't owe him notifications about my contracts."
"No," she said. "You don't."
She paused at the bay door, keys in her hand.
"I also know you're not not telling him because you're hiding it," she said, carefully. "I think you're not telling him because you know he'll say the right things and his face will do the wrong things and you'll spend the next week managing your reaction to the face instead of working."
I looked at her.
"That's very specific," I said.
"I've been watching you two for two years." She shrugged. "You're not exactly subtle."
She left.
I sat with the proposal draft and thought about what she hadn't finished saying, which was that I knew she was right and was choosing not to act on it for reasons that weren't entirely logical.
The reason I wasn't telling Apex wasn't because I was trying to hide anything.
It was because telling him would make it a conversation, and that conversation would have layers to it that I didn't want it to have.
He'd be careful. He'd be controlled. He'd say all the right things about my right to make my own business decisions.
And underneath all of that, his wolf would be doing the thing it had done on Friday when Damien touched my shoulder.
I didn't want to manage that.
More specifically — and this was the part I was honest about only at nine-thirty on a Tuesday night when Briggs had just left and the shop was empty — I didn't want to find out that I was making a business decision differently because of how it would land with him.
I didn't want to know if I'd already started organizing my choices around his reactions.
Because that was the beginning of my mother's story.
That was the first footnote of that particular book: woman adjusts her choices to manage her mate's feelings. And then the next chapter. And the next.
I knew how it ended.
I took the contract because it was the right business decision and because I was Zara Okonkwo and I had built this shop from nothing on the principle that no one else's comfort level was a factor in my professional choices.
I didn't tell Apex because it was my decision to make and my timing to choose.
That was the whole of it.
That was all of it.
I believed that almost entirely.
Wednesday I sent the proposal. Thursday Damien sent back a signed counter. Friday I signed it.
I had a contract.
Friday night, alone in the apartment, I lay awake longer than usual.
The window above my bed faced north. On clear nights — and this was a clear night, cold and dry, the sky outside looking like something out of a photograph — there was a ridge visible against the darker darkness, a line of pines against the sky.
I knew his cabin was on the other side of it.
My wolf was restless in the way it got after a week where he'd been in the shop and then absent, the bond stretched and humming with the particular frequency of a distance it didn't like.
I lay still and breathed and told it to settle.
It didn't settle.
The wind came down from the north sometime after midnight and I caught it even through the closed window — pine, and leather, and the warm-underneath signature that was specific and unambiguous and belonged to exactly one wolf in Ironridge.
My wolf pressed toward it.
I lay perfectly still and let the scent move through me and thought about the two-second look on his face.
I choose you.
He hadn't said it. He'd said the wrong thing instead and I'd thrown a wrench.
But I'd seen it in his face.
The truest version. The one without performance or patience or six years of careful restraint layered over it. Just the thing underneath all of that — simple and undeniable and completely terrifying.
I wanted to want it the way it wanted me.
My wolf already did. My wolf had no reservations, no complicated history, no architecture of reasons built over twenty years of watching a brilliant woman disappear. My wolf looked at the pine-and-leather scent on the north wind and said yes, obviously, what are we waiting for.
My human side was the part that needed convincing.
And the thing I couldn't fully answer — the thing I'd been avoiding answering for six years — was whether the reasons I'd built were still the right shape for the person Apex had shown me he was.
I wasn't sure anymore.
I wasn't sure, and not being sure was harder than being sure of no.
I turned over and pulled the covers up and told my wolf very firmly that we were sleeping.
It took a long time.
But eventually the scent faded with the wind shift, and the bond dropped to its background frequency, and something in me let go enough to drift.
I dreamed about a garage.
Not my garage — a bigger one, full of the smell of work and the sound of engines, and I was building something, and I looked up and there was someone in the doorway.
I woke up before I could see his face.
I didn't need to.
I already knew.
I always had.
That was the whole impossible thing.
Saturday morning I came downstairs to the shop and opened the bay doors and looked at the dent in the door frame.
Still there.
I made my tea and went to work and did not think about the north ridge or the wind or the two seconds on a man's face that I was having more trouble forgetting than everything that came after.
The contract was signed.
The work was starting.
Whatever else was true, I had built this and it was mine and I was going to do the best work I'd ever done.
Everything else could wait.
It had already waited six years.
It could wait a little longer.