Chapter Four
AVERY
He came to my apartment on a Tuesday, three weeks after the fundraiser, which should have been a professional meeting about the advocacy center rebrand but had turned into takeout on my couch and three hours of talking about everything adjacent to the rebrand and then finally the rebrand, in that order.
This was becoming a thing.
I wasn't sure what kind of thing yet. Dean was easy to be around in a way that happened rarely — he didn't require performance of any kind. Didn't need me to be smaller or more available or more certain than I was. We just talked, and the talking was good, and I liked him.
Which was the problem.
I liked him in the specific way that had a timeline attached to it.
The kind of like that, if I let it keep growing, would eventually arrive somewhere I couldn't stay.
He was an omega. Young, brilliant, beautiful, committed to work that mattered — and biologically structured in a way that would eventually require something I couldn't offer.
An alpha mate. A recognized bond. Someone who could give him heat care that was legal and protected and publicly nameable.
I was none of those things.
I was a beta with a stabilizing effect on his pre-heat symptoms that neither of us had mentioned directly but that we both knew was happening.
Every time I was near him when the stress was bad, something in him settled.
It was visible and slightly awful. Visible because it was real, awful because it was going to complicate things.
We were on my couch and he was reading something on his phone while I finished the brand mood board on my laptop, and it was domestic in a way that I was allowing myself to have for one more evening before I thought about it too carefully.
"Can I ask you something?" Dean said.
"Sure."
"When you left The Meridian Rooms the night of the fundraiser. Did you go home?"
I kept my eyes on my screen. "Yeah."
"Alone?"
The question didn't have jealousy in it. He wasn't asking it that way. He was asking it the way he asked most things — directly and without pretense, genuinely curious about the answer.
"Alone," I said.
He put his phone down. "I ask because I looked up the membership records for that night, for the advocacy center event, and there was a secondary event in the private rooms on the same evening. Price-Kent Holdings."
My hands stilled on the keyboard.
"I'm not—" He stopped. Started again. "I'm not trying to interrogate your personal life.
I just. I noticed you'd been a little quieter than usual for the past few weeks, and I was trying to figure out whether I'd done something or whether it was something else, and then I looked at the membership records because I was trying to see who'd attended the fundraiser. "
"Dean."
"Yeah."
I turned to look at him. He was watching me with an expression that was patient and careful and underneath that, a little scared. Not of me — of the answer.
The problem with people who were emotionally fluent was that they made you want to be fluent back.
"I met someone at the event," I said. "It was one night. It's done."
"Okay." He nodded. "Is it actually done? Or is it done as in finished, or done as in taking up significant real estate in your head for three weeks?"
I hated that he could read that.
"It doesn't matter which kind it is," I said. "It can't become anything. He's an alpha from a dynasty pack succession and I'm a beta. The law has a very specific answer to that question and the answer is not applicable."
"The law's wrong."
"The law's the law."
"Those aren't the same thing." He said it quietly, which was more effective than if he'd said it loudly. Dean was good at that — the quiet version. "Avery."
"Don't."
"I'm not pushing. I'm just saying — you deserve someone who chooses you. Whatever form that takes."
The thing was, he meant it. He wasn't saying it to make a point or to position himself or because it was the right thing to say. He meant every single word of it, and that was worse than if he hadn't, because it made me want things I wasn't supposed to want and the list was getting long.
I looked at him.
He was close on the couch. Not inappropriately close — we'd been sitting like this for hours and it was just comfortable, just natural, and somewhere in the last three weeks natural had become something I had to be careful with.
He leaned toward me. Not aggressively. Just — toward.
I could have let it happen. I wanted to. My body had a clear vote on this and my body was outnumbered.
I pulled back.
"You're going to need someone who can give you what I can't," I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected. "Legal heat care. A recognized bond. Someone who—"
"Avery—"
"I can't be someone's almost, Dean. I've been someone's almost before.
The beta who was there when it was convenient and not there when the law required something else.
" I looked at his face and I kept going because I had to.
"You deserve better than almost. And eventually you'll find the real thing and I need that to not destroy us, which means we can't make it into a thing that can be destroyed. "
He was quiet for a long time.
"That's the most logical thing anyone has ever said about something completely illogical," he said finally.
I almost laughed. "I have to be reasonable about this. If I'm not reasonable, I won't be reasonable about anything."
"Can I disagree with you?"
"You can try."
"The argument assumes that a recognized bond is automatically the real thing and what we have isn't. I think that's the wrong premise." He looked at me steadily. "I think you're protecting yourself by calling something real almost so it hurts less when it inevitably gets taken away."
The accuracy of that sat in my chest like a stone.
"Stay," he said. It was barely a word.
I stood up and carried my laptop to the kitchen and refilled my water and spent forty-five seconds standing at the counter convincing myself that the decision I'd made was the right one.
Then I came back and we watched something on television and he fell asleep with his head at the other end of the couch, his feet near my knees, and I sat there in my apartment with his warm weight near me and thought about all the ways that almost was killing me by degrees.
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