Chapter Nine
Nora
I decided to be professional about it.
Professional was a word I understood. Professional had rules and boundaries and a clearly defined perimeter that kept messy things like feelings and scent matches and the memory of a man’s voice saying take all the time you need safely on the other side of a line I could control.
The plan was simple: go to work, do my job, stop letting Kieran Ashworth’s existence rearrange my nervous system on a daily basis. Straightforward. Achievable. The kind of plan a reliable person would make.
The plan lasted approximately fourteen hours.
· · ·
Monday morning. I arrived at my desk at 8:15, the same time I always arrived, and found a box of Earl Grey on my keyboard.
Not the cheap stuff from the supply closet that tasted like cardboard and regret.
This was loose-leaf, from a brand I’d mentioned exactly once, in passing, during a conversation with Jonah three weeks ago.
Jonah had asked what I drank at home when I wasn’t suffering through the office coffee, and I’d said Earl Grey, the good kind, from the little shop on Ashbury Street that sold it by the ounce in paper bags with handwritten labels.
This was from that shop. I could tell by the paper bag tucked inside the box, with its familiar slanted handwriting.
There was no note. There didn’t need to be.
I put the tea in my desk drawer and told myself it didn’t mean anything. A colleague had noticed a preference and acted on it. People did that. It was collegial. Professional, even.
On Tuesday, there was a new pen. Matte black, weighted the way I liked, with a grip that didn’t slip when my hands were cold. My old pen had been dying for a week, bleeding ink onto my fingers every time I used it. I’d complained about it to no one.
He’d just noticed. The way he noticed everything about me, with that quiet, relentless attentiveness that I couldn’t decide was flattering or unnerving or both.
On Wednesday, a sticky note on my monitor. Three words in handwriting I didn’t recognize but somehow knew.
Good morning, Nora.
I peeled it off the monitor and put it in my desk drawer with the tea.
Then I took it out and looked at it again.
Then I put it back. Then I took it out one more time and ran my thumb over the ink, which was still faintly raised on the paper, and I thought about a man pressing a pen to a sticky note in his penthouse at some point before 8:15 in the morning and writing my name, and the thought made my chest do something warm and inconvenient.
I put the note in my wallet. I wasn’t going to think about why.
On Thursday, nothing. The absence was louder than any gift.
On Friday, a single packet of the good creamer from the third floor, left on my keyboard like a calling card.
I was losing the war against professionalism and I hadn’t even made it through the first week.
· · ·
Sadie cornered me in the kitchenette on Wednesday, because Sadie had a sixth sense for when my emotional scaffolding was compromised and she exploited it without mercy.
“So,” she said, leaning against the counter with her arms crossed and her eyes sharp. “Tea. Pens. Love notes.”
“It’s not a love note. It says ‘good morning.’”
“In his handwriting. On a sticky note. Left on your monitor before you arrive, which means he was here before 8:15, which means he, a CEO, came in early specifically to leave you a message that he could have texted.” She raised one eyebrow. “That’s a love note, Nora.”
I poured my Earl Grey and said nothing, which was an admission and we both knew it.
Sadie studied me. The sharp edges of her expression softened, just slightly, into something that on anyone else would be called tenderness but that Sadie would deny with her dying breath.
“How are you doing with all this?” she asked. “Actually.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I told myself I was going to keep this professional.”
“How’s that going?”
I held up the mug of Earl Grey that Kieran Ashworth had personally sourced from a shop he’d never been to based on an offhand comment I’d made to someone else three weeks ago.
“Terribly.”
Sadie almost smiled. Almost. “Look. I’m not going to pretend I’m comfortable with this. He’s an alpha with a history, and the power dynamic between him and you is... significant. You work for him, Nora.”
“I know.”
“But.” She paused, and the pause cost her something, I could see it.
“I’ve been watching him. And I’ve been watching you.
And he’s not pushing. He’s not cornering you or leveraging anything or being a typical alpha about it.
He’s leaving tea on your desk like a cat bringing dead birds to someone’s doorstep, and that’s either the most pathetic or the most sincere courtship I’ve ever seen. ”
“Please don’t compare him to a cat.”
“The comparison stands.” She uncrossed her arms. “If they hurt you, I will burn that building to the ground. I mean that literally. I have opinions about accelerants.”
“You’re terrifying.”
“Thank you.”
She squeezed my arm as she passed, which was the Sadie equivalent of a hug and a hallmark card, and I stood in the kitchenette with my expensive tea and my complicated feelings and thought about the fact that even Sadie, who trusted alphas the way most people trusted weather forecasts, was starting to see what I saw.
· · ·
Jonah invited me to lunch on Tuesday.
Not in the kitchenette this time. He suggested a cafe two blocks from the office, a small place with mismatched chairs and good sandwiches and the kind of ambient noise that made conversation feel private without being secretive.
I said yes before I’d finished thinking about it, which was becoming a pattern with Jonah.
He asked and I answered, and the space between the question and the response kept getting shorter.
We ordered. We sat. He talked about a conflict resolution training he was designing for the newly merged staff, and I talked about the vendor contracts I’d been restructuring, and for twenty minutes it was just two colleagues having a working lunch and I could almost pretend that was all it was.
Then he asked about my weekend and the professional veneer dissolved like sugar in rain.
“I went to my parents’ house on Sunday,” I said. “For dinner.”
“How was it?”
I considered my answer. “The same as always. My mom made pot roast. My dad asked about work. I said it was fine. They said that’s good. We watched Jeopardy. I drove home.”
“That sounds...”
“Reliable?” I offered.
He looked at me, and the understanding in his green eyes was so precise it felt like being known. “I was going to say ‘careful.’ It sounds like people being very careful with each other.”
I set down my sandwich. “They are careful. We all are. My parents are betas and they raised a beta and we love each other very much and none of us has ever once talked about anything that might disrupt the equilibrium.” I paused. “I haven’t told them about... any of this.”
“About the pack?”
“About any of it. The scent match. You. Kieran.” I shook my head. “They would worry. They’d be kind about it, but they’d worry, and their worry would sound like caution, and their caution would sound like all the reasons I should protect myself from wanting too much.”
Jonah was quiet for a moment. He had a way of being quiet that felt like being listened to rather than waited out, and I was starting to realize how rare and how valuable that was.
“Can I tell you something about presenting as omega?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“When I was fifteen and the test came back, the first thing the world did was hand me a script. Male omegas are supposed to be one of two things: either soft and feminine and grateful, or ashamed and overcompensating. Those are the options. Pick your box.” He turned his coffee cup slowly on the table.
“I didn’t fit in either box. I wasn’t ashamed of being omega, but I also wasn’t going to perform softness for people who needed me to be smaller so they could feel comfortable.
And the world did not know what to do with that. ”
“How long did it take you to stop caring what the world thought?”
“About seven years.” He smiled, rueful and warm. “I was twenty-two when I finally looked at all the scripts and said, ‘None of these are mine.’ And I wrote my own. It’s messy and imperfect and some people don’t like it, but it’s mine.”
I thought about scripts. About the one I’d been handed at fourteen when my designation test came back. Beta. Here is your script: be reliable, be steady, don’t reach too high, don’t want too much. Thank the alphas. Support the omegas. Fill in the spaces and don’t expect anyone to notice.
“I’m still working on mine,” I said quietly.
“You’re further along than you think.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because a woman who’d fully bought the script wouldn’t be sitting in a cafe with an omega who’s part of an alpha pack that’s trying to court her.
She’d have said no to the tea and the pens and the lunches.
She’d have closed the door.” His eyes were warm and steady and impossibly green. “You left it open.”
My throat tightened. I looked down at my sandwich, which had become blurry.
“It’s not that people are cruel,” I said.
“Being a beta. It’s not cruelty. It’s indifference.
You can survive cruelty because at least cruelty means someone is paying attention.
Indifference just... erodes you. Slowly, over years, until you don’t even notice what’s been worn away because you can’t remember what was there in the first place. ”
Jonah set down his coffee. He looked at me with so much understanding it made my chest ache, a physical, localized pain that radiated outward from the center of my sternum.
“I see what’s there,” he said. Simply. Without decoration or emphasis. Like a fact. Like gravity.
I believed him.
We finished our lunch. He walked me back to the office. And in the elevator, as the doors closed and we stood side by side in the ascending quiet, he reached over and brushed his fingers across the back of my hand.
Just that. Just a brush. Just his fingertips against my knuckles, light as breath, gone in a second.
Neither of us pulled away.
Neither of us mentioned it.
The elevator reached the second floor. The doors opened. We walked out and went to our separate desks and spent the rest of the afternoon being professional and functional and completely, utterly wrecked.
· · ·
I called Maren that night.
She picked up on the second ring, which meant she’d been expecting it. Maren had an uncanny ability to know when I was about to call, the way some people could feel weather changes in their joints.
“Scale of one to ten,” she said, without preamble. “How screwed are you?”
“Eleven.”
“Excellent. Tell me everything.”
I lay on my couch with my phone on speaker and stared at the ceiling and told her about the tea and the pens and the sticky note that was currently in my wallet like a talisman.
I told her about Sadie’s reluctant blessing and the dead-bird metaphor.
I told her about Jonah at the cafe, and the scripts, and the way he’d said I see what’s there like it was the simplest truth in the world.
I told her about his fingers on the back of my hand and the way my entire body had gone quiet and loud at the same time.
“The omega,” Maren said thoughtfully. “You’re falling for the omega too.”
“I’m not falling for anyone. I’m maintaining professional boundaries.”
“Nora. Honey. You have a sticky note in your wallet.”
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. “I know.”
“And the omega touched your hand and you described it to me like a religious experience.”
“It was a brush. A finger brush. That’s not a religious experience.”
“You said your entire body went quiet and loud at the same time. That’s either a religious experience or a medical emergency, and since you’re not in the hospital, I’m going with religious.”
I laughed despite myself. This was what Maren did. She took the things that felt enormous and impossible and she held them up to the light and made them look like what they were: life, happening. Scary and beautiful and absolutely worth it.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “With two of them? How does that even work?”
“I think it works however you want it to work. That’s the whole point, right?
There’s no script for this. You said it yourself, there’s no precedent.
A beta in a pack. A scent match that shouldn’t exist. An omega who’s choosing you because he wants to, not because biology told him to.
” She paused. “You don’t have to follow anyone else’s rules, Nora. You get to make your own.”
I was quiet for a long time. On the other end of the line, I could hear the faint sounds of Maren’s apartment.
Her dishwasher running. The creak of the floor as she moved through her kitchen.
The small, domestic sounds of a life lived alone, the same sounds that filled my apartment every night, and I wondered if she felt the quiet the way I did. If the silence had a shape for her too.
“How was your week?” I asked, because Maren always asked about mine and I didn’t always return the favor, and I was trying to be better about that.
“Oh, you know. Twenty five-year-olds staged a protest because I wouldn’t let them rename the class hamster ‘Sergeant Fluffbutt.’ I compromised on ‘Mr. Fluffbutt’ and they accepted the terms.”
“Negotiation skills.”
“I should work in crisis management. Speaking of which, how’s the scary alpha?”
“Leaving me tea.”
“God, that’s romantic. I want someone to leave me tea.”
“Your time will come.”
“From your mouth to the universe’s ears.” She yawned. “Go to sleep, Nora. And for the record? You’re not falling for two of them. You’re opening a door. Different thing.”
I hung up. I lay on my couch in the quiet of my apartment with the hum in my chest and the memory of Jonah’s fingers on my hand and the sticky note in my wallet and the pen on my nightstand and the door, the door, the door that I’d told Kieran I’d keep open, that I’d told Maren was different from falling.
It was open. It was wide open. And I could feel the draft all the way through.