Chapter 18
Chapter eighteen
The pack is at dinner.
No crisis. No agenda. Just the facility schedule and the fact of all of them being in the same building and ending up at the same table.
Leo across from me, performing normalcy at roughly forty percent above what's required.
Jake and Jim side by side, the ease between them something I watch because it's good and I don't have many things that are straightforwardly good right now.
Dalton is at the door.
Not at the table — at the door, doing his job, notepad in hand, monitoring. The line between staff and residents drawn in the geography of the room. But he's watching the table the way he watches things that matter to him, and I notice that too.
RJ is not here.
The space where he would be is present the way absences are present — not empty, occupied by the awareness of what's missing. Nobody looks at it directly. Everyone knows.
I look at my tray and decide to be here anyway. Montana is not tonight. The board review is not tonight. Tonight there is chicken that is approximately edible and Leo already stealing from Torres's plate before Torres has sat down.
"Hey, that's mine," Torres says.
"It was yours," Leo says. "It has now been liberated."
"Put it back."
"I have already committed emotionally."
Torres tries to steal it back, but Leo blocks him without looking, which is physically impressive.
Jim watches this happen with the patient attention he gives everything — waiting to see where it ends up. "Done?"
"For now," Leo says.
Jake, beside him, has been watching this exchange with the expression of a man who has been around Leo long enough to know exactly how that was going to end. His jaw does the thing where it's almost a smile but doesn't commit to anything.
I catch it.
He catches me catching it.
We both look back at our food.
"So," Torres says, to the general table. "Today."
"Today," Leo agrees pleasantly.
"The table thing."
"The table thing," Leo agrees again, with the same pleasant energy, which gives absolutely nothing.
Torres looks at me. Then at the table I am currently eating at. Then back at me, with the expression of a man doing the math on whether to say the thing he's thinking.
He says it anyway. "I may have — briefly, not for long — been slightly concerned when you got up there."
"Concerned," I say.
"Concerned." He's very committed to this word. "In a completely normal way."
"Torres," Leo says, leaning forward with the expression of someone about to offer genuine comfort, "you can say scared. This is a safe space."
"I was not scared."
"Jake," Leo says, "was Torres scared?"
Jake, without looking up from his food: "Very."
"I — that's—" Torres looks at Jake with a betrayed expression. "You weren't even in the room."
"Jim told me."
Everyone looks at Jim.
Jim looks up from his tray. "He was scared," he confirms, and goes back to eating.
The table does various things with their faces. Leo's is not subtle at all. I press my lips together and look at the ceiling.
Torres points at Jim. "I thought you were supposed to be the quiet one."
"I am quiet," Jim says. "That doesn't mean I'm not observant."
"I nearly wet myself," Torres says, with the sudden energy of a man who has decided that honesty is the best option now that denial has failed. "When she shifted. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I have been through some things in this facility and nothing prepared me for — whatever that was."
"What did it look like," Leo says, with the genuine interest of someone who was behind me and missed the view.
"Like—" Torres gestures expansively. "Large. Very large. And then everyone stopped fighting and it was extremely quiet." He looks at me. "How are you that huge?"
"Alpha," Leo says, as if this is a complete answer. "She's our alpha."
"I gathered," Torres says dryly. "I gathered that very clearly when she was standing on the table being enormous."
"It's good," Leo says. "You want your alpha to be enormous. It means nobody messes with the pack."
"I am not in the pack."
"Torres," Leo says, with patient warmth. "You eat at our table."
Torres opens his mouth. Closes it. Looks at me.
"Alex," Torres says. "Am I in the pack?"
"No," I say. Then I go back to eating.
Torres stares at me. "That's it? No?"
"Yep," I say.
Torres looks at Leo. Leo spreads his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
"Then why do I keep ending up at your table."
"Because Leo steals your food and you come back anyway," I say. "That's how it is."
Torres considers this. "That's a terrible how it is."
"It's yours," Leo says warmly.
"I nearly wet myself," Torres says again, mostly to himself, and drinks his coffee.
"Whatever that was," Leo says, "is our pack alpha, and you should feel extremely safe."
"I felt extremely not safe."
"You should work on reframing."
"I was in the room, Leo. I was part of the situation."
"You helped cause the situation."
"The Gold House guy started it—"
"And then you escalated it very enthusiastically—"
"I was responding to instinct—"
"And then Alex fixed it," Leo says, spreading his hands in the gesture of someone making a very simple point. "You're welcome. She worked very hard on that table."
Torres looks at me. "Thank you," he says, with great sincerity and a slight air of lingering trauma.
"You're welcome," I say.
"I'm going to be normal about it," he says. "Starting now."
Jake makes a sound. It takes me a moment to identify it because I've never heard it before.
He's laughing.
Not performing it — actually laughing, low and brief, at his food, his shoulders moving with it. Jim looks at him and something in his face does the thing that is not quite a smile but is significantly more than neutral.
Torres points at Jake.
Jake stops laughing but continues to look extremely unbothered.
"Everyone at this table is terrible," Torres says.
Leo puts his arm around Torres's shoulders briefly, the gesture of a man bestowing wisdom. "Let me introduce you to our female alpha," he says. "Do not fuck with her. Do not fuck with us. She will absolutely end you." He releases him. "You're welcome for the warning."
***
The conversation moves the way dinner conversations move when everyone is deliberately choosing to be present rather than anywhere else.
Leo talks about the coursework with Jake, which he has Opinions about, and extracts more sympathy from Torres than from anyone else at the table because Torres is new to Leo's particular relationship with academic material and hasn't yet learned not to engage.
"The module assumes a baseline knowledge that I simply do not have," Leo says. "I have practical knowledge. I have field experience. What I do not have is the educational vocabulary to describe experiences I have been having successfully for years."
"So you failed the module," I say.
"I failed the module with significant contextual nuance."
“Just do it again Leo.” Jim says quietly.
Everyone looks at Jim.
Jake looks at his food. "Cal is good at his job." He says it flat, factual, stripped of everything except the information itself. "You can ask for help."
Jim goes still beside him. He doesn't say anything. He reaches for his water and drinks it and I watch the careful attention he pays to Jake when Jake isn't looking.
I look back at my food.
Leo looks at me. I look at him. Neither of us says anything.
Something sits warm in my chest anyway.
***
At some point the conversation thins out into the comfortable near-silence of people who have run out of words but haven't run out of wanting to be in the same place. Jake and Jim sit close, not talking, the ease between them something I can feel from across the table.
I watch Dalton's eyes move around the table and find each person and check them off some internal list, and then find me, and stay.
The weight of everything is there — it's always there, Montana and the board and the clock running faster than it was yesterday — but I'm here.
The food is good. The people around this table exist and are present and some of them are even laughing, which is a thing I didn't know how to want until I had it.
I didn't expect to want this.
I wanted individuals. I wanted these people — not a structure, not a constellation, not to be the center of something I didn't design. And yet the shape of it sits in my chest like something that was always going to be there, and that scares me more than any of the rest of it.
Not because it might fall apart.
Because it might not.
***
Afterward, while the table is clearing, I lean toward Leo.
"I miss Gray," I say. Quiet.
A sound from the door. Low. Almost nothing.
I glance over. Dalton is looking at his notepad but his mouth is doing something and he drags his thumb across his nose — the gesture I've seen a hundred times now, the one that is just him.
I turn back.
Jim is watching Dalton. Not the flicker I've seen before — a frown.
Small, precise. The expression of someone filing something that doesn't fit the folder they put it in yet.
He looks at me. Then at Jake. Then back at Dalton, who has recomposed himself entirely and is making a note in his notepad with the serene professionalism of someone who definitely was not just laughing at a resident.
Jim's frown deepens fractionally.
Jake, who has caught Jim's expression, raises his eyebrows in a question.
Jim shakes his head slightly. Goes back to his coffee.
I file it too.
***
Dalton falls into step beside me in the corridor on the way back.
I'm flanked — Dalton on one side, Leo on the other, which Leo has arranged through the quiet mechanics of positioning that he executes with such casual ease I never notice him doing it until it's done. Leo is humming something. It is designed to be mildly annoying. It is, mildly, annoying.
"Sven's review has been pushed back," Dalton says. "Indefinitely."
I look at him.
He doesn't take credit. He says it the way he says things that are done — flat, as information, nothing performed about it.
"Thank you," I say.
He looks slightly uncomfortable. The mask doesn't quite know what to do with direct gratitude.
I find this endearing. I do not say so.
He nods once and peels off toward the admin corridor.
Leo watches him go. Then he looks at me with the expression of someone who has been running calculations all evening and has arrived at a conclusion.
"Leo," I say.
"I'm not doing anything," he says.
"You're thinking about doing something."
"I'm thinking about a lot of things. I'm a complex person."
"Leo."
He puts his hands in his pockets and whistles something. It is the same mildly annoying thing he was humming. He does not stop whistling it until he reaches the Red House corridor junction, at which point he looks at me with studied innocence.
"Good night," he says.
"What are you planning."
"Sleep. I'm planning sleep." He tilts his head. "Gray misses you too, you know. He told me."
"When did you talk to Gray."
"I talk to Gray all the time. We have a very meaningful connection." He pauses. "Established primarily through our mutual appreciation for you, but still."
He goes.
I stand in the corridor and think about Gray in Gold House across the compound and the look Leo gave Jim over the dinner table and what Leo does when he's decided something. Which is the thing I should be worried about. The thing that, if I'm honest, I'm also slightly hoping for.