9. The Help She Hates #3
The last clause, the load-bearing one, in the largest font because Juniper has opinions about emphasis: If I say the arrangement ends, it ends, that hour, without argument, appeal, or postage.
I photograph the notebook pages and send them to Priya at ten p.m. with the message ‘Make this real’. She replies in four minutes, which means she was waiting up:
This is the most enforceable romantic disaster I've ever formatted. Contracts by morning. Proud of you. Go to bed.
By Thursday morning, I send the contracts.
Three envelopes, three couriers, identical terms, one cover line each, drafted by Priya, approved by me: execution of the attached is a precondition to any meeting, personal or professional.
Then I do the healthy thing, per my new regime, which is to work a normal day and check the inbox only every eleven minutes.
Beckett signs first.
Ninety minutes, scanned, notarized, Lena's tidy cover note attached, every page initialed, including the banned-nickname appendix, no comment anywhere on the document, which is its own comment.
August's arrives at two with one question, routed properly through counsel like the contract requires, and the question undoes me a little in the middle of my office, because it isn't a negotiation, it's this: Clause 5 addresses scent-marking.
Should the vendor additionally wear medical-grade suppressants during in-person meetings, or is held control sufficient?
Please advise; either is acceptable, and the answer will not be discussed further.
He's asking whether I want him chemically erased for my comfort, offering to mute the pear-blossom-and-iris of himself down to nothing, no protest, no wounded flourish.
I sit with my pen over the reply for longer than I'll admit before writing, held control is sufficient, and then sit another minute wondering which of us I answered for.
Cade's contract comes back at four. Signed, initialed, complete. No note. No joke. Nothing in the margins, no personal appeal smuggled into the signature line.
I turn all nine pages twice, looking for the Cade of it, the wink, the flourish, and there's nothing, just his name in blue ink sitting quiet as a folded hand, and that's the one that unsettles me most.
I know exactly why, and I put the knowing in the internal cellar with the rest of the piles of anxiety wonders.
They're not pursuing.
Pursuit I armored for.
This is three men standing perfectly still with their hands visible, and there's no armor for stillness.
I close the office at nine. The lane's gone quiet, string lights on, fog coming up off the harbor soft as breath, and I'm turning my key in the gold-lettered door when the feeling arrives before the reason.
The little cold prickle up the back of the neck, older than language, and I turn around.
Across Bellflower Lane, under the streetlamp outside the darkened bookshop, stands a man with a suitcase.
Dark hair, longer than it used to be, and caramel-amber warmth drifting to me across the street. A jacket too good for this town and shoulders I'd know in any light or none at all.
In five more years of trying not to, the fog moves between us, and Cade Mercer does not cross the street. Doesn't call out, or smile that genuine grin that lights his whole face up in excitement.
He doesn’t deploy one watt of the four seconds that work on everyone alive.
He stands beside his suitcase like a man who has just walked up from the harbor road with his whole life in one bag. He lifts one hand, not a wave, just a raising — here, acknowledged, your move.
Then he waits, absolutely still, under the lamp, in the fog, to see what I do.
The contract in my inbox says he can't approach.
Nothing in any contract says what I'm allowed to do, and for one long second, my body leans a centimeter toward the curb all by itself: toward the shape of him, to the man who drove away, and every rule I wrote this week was written for exactly this moment in the midst of this lamppost.
You’re not going to unwrite the agony they put you through, Amber.
This could be the tactic. To seem unbothered. Hoping I’ll come crawling back like a desperate, needy Omega who yearns for the Alphas that abandoned her.
As if I can’t get anyone else.
The crazy part is, I can.
I’ve been asked plenty. I could be in a relationship at any moment if I let the message out there that I’m ready to mingle.
Maybe it’s time I do that…
Would it help remove the anger within me?
Heal me in some way, like a fairy godmother appearing and ridding me of the burden this pit of rage has continued to drag on?
You made the rules, Amber. Instill them…and prove that these men will have to work a lot harder to get what they perceive they don’t want.
I turn away.
My hands finish the locks, deadbolt, top latch, steady the whole way, and I walk up Bellflower Lane toward home without looking back.
He doesn't follow, call out, or leave.
Cade Mercer stands under the streetlamp beside everything he owns and lets me walk away from him; the sound my heels make on the cobbles is the only voice in the fog, saying the same word all the way home.
Rule one, rule one, rule one.