Chapter 7
Tristan
I notice things. This is not a skill I developed so much as something I was born into. I have an attunement to the people around me, to the small signals that most people broadcast without knowing it.
The way someone holds a cup tells you how tired they are. The way someone scans a room tells you what they’re afraid of. The way someone eats—or doesn’t eat—tells you almost everything you need to know about how they’re doing, if you’re paying attention.
I’m always paying attention.
It’s the caretaker instinct, Ryan would say, with the fondness he reserves for things he considers both useful and slightly exasperating.
Archer would say I mother-hen. Jack would say nothing because Jack would have already eaten whatever I made and be asking for more, which is its own kind of appreciation.
The point is, I notice things. And from the first moment Lola walked into my café and sat at the counter and ordered with the efficiency of someone who eats to function rather than someone who eats for pleasure, I have been noticing things about her that I don’t entirely know what to do with.
Day one: she ate the eggs. All of them, quickly, without dawdling.
Good sign. But the way she did it—head slightly down, elbows in, taking up the minimum of space—that’s the eating posture of someone who learned early to finish fast before it gets taken away or before they have to move.
Not deprivation, necessarily. But readiness. Always ready to go.
Day two: she worked prep with me for three hours and ate nothing.
I put things in front of her throughout the day—a small pastry, a portion of the test batch I was running for the weekend menu, a bowl of something warm around noon—and she looked at each of them. She was clearly hungry, but she didn’t touch a single one.
I didn’t comment. Commenting would close a door. Tristan, you’ll push her, I tell myself, which is what I always tell myself, which is sometimes enough.
Day three—today—she arrives at the stall at nine with coffee from somewhere that is not my café, which I note without taking personally.
She sets up her section of the prep table with the focus she does everything with.
She works through the first hour without stopping, and by the second hour I can see it in the set of her shoulders, she hasn’t eaten this morning. Possibly last night either.
I know what that looks like. I know it because I’ve fed enough people to understand that not eating is never really about food.
She’s working the pastry prep. She has good hands, precise, she’s learned how to handle dough somewhere along the way and she doesn’t overwork it, which is the primary error of people who haven’t.
I’m running the second burner setup and watching her without watching her, which is a skill set I’ve also developed over time.
The pack bond hums steadily.
Ryan is at home. Archer is doing perimeter rounds.
Jack is somewhere unpredictable, which is how I locate Jack, by process of elimination.
All of them are aware of her, the same way they’ve been aware since partial-bond was created.
That low persistent frequency of a pack bond that has acquired a new and significant signal.
I’m the most aware, probably. Not because my instinct is louder.
Ryan’s is more controlled, but it runs deeper, and Archer’s protective drive is running at a level that I suspect is giving him a headache he won’t admit to.
But I am the one who spends three hours a day beside her, working the same space, breathing the same air, and proximity does things to the bond that distance doesn’t.
She smells like vanilla and citrus. Fruity and spicy at the same time.
It’s actually quiet pleasant to be around.
Her suppressants aren’t working very well, if she’s using them at all.
They might be masking the obvious Omega scent, but not all of it.
Or maybe it’s the partial-bond that’s letting me smell it. I don’t know which.
She reaches for the top shelf of the ingredient rack and comes up half an inch short. She doesn’t ask for help, she goes up on her toes and gets it, jaw set, and something in me goes very quiet and admiring.
I move to the prep station beside hers.
“How are you finding the dough?” I ask.
“It’s good. The ratio’s slightly rich. You’re getting a flakier edge than you might want for hand-held service, but it holds for table service.”
I look at her. “You’ve done pastry work before?”
“I’ve done a lot of work before.” She folds the edge easily. “If you want hand-held stability you can bring the butter back by about ten percent without losing the flavor profile.”
I consider this. “Show me?”
She does. Her hands move with the confidence of someone who has done this enough that the knowledge lives in her fingers rather than her head.
I watch the adjustment and she’s right, immediately and demonstrably right.
The part of me that loves this—that loves watching someone be quietly skilled at something—that part does something warm and tender.
“Where did you learn?” I ask.
“Here and there.” The deflection is automatic, reflexive, the same way she answers most questions about herself.
“Fair enough,” I reply.
She looks up, briefly, like she expected pushback and didn’t get it.
I go back to the burner setup.
By eleven, she is running on empty and pretending she’s not. I can see it in small things. The fraction of slowness in her movements that wasn’t there an hour ago, the way she’s gone slightly inward. Her blood sugar is low. I would bet on it.
I don’t say you need to eat. I’ve learned with the pack, with the people who come through my café, with every person who has ever needed something and refused to ask for it, that need announced is need defended against. You don’t tell people what they need. You just put it in front of them.
I plate something small. Not a meal. A meal would feel like an intervention, and she’d resist the intervention.
Just the test batch I’ve been running all morning: a small fried dough spiral with a honey glaze and a scattering of sea salt, the kind of thing that reads as incidental, as something that exists and happens to be nearby.
I set it on the corner of her prep station without comment.
I go back to my tasks.
A full thirty seconds pass. I pretend I am not watching. But I am absolutely watching in my peripheral vision.
She looks at it. She looks at me—I’m not looking at her, I’m checking a temperature—she looks back at it. She picks it up and takes a bite. I keep my eyes on the burner because the last thing she needs is to feel observed in this moment.
The small sound she makes is not intentional. I am certain it’s not intentional. It’s barely a sound at all, just a breath, really, the involuntary exhale of someone who has been given something their body needed urgently and didn’t know how to ask for.
I plate another piece and set it next to the first without looking up.
She eats it.
We don’t discuss this.
Around noon Jack appears, as Jack does, with the energy of a weather event and the subtlety of one too.
“Tristan,” he says, leaning over the counter. “I need you to settle something.”
“I’m working.”
“It’s quick.” He looks at Lola with the brightness he gets around things that amuse him, which has been a constant since she arrived. “Lola. If you had to choose between ring toss and the maze as a pure entertainment experience—”
“Maze,” she replies, without looking up.
“That’s what I said,” Jack says triumphantly.
“I said ring toss,” I mutter. “On the basis that the maze is deliberately disorienting and ring toss is at least honest about what it is.”
“The maze is also honest about what it is,” Lola points out. “It says maze. It’s not pretending to be a straight corridor.”
“Fair point,” I concede.
“I knew I liked her,” Jack says.
“You say that every time she agrees with you.”
“I say it every time she’s interesting, which is constantly.” He steals a piece of fried dough from the plate and points at Lola. “Tonight, carnival opening. You’re coming.”
“I’m not—”
“I’m not asking.” He’s already backing away. “Tristan will bring you. It’s on the schedule.”
“I don’t have a—”
But he’s gone, the impressive vanishing act he does when he’s said what he came to say and wants to exit before the response arrives.
Lola looks at me like I’m responsible for him. I guess in a way, I am. The pack membership isn’t always convenient.
“He does that,” I say.
“I’ve noticed.” She returns to the prep work. “I’m not going to some—”
“You don’t have to go. But the opening night is worth seeing. The full lights, the whole town out. It’s the one night a year where Sweetwater Valley is alive and busy.”
She’s quiet.
“And you’ve been working all day,” I add. “You should see it.”
“You sound like you’re trying to sell me something.”
“I’m not.” I check the burner, adjust the temperature, wipe my hands on the cloth. “I just think you’ve been running a long time and a carnival at full light is a nice thing to experience for an hour.”
The silence has a different quality than her usual silences. Less deflection, more consideration. I don’t push it.
The afternoon heat builds and the prep work winds down.
At some point I look up and realize the light has gone golden and long and we have been working side by side for six hours.
I’ve worked alongside pack members for years and the experience of working alongside her is different in ways I’m still mapping.
She’s efficient without being cold. She makes small dry observations about things, the kind that aren’t quite jokes but land in the same place, and she has clearly decided that I’m a person whose company she can tolerate without bracing herself, which I know because she’s stopped holding herself quite so tightly when I’m in the same space.
It’s a small thing. But it’s also enormous.
I’m cleaning the prep station when she reaches across me for the stock list—she’s doing inventory, methodical and self-directed, nobody asked her to—and her arm crosses mine.
It’s not a collision. Just a crossing, her forearm over mine for a second at most, a geometry of two people in a shared space.
She stills.
Not much. A fraction. A breath held, a movement not completed.
Her arm is still crossed over mine, the back of her forearm against mine, and she has not moved it, and I have not moved mine.
The contact is barely contact, cloth and skin and warmth.
I keep doing what I’m doing because if I acknowledge it she’ll move.
Three seconds. Four.
My hand is still on the prep station and hers is hovering over the stock list and the afternoon light is flooding across the stall.
The carnival is humming into its opening-night energy all around us and she is very warm.
Her scent is now something that my pack instinct translates as home before I can intercept the word.
She moves. Finishes the reach, takes the stock list, steps back one step.
“Done with the far burner?” she asks. Her voice is exactly level.
“Yes,” I reply.
She does the inventory. I finish cleaning. The space between us is back to its normal working distance and nothing has happened and everything has happened. I am very carefully where I am, present and steady, because that is what she needs and I know it.
She hands me the stock list when she’s done. Our fingers don’t touch again. I take the list.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You were low on the sea salt.”
“I’ll order more.”
“And the honey.”
“I have a source. She’s a local beekeeper, I’ll call her tonight.”
Lola nods. Moving on. And then, because she is who she is and it surfaces sometimes before she can reroute it: “The honey glaze was the right call. On the fried dough. The salt ratio especially.”
I look at her. She’s looking at the stock list.
“Thank you,” I repeat.
She shrugs, one shoulder. “Just an observation.”
I watch her untie her apron. She folds it neatly, the same way she folds everything, before she sets it on the end of the table.
“Tonight,” she says. Not a question. Not an agreement. Just the word, placed in the air between us.
“Only if you want,” I reply.
She stares at me for a moment. Direct, measured, the way she looks at everything.
Except this time there’s something underneath it that isn’t quite as armored as her usual, something that has been worked loose over six hours of shared space and small kindnesses and one moment of contact that neither of us named.
“I’ll think about it,” she says.
She picks up her jacket and goes. I watch her walk out of the stall and into the carnival ground that is lighting up for opening night, globe by globe. She moves through it with her shoulders straight and her pace even and her hands in her pockets.
She’ll be here tonight. I know it the way I know the bread is done.
Not by looking at it, but by something more immediate and certain.
She’s been running long enough that stopping feels like surrender, and coming tonight would feel like choosing, and she is someone who needs to choose things. Needs to feel the agency of it.
She’ll choose it.
And when she does, I’ll be here, and I won’t make it a moment, and I won’t crowd her. I’ll just make sure she has something warm when she needs it.
That’s what I do.
I turn back to the stall, already thinking about what to bring tonight, what she’ll eat without thinking about it if I make it small and incidental enough. The pack bond hums around me, and somewhere in it is the new frequency of her.
She’s starting to trust me. She doesn’t know it yet.
That’s all right.
I know it for both of us.