Chapter 13
Lola
I don’t stay the night with Archer. It feels too intimate, despite what we just did.
Instead, I make an excuse in the early evening and leave.
I need some distance from the pack right now.
If I were to accidentally run into Jack, it would just be weird.
There might be pressure to complete the bond or something equally as confusing right now.
So I leave.
I turn up at the pub before I realize where I am. The River is quieter tonight than it was the first time I walked in.
That was days ago now. The night I dyed my hair in Doris Harrow’s bathroom and couldn’t sleep. I walked through the dark town and found a pub and found Jack, in that order. I made a series of decisions that I am still processing the consequences of.
Just four days? It feels like longer. It feels like the kind of longer that isn’t about time passing but about density. How much has happened in the space of it, how different the internal landscape looks from one end to the other.
I push open the door.
I came alone because I needed to be alone for a while.
This is a new kind of need, the alone part. Two weeks ago alone was my default state, my operating condition, the water I swam in so constantly I’d stopped noticing it was water. Now alone requires seeking out. Now alone is something I have to find space for.
I needed an hour of just being another person in a room.
The River gives me that. It’s the right kind of pub for it. It has the lived-in warmth, the low noise, the bartender who topped up my water without being asked the first time. I’ve since learned the bartender is called Pete and he has strong opinions about the carnival’s parking situation.
I take a stool at the bar. Not the same stool as last time. Different end, different sightline. Old habit.
“The valley whiskey?” Pete asks.
“Please,” I say.
He pours it and puts the glass in front of me. He goes back to whatever he was doing, which is the correct response and the reason I like this pub. He doesn’t hover.
I drink the whiskey and look at the room in my assessing way.
I let the noise of it wash over me. Three tables occupied.
Two men at the far end of the bar who’ve been here long enough to have the comfortable stillness of regulars.
A couple near the window. The low murmur of a television mounted above the bar, which is showing something I’m not paying attention to.
The whiskey is smooth.
I think about Archer’s hands, which is a memory that keeps popping into my head which I’ve decided I’m allowed to do because processing recent events is a legitimate cognitive activity.
I think about Jack’s face after the maze.
You’d be surprised. The infuriating cocky confidence of it. Pun intended.
The whiskey is gone before I realize it. Pete moves to pour another and I’m about to say yes when the television changes from ambient background noise to something that requires attention, the swell of a news program transitioning into a segment.
I don’t look up immediately.
I should have looked up immediately.
“—police are still urgently searching for Lola Wilson, twenty-four, last seen in the tri-state area following the alleged robbery of First Commerce Bank in—”
I look up.
My face is on the screen.
Not the auburn-haired version, not the Sweetwater Valley version. The before version, the security camera version, the version that has been on three news cycles and which I have been successfully not-thinking about for the better part of a week. Grainy. Familiar. Mine.
My stomach drops.
My heart hammers up a storm.
I breathe very carefully and keep my face neutral. I do not look at Pete and I do not look at the two men at the far end of the bar. I conduct an extremely rapid assessment of who in this pub has been looking at the television in the last thirty seconds.
Pete: facing away, restocking something under the bar.
The couple by the window: facing each other, not the screen.
The two regulars at the far end: one is looking at his phone.
The other… The other is looking at the screen.
He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the screen and then he looks at his phone and then he looks at the screen again.
I watch his face do the calculation that I have been dreading for a week—the comparison, the assessment, the—
He looks up.
He looks at the bar.
I am already off the stool.
Not running. I do not run. I stand, I put money on the bar, and I turn toward the door with the even pace of someone normal who has finished their drink and is leaving because they’ve finished their drink.
My pulse is a speeding train.
The door.
The cool night air of Main Street.
I am outside and I am walking. Still not running, running is noticed, running is remembered. I am heading toward the pack house because the exit calculation has come back online with full force and I need to be somewhere I am shielded. Somewhere I am protected.
* * *
I am positioned on the couch in the pack’s home with my legs tucked under me and Tristan’s extremely good tea in my hands.
I have not said a word about why I am here.
I’m sure they can smell the panic in my scent but nobody has mentioned it.
Jack’s elbow is two inches from my knee, and I have been here for four hours.
I notice this at ten o’clock.
I came at six.
The pack house, which I have been in three times now, and each time the radius of my comfort inside it has expanded in a way I haven’t tracked carefully enough. Tonight, I am on the couch with tea and I don’t want to leave. This is the situation I’m assessing.
It’s a good couch. That’s a real factor, not a deflection.
It’s been broken in over years to the exact specifications of human comfort, wide and deep with the softness of something used and loved rather than preserved.
The blanket I have acquired from somewhere is also real.
The warmth of the building against the night air outside is real.
The fact that it smells so good in here is… That’s a data point I’m still processing.
It’s not bad. The opposite of bad. The pack house smells like coffee and old wood and something I’ve been trying to categorize all week without landing on the right word.
It’s the pack, I understand that on an intellectual level.
Four Alphas sharing a space leave a signature, a layered warmth that I have no neutral framework for because every framework I have was built for individual scent, not this.
Not this combination of cedar and wood smoke and coffee.
I breathe in slowly through my nose, carefully, like I’m collecting evidence.
Safe.
That’s the watchword. My body keeps landing on safe and I keep redirecting it because I don’t have enough information to justify safe, because safe is a conclusion and I’ve only been here a week.
Amber seemed safe for fifteen years so my evidence-based threshold for safe should be considerably higher than a couch and a few days of proximity.
“You’re thinking very loudly,” Jack says, without looking up from whatever he’s doing on his phone.
“I’m not thinking anything.”
“You do this thing when you’re in your head. Your jaw goes a little tight. Not clenched. Just decided.” He still doesn’t look up. “Whatever you’re arguing with yourself about, you’re winning.”
“I’m not arguing with myself.”
“You’re very winning, then.”
Tristan appears from the kitchen with a plate of something small and sets it on the cushion between me and Jack without comment. Fried dough, honey-salt, the thing I’ve apparently given myself away about enjoying. He goes back to the kitchen.
I eat one without thinking about it. It’s oven warm. Jack was right, Tristan’s food is good enough to give a girl an orgasm.
Across the room, Archer is at the worktable with something structural—a piece of the game alley setup that needed repair, I know because I heard him say so to Ryan two hours ago—and he’s been focused on it since I arrived. He hasn’t said anything about our romp earlier. I prefer it that way.
He’s always between me and the door, I notice. Not obviously. Not positioned. It’s more that he ends up there, finds tasks that place him there. I have not been cataloguing this because I don’t know what to do with it yet.
I’ve been tracking Ryan in my peripheral vision for hours, which is a confession I’m making only to myself privately.
He came in at seven, nodded at me like I’d been coming here for years rather than days, sat in the chair by the window with a book, and has been there since.
He hasn’t spoken much. He doesn’t need to.
The pack in domestic mode is different from the pack in carnival mode.
I knew this theoretically. I did not know it as a sensory experience.
This is what it looks like when four people share a space that belongs to them, the ease of it, the lack of performance, everyone moving in their own radius and the radii just fitting together without effort.
Tristan cooks. Jack generates a low ambient chaos that somehow doesn’t intrude. Archer does physical work that needs doing. Ryan anchors.
And I am on the couch in the middle of it, which I got to by a series of individually justifiable decisions and cannot get out of without making it a moment, which I’m not prepared to do yet.
So I stay.