Chapter 16 #2
Ryan notices first. He’s beside me in a moment. Not in front, not blocking, just beside. His voice is low against the crowd noise. “Lola? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I reply.
“Okay,” he says, in the tone that means I hear you and I’m not arguing and also I don’t believe you.
“I just need…” I don’t finish because I don’t know what I need, which is the problem. I need the volume to go down. I need the layered warmth of them to step back. I need my own nervous system to return to my jurisdiction.
“Come with me,” he says.
Not a question. Not a direction exactly. An offer in a direction.
I follow him.
He takes me to the river pier.
I’ve been here before and it was just as beautiful now as it was then.
Ryan walks me through the last of the crowd and out onto the old boards.
The noise drops by half with every step, the tree cover and the distance doing their work, until we’re at the end of the pier and the water is below us.
The carnival is a warm glow through the trees and it’s quiet.
Not silent. The music still reaches here. But it’s manageable.
I put my hands on the railing and breathe. He stands beside me. Closer than his usual careful distance, but not touching, not crowding. Just present at a proximity that my nervous system registers as…
I breathe.
“You don’t have to explain it,” he says.
“I know.”
“The crowds can be a lot. Especially with…” He stops. Reconsiders. “Especially at peak.”
“It wasn’t the crowd,” I reply, before I decide to say it.
He’s quiet.
“It was…” I look at the water. The lantern reflections from earlier in the week are gone, just the carnival glow moving on the surface.
“It was all of it. The…” I have no safe language for what it was.
The pack bond reaching for me. Your collective scent at full density.
Days of gravity becoming something I can’t calculate my way around.
“I know,” he says. Two words. Quiet and direct and carrying about fifteen things.
I glance at him.
He’s looking at the river and his profile in the low light is beautiful. It’s the absence of excess, everything present and nothing ornamental. He’s close enough that I can see the detail of it. Close enough that when he breathes, I can feel the shift in the air.
“Ryan,” I say.
“Mm.”
“This is…” I stop again, frustrated. Why can’t I finish my sentences?
He spins to face me then. This close, with the carnival glow behind us and the river below and the noise at its managed distance, the look is very different from across a room.
This is close. This is close enough that I can see what’s in his expression, not the controlled surface but what’s underneath it.
The thing he holds back in company and is not quite holding back right now.
He wants me. That’s what’s underneath. Steady, patient, entirely clear-eyed about what it is, and he’s been holding it at the exact distance required. The effort of that is visible in him now, in this moment, in a way it hasn’t been before.
“I know what this is,” he begins. Low. Direct. “I know what you’re feeling. I’m not going to pretend I’m not feeling it too.”
I should say something that puts distance back in. I need to find the sentences. I’ve been maintaining the sentences since I arrived in this small town.
I don’t say them.
He turns his body toward me slightly and his hand comes up to my waist. Not grabbing. Not claiming. Just resting there. One hand, steady, at my waist, and the heat of it goes through everything between us and lands somewhere I have no defenses for.
Then his other hand comes up.
Not to my waist. To my hands, which are at the pier railing, and he covers them with his. The contact is warm and large and deliberate. I feel it from my fingers up through my arms and somewhere in my chest where the bond has been pressing for days.
“Give me your hands,” he directs calmly.
“They’re—” I look down. “They’re right here.”
“I know where they are.” He doesn’t move. Just waits, with the patience that is his fundamental quality, and I understand that he’s asking something specific. Not for my hands at the railing. For my hands.
I let him take them.
He turns them over—slowly, giving me every moment to stop him—and places them flat against his chest. Both of them. My palms against the fabric of his shirt, and underneath the fabric…
His heartbeat.
Slow. Steady. Completely, infuriatingly, impossibly constant. The heartbeat of a man who is feeling everything I’m feeling and has not let it move him from his own center. I can feel it under my hands, the rhythm of it, and something in my nervous system responds before I’ve decided to let it.
Slowing.
My pulse, which has been running at emergency speed since the crowd and the scent and the bond-pressure of ten minutes ago, begins to find the rhythm under my hands.
Like something being tuned. My system reaching toward his the way a compass needle reaches toward north, and I cannot tell if this is biology or choice and I’m not sure the distinction matters right now.
He exhales.
And his scent, which I’ve been aware of all evening in the layered carnival warmth, opens differently at this proximity.
Deeper. The cedar and snow of him, and underneath it something that is purely Alpha, purely Ryan.
Something that my instinct doesn’t have neutral language for because the language it has is: safe, anchored, here. It moves through me like a slow tide.
“You’re overwhelmed,” he says. “I’ve got you.”
I’ve got you. Three words and the bond hits me like a wave, the full force of it, something I’ve been standing sideways against for days, and it would be so…
It would be so easy.
Step in. Let him hold it. Let all of them hold it. Stop carrying this alone. Put it down with the people who have been quietly arranging themselves around me like a structure, like something built for a specific purpose.
My hands are on his chest and his heartbeat is under them and his scent is around me and I am…
I am so tired.
The thought arrives with a clarity that bypasses all my defenses.
I am so tired of not having this. Not him specifically, not in the way that requires a decision and the full weight of what choosing means.
Just… this. Hands on something steady. A heartbeat that doesn’t waver.
Something to orient by that isn’t the next move or the exit route or the carefulness of being alone with something enormous.
His thumb moves at my waist. Once. A small, unconscious press of warmth.
And the bond surges.
I step back. One step, clear and deliberate. My hands leave his chest. His hand falls to my waist. The air where he was is cold. My palms are warm. I can still feel his heartbeat in them, the ghost of the rhythm, and I press them together briefly at my sides before I make myself stop.
We’re positioned at the end of the pier and I breathe through what I just did, which is the right thing, which is the only defensible thing, which has left a space in my chest that feels like it has sharp edges.
“I can’t,” I say. It comes out quieter than I want. More honest than I can afford.
He looks at me. He doesn’t move toward me.
He doesn’t fill the void with reassurance or argument.
He stands where he is and holds whatever he’s holding with the steadiness that I have been watching all week, and his expression is not hurt.
It’s not fake. It’s patience. Real and unhurried and without an end date.
He looks at my hands.
I realize I’m pressing them together again.
I stop.
“Okay,” he says. One word. That’s it.
I observe the river. My waist is still warm where his hand was. “I should go back,” I say.
“I’ll walk with you.”
We walk back through the trees and into the carnival light and neither of us speaks.
The pack finds us at the edge of the ground within minutes and they adjust without asking, making the space I need without being told I need it.
I move through the rest of the evening inside their orbit and outside their reach.
The warmth of his hand stays with me all night.
I'm at a loss regarding what to do with the fact that I stepped back.
I don’t know what to do with the fact that a part of me—the part that is not strategy, not history, not the carefulness of self-protection I’ve been building since Amber—that part thinks I was wrong.
Maybe I was.