Chapter 17
Tristan
I know something happened at the pier. Not the details, Ryan doesn’t offer them and I don’t ask, because there are things that belong to the people they happened to and extracting them serves the extractor more than the situation.
But I felt it in the bond, the feeling of something that almost was and then wasn’t.
When they came back through the carnival ground together I saw it in her.
The careful way she was holding herself, the extra work of it, the set of her jaw that meant she was coping with something recent and significant.
I know what that looks like.
I know what most things look like, on people, I’ve spent enough time watching.
She moves through the rest of the evening close to the pack but not inside it. She maintains a radius like something has gotten past her guard and she’s rebuilding the perimeter. A half-step further out than her current normal, which has been moving inward all week and has now retreated outward.
I let her have it.
The whole evening, I let her have it. Space, normalcy, the low demand of just being in the carnival without anything being asked of her.
I make sure she has water because the stall work runs long and hot and she won’t get it herself.
I make sure she has something to eat around nine because the evening rush doesn’t leave time for proper food and she’ll work through it without registering the hunger.
Both times I do it quietly, without ceremony, without making a big deal of it.
She takes both without comment. That’s the language we’ve built, she and I. The taking without comment. The giving without conditions.
By eleven, the fireworks are over, the carnival is winding down, and the pack is together at the edge of the ground. Lola is standing slightly outside our circle, her arms crossed, and her expression far away.
“I’ll walk you back,” I offer.
She looks at me. Not the sharp assessment she gives most things, just looking. “You don’t have to.”
“I know. I want to.”
She looks at me a beat longer, reading something, and then she nods. Once.
I tell the others goodnight. Ryan’s eyes meet mine briefly. He knows what I’m doing, Ryan always knows, and what’s in his look is permission and gratitude. I take care of the people in my orbit. That’s what I do. He trusts me to do it.
We walk.
Main Street at eleven on a Saturday night is quieter than the carnival ground but not actually quiet. People are still out, the pub is alive and rowdy, a few families are heading in the same direction we are with tired children and the satisfied energy of a day well-spent.
Lola walks with her hands in her jacket pockets and her pace is even. We’re silent for the first block, the comfortable kind.
“You okay?” I ask.
“People keep asking me that.”
“People keep having reasons to.”
She utters a sound that is somewhere between acknowledgment and protest. “I’m fine.”
“I know you’re fine.” I look ahead, at the cobblestones, the clock tower, and the dark shop fronts. “Fine isn’t the same as okay.”
The pause is a length that means something. “No,” she says. “It’s not.”
Which is more than she usually gives, and I receive it the way I receive most things she offers—as something worth handling carefully. We walk another half-block.
“The carnival is loud,” she says. A deflection, but also true.
“It is. More than you’d think, for a small town.”
“It’s the density. Everyone compressed into a small space.” A pause. “And everything. All at once.”
She means the pack. She means the bond-pressure, the accumulated weight of days of proximity reaching a saturation point.
It’s partly the Omega in her, the innate desire to let Alphas in can be overwhelming.
I know this without her saying it because I felt the edge of it myself.
The intensity of the four of us around her in a crowded sensory environment, our scents and presences amplified, the bond doing its best to tie us all together.
I say none of this.
“Carnival are like that,” I reply. “Takes it out of you even when you’re enjoying it.”
She glances at me. She knows what I’m doing. “Yeah.”
We reach the corner of Doris Harrow’s street and I slow, expecting to stop, but she keeps walking and I keep pace. We go past the turn off but I don’t comment on it.
She needs to keep moving. I know this about her.
Stopping means stopping with whatever she’s carrying, and she’s not ready to stop yet.
So we walk, and the town settles around us.
The carnival music fades to a low din from the riverfront, and eventually the street runs out at the edge where the cobblestones give way to the river path. We stop at the white picket fence.
She breathes.
“Better?” I ask.
“Yes,” she replies, and means it.
We stand at the fence for a while and I don’t manufacture conversation. She’ll talk when she talks. That’s what she does. She doesn’t fill silence for social reasons, and I’ve always been comfortable in silence, so we exist in it together. The river runs beyond the fence like a ribbon.
“You don’t ask things,” she says eventually.
“I ask things.”
“Not the things other people ask.” She’s looking at the water. “Jack asks everything, immediately, without any apparent filter. Archer demands and then retreats. Ryan…” She stops, briefly. “Ryan waits. But I can feel him waiting, which is its own kind of asking.”
“And me?”
She’s quiet a moment. “You just make space. And then you’re in it. And somehow I’ve said things I didn’t plan to say.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“I’m still working that out.” The corner of her mouth teases upward. “It’s effective. Whatever it is.”
“It’s not a strategy,” I assure her.
“I know.” She says it with the certainty of someone who has checked. “That’s the part I'm at a loss for.”
I look at the river too.
“I’ll tell you something,” I begin, “and you don’t have to do anything with it.”
She looks at me.
“I had a person, once, who I couldn’t reach.
Not because they didn’t want to be reached.
They did, I think, but they’d been alone with something too long.
Every time I got close they’d find a reason to make the distance.
” I pause. “I spent a long time trying to figure out the right approach. The right words. The right moment. Eventually I stopped trying to reach. I just stayed close and let them choose the distance.”
“Did it work?” she asks.
“Took a year.” A pause. “But yes.”
She’s quiet for a few moments. “I’m not…” she starts.
“I know,” I say. “I’m not telling it about you. I’m just telling it.”
She glances at me for a moment, and what’s in her expression is the thing I’ve been watching move closer to the surface all week.
It’s not trust yet, but the precursor to it.
The look of someone who has located something they might be able to trust and hasn’t decided yet whether the risk is worth it.
I hold the look steadily.
She looks back at the river.
We walk back eventually, at a slower pace than we came, and I take her the long way without comment and she doesn’t object. The town is mostly quiet now, the carnival settled into its late-night skeleton crew, the pub still lit at the far end of Main Street.
At the corner of Doris Harrow’s street, she stops.
“I’m hungry,” she says. An admission she makes without apology, and slightly surprised, like she keeps forgetting that needing things is allowed.
“I have the stall leftovers,” I offer. She looks at me. “It’s nothing extravagant. Whatever came back from the close-down.” I pause. “It’s only a few minutes to the stall.”
She comes to the stall.
The carnival ground at midnight is entirely different from the carnival in any form I’ve described before.
The crew has done the first-pass cleanup.
Surfaces cleared, equipment stowed, the strings of lights still on in their reduced overnight setting, dimmer and warmer, throwing everything in gold rather than the full-brightness of service hours.
It’s quiet. It’s warm. The food row smells like hours of delicious things lingering in the air.
My stall is how I left it, the close-down process I’ve done enough times to do right automatically. I unlock the back panel and find the covered plates I set aside before service ended. It’s a habit, always put something aside, there’s always someone who needs something later.
I knew it would be her tonight.
I set up the small prep table in the back. Two stools, the plates, the water jug, the remainder of the good honey that I’m finishing because it won’t keep through tomorrow.
She sits. I sit. We eat.
It’s quiet and requires nothing from either of us except presence. She eats without monitoring herself, the way she’s started to do, which I consider a significant development. The pastry, a small savory parcel I’d made for testing, the honey applied without measurement.
“This honey is very good,” she says.
“It’s local. The beekeeper is about three miles east. She has a wildflower variety that’s almost too complex for most applications, but with the right pastry base…” I stop. “Sorry. I do this.”
“Talk about food?”
“Extensively. It’s a known issue.”
“I like it,” she says with a smile.
I look at her. She’s looking at the pastry, and her cheeks have pinked, though the light makes it hard to tell for sure.
“I like it when you talk about food. You talk about it like it matters.”
“It does matter.”
“Most people don’t think—”
“Most people eat to function,” I interrupt. “That’s not wrong. But there’s a difference between eating to function and eating something someone made for you because they wanted you to have something good.” A pause. “You know the difference. I’ve watched you register it all week.”
She’s quiet.
“Yeah,” she says. “I know the difference.”
Something in that is heavier than it should be, and I know, without knowing the details, that the difference has been meaningful to her. I don’t ask.
She reaches for the honey at the same moment I do.
Our fingers meet on the jar.