Chapter 18
Lola
I stop pretending I’m going back to Doris Harrow’s after dinner on Sunday.
It’s not a decision, exactly. More like the absence of one.
I don’t construct the excuse, don’t reach for the logistics, don’t perform the wind-up of someone who has somewhere else to be.
I just stay, and the staying happens the way breathing happens, without requiring my permission.
This is either growth or catastrophic tactical failure and I haven’t decided which.
The Sunday post-carnival dinner at the pack house is different from the weeknight version. It’s bigger, louder, the residual energy of a full weekend still running through all of them.
Jack is recounting something that happened at the game alley with the physical commitment he brings to stories, using his whole body.
Archer is pretending not to be entertained but I can see his eyes sparkling happily.
Tristan is at the stove doing three things simultaneously.
Ryan is at the table with his coffee looking at Jack with the expression that means you are exhausting and I would not change a single thing about you.
I am at the counter with a knife and a board. In front of me is a pile of vegetables that Tristan handed me twenty minutes ago with zero preamble and complete confidence that I’d know what to do with them.
Thankfully, I do know what to do with them. I chop and listen to Jack’s story. I watch the room in my peripheral vision and I think: this is the third meal I’ve eaten here this week.
And then I think: so?
Which is new.
Here is the thing I’ve been doing, that I have not been fully acknowledging I’ve been doing: Choosing to be here.
Every time. Every meal, every evening. Every morning I’ve shown up at the stall before my scheduled start because the alternative was the ceiling at Doris Harrow’s and the ceiling has nothing on the stall.
Every time Jack has said come on I’ve gone.
Every time Tristan has opened the back panel of the stall in the late carnival quiet I’ve sat down.
I’ve been choosing it.
I’ve been labeling the choices as convenience or strategy or various other things that let me avoid the actual label, which is: I want to be here.
Present tense, active, increasingly undeniable.
I want to be in the room where Archer plays guitar unexpectedly and Jack cheats at ring toss and Tristan puts honey on things without being asked and Ryan…
Ryan, who I have not been thinking about.
Extensively.
He stood at the pier with his hand at my waist and said I’ve got you and I stepped back and he said okay.
Just that one word, no faking of understanding, no retreat into cold, just okay.
Then he walked me back and found the others and has been, since then, exactly as present and exactly as careful as he was before.
The hand. The warmth of it. The thumb.
I am thinking about this a normal amount. A completely normal and non-significant amount. I am a liar.
I finish the vegetables and slide them off the board. Tristan takes them without comment and the proximity of him is breathtaking. I have also been thinking about the honey jar a lot. His face in the low light, close enough to be kissed.
These are men. They are handsome Alphas and I have been pretending not to notice this for two weeks.
I notice now, fully, without pretending otherwise.
Ryan’s stillness and the cut of his jaw.
His hands that are large and capable. Tristan’s forearms and the warmth that comes off him like something structural.
Jack’s laughter and the brightness of him when he’s pleased about something. Archer…
Archer is a problem I’ve been calculating since day one and only recently admitted is a problem because I’m attracted to him.
This is inconvenient given that he spent the first four days treating me like a threat.
But he plays guitar. He plays it like nobody’s watching and it’s the hottest thing I’ve seen a person do in years.
I also know he’s got the bedroom skills to back up all that guitar playing sexiness. Those fingers are magical.
I am deeply attracted to all four of them, which is inconvenient. I’m putting that in the acknowledged pile. I’m done pretending it’s not there. What I do with it is a separate question.
* * *
The next day, the carnival begins its transition. Sunday was full operation, Monday is the partial day, Tuesday starts the wind-down toward the closing weekend. The stall doesn’t need me for the Monday, which means my time is mine.
I go for an early walk and then return to the pack house at eight. Not because anyone asked. Not for any logical reason I can defend with a straight face. Because when I stood at Doris Harrow’s gate, I thought about here, and then I came here.
Tristan opens the door like he was expecting me, which he probably was. He hands me a mug of coffee. I drink it at the kitchen counter and he does prep work for the Tuesday stall. We exist in the comfortable silence that has become our default register.
At nine, Ryan comes through on his way somewhere and stops in the kitchen doorway.
“Morning,” he says.
“Morning,” I say.
He gets coffee and leaves, and I watch the doorway where he was for approximately three seconds longer than is strictly necessary. Tristan says nothing about this because Tristan is a man of extraordinary discretion.
Jack appears at ten with what he describes as a structural problem with the game alley wind-down, which I recognize as a pretext and follow anyway because the pretext is at least creative, and also I want to.
We spend two hours deconstructing the ring toss station, which doesn’t require two people but is easier with two. Somewhere in the middle of it, it becomes less about the ring toss and more about Jack making increasingly funny observations about the carnival patrons he’s seen over the weekend.
“The couple at the axe throw,” he says, handing me a section of the frame. “Saturday afternoon. I bet it was a first date. She was better than him and very careful not to show it.”
“I saw them too. She let one go wide on purpose.”
He grins. “I knew it. He didn’t deserve her.”
“Probably not.” I slot the frame section into place. “What about the family at the Ferris wheel? Dad, three kids, no second adult.”
“Was Dad nervous about the height?”
“Third kid held his hand the whole ride.”
Jack goes quiet for a second. “I missed that.”
“You were at the base. Couldn’t see the car.”
“Good kid,” he says.
We work through the frame disassembly and the sun moves gradually.
The day is warm and relaxed and I am having a good day.
Not a getting-through-the-day day, not a maintaining-forward-momentum day.
Just: good. The good of physical work and easy company and the pleasure of being somewhere that has started to have the feel of familiarity.
The town has done this, gradually.
I notice it every day. The way Main Street has stopped being a space I’m mapping and started being a space I recognize. The way Elsie at the gas station says my name now when I walk in. The way the bookshop owner nods when I pass.
I have become, without quite deciding to, a known quantity in Sweetwater Valley.
I don’t know how to feel about this, so I slot it into the pile of things I’m sitting with rather than resolving.
* * *
The other Omega finds me on Tuesday. Or I find her, or we find each other, which is maybe the more accurate version of what happens when two people have the same instinctive response to a space and end up in the same corner of it.
The corner in question is located at the far end of the food row during the Tuesday morning partial service. There is a bench behind the last stall with a good sightline to the river and low foot traffic. I’ve been using it as a decompression spot between rushes.
She’s already on the bench when I get there.
She’s around my age, dark-haired, with the features I’ve learned to identify in myself from the outside.
The alertness, the awareness, the way she’s sitting with her back to the stall wall rather than the open.
She clocks me before I reach the bench and does the same assessment I do.
We both land in the same place at the same time: not a threat, probably.
“Bench is free,” she says.
“Thank you.” I sit at the far end.
We exist in the external silence of two people doing internal cataloguing. The river appears through the gap in the stall row. The carnival is quiet, more locals than visitors today.
“You’re with Ryan’s pack,” she says.
I open my mouth to say no and then stop. Because what I was going to say is a reflex, not an answer, and she’s an Omega, she can probably scent the reflex for what it is.
“I work their food stall,” I say. “Tristan’s.”
She looks at me with the knowing expression of someone who has done the math and is being polite about it. “Sure.”
“I’m not with the pack.”
“Okay.”
The okay has the same energy as the okay Ryan does, which means I hear you and I have opinions and I find myself nearly smiling.
“I’m Dee,” she says.
“Lola.”
“Passing through?”
“Working the carnival week.”
“Mm.” She stares at the river. “I came for the week too. There’s a pack visiting from the north valley. My friend bonded with their Alphas two years ago. I’m visiting.” A pause. “It’s a lot of Alphas for one carnival.”
I think about how crowded it was on Saturday night and what happened to my nervous system. I make a sound that is deeply involuntary and entirely expressive.
She turns to look at me and what’s in her face is the exact mirror of what’s in mine, which is yes, that, precisely that, and something about the recognition—of being seen in something that specific, by someone who knows from the inside—makes me laugh.
She laughs too, and it’s genuine. We sit on the bench behind the food stall laughing at the shared experience of being an unbonded Omega at a carnival packed with Alphas and what this does to a nervous system.