15. Chapter 15
Chapter fifteen
J essica
The gate is four feet wide and I am not.
That's the entire problem with today's exercise, and Voss knows it, and I am ninety percent certain he built the course specifically to make that point at me.
"Again," he calls. "From the top."
I come round the end of the line of barrels at a dead run — and running as a direwolf is still the single best physical sensation of my life, all that reach out in front and the ground just going — and I hit the first turn clean, and the second turn clean, and then I have to thread the gate.
Four feet.
I get my shoulders in.
I do not get my hips in.
The right-hand post comes out of the ground with a noise like a small tree dying and cartwheels about fifteen feet down the field.
"Miller."
I sit down on the wet grass and look at the post.
Then I look at Voss with what I would like recorded as an expression of complete innocence.
"That's the fourth one this week."
I can't answer him, obviously, because I'm currently the size of a horse and made mostly of teeth. But I'm reasonably confident my face is doing enough.
"She's enjoying herself," Soren says from the fence.
Traitor.
"She's supposed to be learning to fit through things," Voss says. "Fitting through things is the entire skill. Any idiot can go through a fence. Go and get the post."
I go and get the post.
It takes me a while, because carrying a six-foot wooden post in your mouth is significantly harder than it looks, and by the time I drop it at Voss's feet Soren has turned around and is examining the treeline with great interest and his shoulders are not entirely still.
Here's the thing, though.
At the beginning of the year, I couldn’t even shift on command.
Now I'm doing drills. Voss says shift and I shift, most of the time, in under four seconds, which he tells me is unacceptable and which I know for a fact he's written down as progress.
I've run this course seven times this afternoon.
I've done stop-on-command until my legs shook.
I can hold this body for over an hour now without it feeling like something I'm borrowing.
I still can't get through a four-foot gate.
But I'm here.
"Again," Voss says. "And this time think about your back end. You keep steering the front of yourself and leaving the rest to catch up."
We finish at five.
I shift back on the line where I stopped — two seconds, maybe less, which nobody comments on and which I notice — and stand there in the cold with my hands on my knees, breathing like I've been beaten with a plank.
"You're rushing the third turn," Soren says.
"I'm not."
"You come off the barrels too wide and then you're carrying speed you can't lose before the gate."
"I know I'm carrying speed—"
"So lose it earlier."
"So lose it earlier, " I say. "Thank you. That's very helpful. Genuinely. I'll write that down."
Soren looks at me.
"You want to do it again," he says.
Not a question. He's got his arms folded and he's already looking at the gate, and this is the thing that has changed, this exact thing, and it happened so gradually I couldn't tell you what week it started.
He knows what I want before I've decided to want it.
"Voss has gone," I say.
"Confirmed."
"So you're staying."
Soren doesn't answer that at all, which is his most annoying trick, and goes to reset the post.
We do the course twice more and I get through the gate on the second one — barely, with a scrape down my flank and absolutely no dignity, but through — and then Soren says the thing I've been dreading.
"Human," he says. "You need the takedowns."
"I hate the takedowns."
"You're bad at the takedowns."
"That's why I hate them."
Because here's the other problem with being what I am. When I'm shifted, I'm the biggest thing in any given field. When I'm not, I weigh about as much as one of Soren's legs, and the direwolf strength does not neatly transfer into a body that hasn't got the frame for it.
So he puts me on the mats and we work controlling a bigger opponent, which mostly involves me discovering new and creative ways to end up looking at the sky.
"Your weight's forward."
"I'm aware of where my weight is—"
"Then move it."
I go again, and this time I actually get it — I get under his center and I twist and for one glorious second I feel Evren Soren's balance go — and then he corrects, because of course he does, and turns it, and I end up caught against his chest with his arm across my back.
And we stop.
Both of us.
His hand is at my waist. My fist is closed in the front of his shirt. My shoulder's against his sternum and I can feel him breathing, hard, from the last two minutes, and I can feel exactly how much of him there is.
Neither of us lets go.
The pull comes up under my ribs, warm and slow and completely unmistakable, and I have known what that is since a very small office with a mug on the desk, and I am done pretending otherwise.
I look up.
He's already looking down.
His eyes go to my mouth and back up, once, fast, and his hand at my waist doesn't move an inch, and there is absolutely no version of this that is still about training.
"Are you going to keep pretending?" I say.
"I'm not pretending."
That stops me.
Because I was expecting this is training , or you're a second-year , or one of the flat deflections he's been handing me since September.
"Then what are you doing? "
He doesn't answer that either.
That's the whole answer, actually. He doesn't have one. Evren Soren, who has an answer for everything, who corrects people's stances in nine words, who has never once in his life been caught without a position — is standing on a mat in the cold with his hand on me and no idea what he's doing.
So I stop waiting.
I get my other hand into his collar and I pull him down.
He comes.
God, he comes fast — for about half a second there's a hesitation and then it's gone and his mouth is on mine and his hand slides from my waist to the small of my back and pulls me in hard against him. God, he is big everywhere.
He kisses like he does everything. Precisely. Absolutely no question about whether he knows what he's doing — and it's about four seconds before I understand that the precision is the restraint, that he is holding this together on purpose, and that there is a great deal underneath it.
So I bite his lip.
The control goes.
His hand comes up into my hair and he tilts my head how he wants me. Then he backs me into the equipment rack and it rattles against the fence, and his mouth opens over mine and he stops being careful.
I get both hands under the edge of his shirt.
His skin is burning.
" Jessica —"
"Don't stop."
"I'm not—" He's breathing like the course. His forehead comes down against mine. "I'm not stopping."
"You sound like a man who's stopping."
"I'm being slow. "
"I hate slow—"
"I've noticed," Soren says, and kisses me again, and his hand slides down my back and over my hip and grips, and my whole body arches into him.
The pull is screaming.
That's the part I can't explain. It's not the kiss.
I've kissed people. It's that everything under my ribs has caught fire and is pulling toward him like something being reeled in, and his hands have gone tight enough that I'll have marks, and I know — I know completely, I have never been more certain of anything — that if I said one more sentence right now he'd have me on the ground and neither of us would care who was watching.
I open my mouth to say it.
And Soren stops.
He pulls back about six inches. Both hands still on me. Breathing hard.
"No," he says.
"You have got to be kidding me."
"I'm not."
"That's the most annoying thing anyone has ever said to me," I say. "And I've had a very competitive year."
"I'm aware," Soren says, with a quick grin.
"When?"
He doesn't answer.
"Soren. When? "
"Soon," he says.
And I want to cry, but I let it go.
We walk back toward the shed and neither of us is right.
I know my face is wrong. I can feel it. My hair's come out of everything and my mouth feels used and there's a scrape down my forearm from the equipment rack that I did not notice acquiring.
Soren looks completely normal, except he doesn't, because I know him now. There's a set to his shoulders that isn't usually there and he hasn't said a word in ninety seconds and he keeps flexing his right hand.
Then he stops and takes my wrist.
"I did this."
"It's a scrape."
"It's a scrape with rust in it." He turns my forearm to the light, thumb bracketing the underside of my wrist, entirely clinical. "Get it looked at or I’ll find you and you won’t like it."
"Yes, Professor."
"Don't."
"Sorry. Yes, Evren. "
"Absolutely not," Soren says.
And that's when Luke comes through the gate.
He's got his coat over one arm and his tie gone and the expression of a man who has spent four hours in a meeting room, and he says, "There you are, I've been all over this campus after meeting with the lawyers—"
"I was doing gates."
"You were doing what? "
"Gates. There's a gate. It's four feet." I turn toward him, and Soren's hand is still on my wrist, and Luke is already reaching for me the way he always does, hand coming to the side of my neck as he leans in—
And he touches me.
It hits like a struck match.
Heat goes up my arm and across my chest and detonates somewhere under my collarbone, and my whole body locks — my knees go, actually go — and there's a sound out of me that is not a word, and my wrist burns , one hard bright line of pain like a wire pulled tight under the skin.
Somebody's holding me up. Two somebodies.
Then it stops.
And the field is very quiet, and there are three men breathing hard, and I'm looking down at my own arm.
Three arcs.
Two of them I've had for months — the two dark curves I've caught myself looking at in lecture halls.
And below them, a third. Following the same curve, dark as ink and absolutely permanent.
Not quite a circle. You can see where a circle could be.
"Well," Soren says.
Nobody laughs.
He's let go of Luke's shoulder — because that's who caught me on that side, apparently — and now he takes my hand instead, carefully, and turns my wrist up, and looks at it.
He doesn't touch the mark. His thumb stays about half an inch below it.
I've watched it for a year and a half. The whole place drops half a note.
Conversations get quieter without stopping.
People move their chairs an inch they don't need to move them.
Half the room finds something else to look at and the other half sits up straighter, and none of them decide to do it — it just happens, the way you'd flinch at a loud noise.
"God I remember when I first saw you." He's still holding my wrist. "You looked up. You said good morning. And you went back to your breakfast."
I can’t take my eyes off of him.
"You had your mouth full," Soren says.
"That's it?" I say. "I said good morning? "
"Everybody in that hall reacted to us," Soren says. "You greeted me and dismissed me." He finally looks up. "Nobody had ever done that."
"Soren—"
"I knew then," he says. "And I have spent every single day since telling myself that I only suspected."
I don't know what to say, so I look at Luke instead.
Who has not said one word since it happened.
Who is standing perfectly still with his hand half-raised where it fell away from my neck, watching Soren hold my wrist.
And who does not look surprised.
Not even slightly. There's no shock anywhere on Luke Draeven's face.
"Luke," I say.
"Mm."
"You're not saying anything."
"No," Luke agrees. He puts his hand down. "I'm not."
Then his eyes go past me, over my shoulder, toward the gate.
And his whole face changes.
Ander's about twenty feet away.
I don't know how long he's been standing there. Long enough. He's got his training bag over his shoulder and he has stopped completely, and he is looking at my wrist, and I watch him count.
One. Two. Three.
Something goes through him.
It isn't rage. That's the thing that frightens me. I've seen Ander Ardent furious — it's loud and it's cold. This isn't that. Whatever is happening on his face right now is something coming apart at the seams, and he isn't fast enough to get it under control.
"Ander," Luke says. Warning.
Ander looks at Soren.
"You couldn't wait," he says.
Soren doesn't let go of my hand.
"That isn't how it works," he says.
"Isn't it."
"You know it isn't."
" Don't. "
And it's out of him too loud, and it rings off the shed wall, and even Ander looks slightly appalled at himself.
"That's not fair," I say.
Because it isn't.
"Nobody did anything, Ander. It's not a decision. It's not a—" I hold my wrist up. "This isn't a plan. Nobody arranged it. It happened in a field because Luke came to tell me something about lawyers."
Ander looks at the mark.
And he recoils.
Not much. A quarter-step, the sort of movement you'd make from a hot pan, and he covers it immediately, and every single person in this field sees it.
"Ander—"
"Don't," he says.
"Would you just—"
" Not now, " Ander says.
And he goes.
Straight through the gate, through the door at the end of the equipment shed, and the door bangs off the wall and swings and doesn't latch, and the sound of it goes on for a while.
I don't go after him.
That's a decision. I feel it cost something, and I make it anyway — because I've spent long enough chasing that man's opinion of me around this campus. I'm not doing it now.
Luke says, very carefully, "I'll talk to him."
"Will that help?"
"No," Luke says, and goes anyway.
Which leaves the field, and the wrecked gate post, and me, and Soren.
He hasn't moved.
Through all of it — the shouting, the door, Luke leaving — Soren has stayed exactly where he was with my hand in his, and he hasn't looked at the shed once.
"You okay?" I say.
"Are you?"
I look down at my wrist.
Three dark curves, slightly apart, following a line that hasn't finished being a line. Luke. Torres. And now the man standing in front of me, who has apparently known since I said good morning to him with my mouth full and never said a single word about it.
I don't know if I'm okay. My arm hurts. My mouth still hurts. Ander's door is still swinging on the far side of the yard and I've got about nine things to be frightened of and one of them is my own life.
But I'm not sorry.
"No," I say. "I'm not okay. Ask me again on Friday."
Soren's thumb moves once, slow, against the inside of my wrist, below the new mark.
"Jessica."
I look up.
"I'm still here," he says.