Chapter 24 Soft Serve & Sharp Edges #3
"I am not sure." I wrinkle my nose, the uncertainty playing across my face.
"But it looks that way. The energy between them is different from how it was before.
Charged. Careful. Like two people circling something they both want but are too scared to name out loud.
" I shrug. "We are all here for some reason or another when it comes to our relationship status, right?
I want to get a pack by Valentine's Day.
That is my goal, my reason for being at this university, the entire gamble I took when I agreed to this arrangement.
And Sage, she probably wants her shot in the hockey industry, but she needs a pack for that too.
The connections, the stability, the credibility that comes with belonging to one. "
I squeeze his hand without thinking, grounding myself in the contact.
"I do not want to interfere with whatever is growing between them. I do not want to be clingy or demanding or the friend who inserts herself into every space because she is terrified of being left out. They deserve room to figure their thing out without me hovering."
We keep walking. The lamplight stretches our shadows long across the frosty pavement, two dark shapes merged at the hand, shifting with each step.
"But there is more," Etienne says quietly. Not a question. An observation.
I stop.
He stops with me, turning so we are facing each other beneath the amber glow of a streetlamp that casts his features in gold and shadow.
His expression is open. Attentive. The kind of focused attention that makes you feel like the only person on the planet, which is both comforting and terrifying because being the center of someone's attention means they can see every crack in your armor.
I look at him for a long moment.
The cold air carries his scent to me in waves.
Cedar. Pine. That ink-and-parchment note that always makes me think of late nights and handwritten stories and the quiet corners of a man who creates entire worlds on paper because the real one has not always been kind to him.
The familiarity of it loosens a knot in my chest that I did not realize I had been carrying.
"Sage disappeared," I say.
The words come out flat. Matter of fact. Stripped of the emotion that I have packed so tightly around this particular wound that it has compressed into a hard, smooth stone sitting at the base of my ribs.
"A few years ago. We were best friends. The kind of best friends who knew everything about each other, who finished each other's sentences and shared clothes and had a specific booth at our favorite diner that the waitstaff stopped offering menus because they already knew our orders.
She was my ride or die. My person. The one constant in a life that kept pulling the rug out from under me. "
I swallow hard.
"And then poof." I snap my fingers, the sound sharp in the quiet night.
"She was gone. No warning. No explanation that made sense.
One day she was there and the next she was not, and the space she left behind was so massive I did not know how to fill it.
I tried. I tried filling it with skating and studying and keeping busy enough that I would not notice the gap.
But gaps like that do not close just because you ignore them.
They just freeze over, and you walk on the ice and pretend the water underneath is not deep enough to drown in. "
Etienne listens.
He does not offer platitudes. Does not rush to fix it with reassurance or redirect the conversation to lighter terrain. He stands there, solid and steady, holding my hand, and lets me bleed.
"I know it was not her fault," I add, because it is important to say that, because I have spent years untangling the blame from the grief and I need him to understand the difference.
"Whatever happened, whatever pulled her away, I know she did not choose to leave me.
But knowing that does not change how it felt.
Knowing the fire was an accident does not make the burn scar heal faster. "
He tilts my chin up with his free hand.
Gentle. The pad of his thumb resting beneath my jaw, angling my face so I am looking directly into his eyes instead of at the frost-covered ground where it is safer.
"Are you afraid to get close to us because we will just disappear?" he asks.
Us.
Not me. Us. The pack. Cal and Raphael and Etienne and the entire fragile, beautiful, terrifying structure we have been building together over the past few weeks, brick by brick, meal by meal, shared laugh by shared laugh.
I do not answer immediately.
The question deserves more than a reflexive response.
It deserves the truth, messy and contradictory and unresolved as it is, and I owe him that much after the afternoon he gave me.
After the outfit in his car and the restaurant on 6th and the soft serve and the way he held my face when the brain freeze hit like it was the most natural thing in the world to cradle an Omega's temples on a public sidewalk.
"Yes and no," I finally say.
He waits.
"Yes because..." I take a shaky breath, and the air fills my lungs cold and sharp, tasting like winter and cedar and honesty.
"Because even my parents ditched me. Or at least, that is how it felt.
They encouraged me to go out into the real world, spread my wings, find my own path, all the things parents are supposed to say when they want to sound supportive while actually pushing you out the door because keeping you is too expensive or too complicated or too inconvenient.
And the real world? Etienne, the real world is brutal. "
My voice cracks. I hate that it cracks. I hate that I cannot talk about this without the emotion leaking through the seams of the composure I have spent years stitching together.
"Life is cruel. Especially for us Omegas.
We get told to be independent but the entire system is built to punish us for independence.
We get told to find a pack but every pack we encounter has conditions and expectations and power dynamics that leave us smaller than when we started.
We get told to be strong but strength is exhausting when you are doing it alone, when there is no one waiting at home to tell you that the fight was worth it. "
I blink rapidly, refusing to let the sting behind my eyes escalate into actual tears on an actual date with an actual man who is looking at me like I am the most important thing he has ever seen.
"I want to be like the girls who get to fall in love without thinking about it.
The ditzy, carefree girls in the romantic comedies who trip into the arms of their Alpha and never once worry about whether he will be there tomorrow.
Who never calculate the risk of caring too much, who never rehearse their exits before they even walk through the door.
I want that luxury. The luxury of being naive. "
My laugh is small and humorless.
"But I do not get that. At least, I do not think so. My life has never operated on the assumption that good things stay. Good things arrive and they are wonderful and then they leave and I am standing in the wreckage trying to figure out which version of myself survived the departure."
I meet his eyes.
"I want it, though. Despite the fear. Despite every logical reason my brain manufactures for keeping my guard up and my walls reinforced and my heart locked in a box with seventeen deadbolts.
I want to trust that this is real. That you are real.
That the pack is real. I want it so badly it scares me because wanting things is how you get hurt and I have been hurt enough to know better. "
The silence that follows is not empty.
It is full. Weighted with the gravity of a confession that I have never given voice to, not to Sage before she vanished, not to my parents before they let go, not to anyone in the years I spent navigating communal housing and financial precarity and the thousand small indignities of being an unclaimed Omega in a world built for packs.
Etienne nods.
Slow. Deliberate. The nod of a man who has absorbed every syllable and is choosing his next words with the precision of someone who understands that careless language can wound just as deeply as careless absence.
"I know how it feels," he says. "In a way."
And I believe him. Because Etienne Laurent is a man who has lived in the shadows of louder, bolder, more visible people for so long that the idea of stepping forward probably terrifies him the same way trusting terrifies me.
We are different manifestations of the same wound.
He guards himself through silence. I guard myself through motion.
But beneath those defenses, the fear is identical.
The fear of being seen and found lacking. The fear of reaching for a hand only to grasp empty air.
"But if I could guarantee that I am not going anywhere," he continues, his voice low and steady and anchored with a certainty that vibrates through his palm into mine, "would that help?"
I search his face.
"How would you do that?"
He smirks.
Not the playful, teasing smirk from the ice cream debate. A different one. Quieter. Carrying a tenderness that he does not often let surface, the vulnerable underbelly of a man who spends his life behind masks and notebooks and the safety of goalie pads.
He leans down.
His lips press against my cheek.
Light. Barely a whisper of contact, so gentle it could be mistaken for the brush of winter air if not for the warmth that blooms from the point of contact outward, spreading through my skin like ink through water, coloring everything it touches.
His breath is warm against my face, carrying his scent in concentrated form, cedar and pine and that ink note filling my lungs with each inhale until I am dizzy with him.
Until every nerve ending in my body is tuned to the frequency of his proximity, humming with a resonance that I feel in my bones, in my blood, in the spaces between my heartbeats where the quiet lives.
He lingers.
Just long enough for the kiss to transcend the physical act and become a statement. A declaration delivered in the language of skin and breath and the deliberate choice to be gentle with someone who has been handled roughly by the world.
When he pulls back, his eyes are warm. Certain. Carrying a quiet fire that does not burn but illuminates.
"I'll show you."