20. Chapter 20 #3
That image came too easily: dark suits, candlelight, old rites under a blackened moon. For one moment, something in me stirred with curiosity strong enough to push aside the rest.
Then practical sense returned.
“I’d planned to head home after dinner,” I said.
Sloan’s face fell only a little. “Think about it first.”
I hesitated.
The truth was, going home had been my plan.
Get through the visit. Be polite. Leave with my pride intact and my nerves only moderately frayed.
That had been before breakfast, before the ride, before the cabin, before whatever odd emotional fog kept settling around things I should have felt more sharply than I did.
I looked down at the phone in my hand. The battery bar glowed its warning at me.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“That’s all I’m asking.” Sloan stood with the easy grace of somebody who had never once doubted her own welcome in a room. “I’m going to let you text whoever needs texting before that thing dies dramatically in your hands.”
She drifted out, leaving me with the cocoa, the plants, the early fall light, and a silence gentle enough not to feel like abandonment.
I let out a breath and opened a message to Bronc.
Have you ever heard of the Black Harvest Moon festival?
The screen dimmed once while I waited, then brightened again when his reply came in a few minutes later.
Heard of it. Old wolf observance. We don’t put much stock in that kind of thing here. Not doing anything for it. Don’t see any harm in going to a party if you want to.
I stared at the message and huffed out a laugh before I could stop myself.
It was such a Bronc answer. Practical. Mildly dismissive of mysticism. Protective without being controlling. And, oddly enough, not all that far from the polished reason Sage used when he wanted to make something sound sensible.
That should have been amusing and nothing more.
Instead, it left me feeling lonelier than I wanted to admit.
Before the battery could betray me completely, I opened a new message.
Nikolay.
Just seeing his name there should have done more than it did.
That was what frightened me, if I were honest. Not that I wanted to text him.
I did. Not that I missed him in some sore, complicated place inside myself.
I absolutely did. It was that holding onto the feeling had become difficult in a way I could not explain.
It kept slipping. I would think of him and know, intellectually and emotionally, that he mattered to me—too much, probably—but the warmth itself would blur at the edges before I could fully feel it.
Like trying to cup water in my hands and watching it thread away through the smallest separations.
It made no sense.
Maybe hurt was doing that. Maybe pride. Maybe distance. Maybe I was simply tired enough to be less romantic than usual and more annoyed.
I typed slowly.
I’m staying one more night. There’s some Black Harvest Moon festival tomorrow.
I stared at it once, considered deleting the second sentence because it sounded too eager, then sent it before I could rethink myself into cowardice.
The reply dots appeared almost at once.
My pulse gave one hopeful, traitorous kick.
He was there. He had seen it. He was answering.
Maybe he would say to enjoy myself and come home safe. Maybe he would ask when I’d be back. Maybe—God help me—maybe he would give me one sliver of the tenderness he had been parceling out so sparingly that I’d turned each piece over in my hands like contraband.
The message arrived.
I hope you have a good time.
That was all.
No softness. No edge. No hidden plea tucked under old-world restraint. Just a sentence so neutral it might have been sent to a colleague attending a fundraiser.
I stared at it until the words lost shape.
Something dropped through my middle in one clean, specific plunge.
Not devastation. That would have been too grand for what was, on its face, such a small exchange.
It was worse in a quieter way. A private humiliation.
The sudden awareness that I had reached and not found anything reaching back hard enough to matter.
Maybe he had meant more by it than I was allowing. Maybe that was simply how Nikolay spoke when he was trying not to say too much.
Maybe.
But if a woman had to translate a man that hard, she was already bleeding for free.
I set the phone face-down on the cushion beside me.
A moment later, Sloan drifted back in carrying a teapot and an extra little pitcher of warmed milk as if she had sensed, through some feminine bat signal, that my cup needed tending and my mood needed not naming.
She refilled my cocoa without asking.
The fresh warmth released another soft wave of chocolate into the room.
“Everything good?” she asked.
I looked up.
“Yeah,” I said.
The answer came out flat enough that even I heard it.
Sloan’s eyes rested on my face for a moment. She did not call me on the lie. For that alone, I could have hugged her.
I took a sip of the fresh cocoa. Warmth moved through me again, familiar now, almost treacherously kind.
After a moment, I said, “I’ll stay.”
Her whole face lit up.
“But,” I added before she could celebrate too hard, “I don’t have anything to wear for a formal festival.”
The effect of that was immediate and almost alarming.
Sloan set the teapot down with reverence, clasped her hands once under her chin like she had been granted a personal favor by the moon itself, and said, “Oh, I have the perfect thing for you.”