Chapter 15 #2
"I have a dream," I say. Quietly. The way you say the things that matter most—not with emphasis, with the particular care of something that you've held close enough that it's warm from the contact.
"A bar. My bar. Not someone else's where I use my hands and my knowledge to build their thing and go home to my ancient phone and my mop and my eleven books and start again tomorrow.
Mine. Where the drinks are right and the room is safe and an Omega can walk in alone and the room doesn't question it.
Where I know every person who comes through the door well enough to have their usual ready before they ask.
" I look at the bookshelf—empty now, the wood bare.
"The Lucky Clover Lounge. I've had the name for two years.
I have the menu mostly built in my head.
I know the supplier relationships I'd need and the licensing requirements and the first year's staffing structure.
I know everything about it except how to actually make it happen, because making it happen requires money I don't have and will never have at this rate because every dollar I manage to save gets calculated against the interest accruing on the debt and the math never works out. "
My voice breaks slightly on the last part.
"And my family," I add, because I'm saying the things I don't say and I might as well go all the way.
"They have opinions about how this situation reflects on them.
About what it means that their daughter is in this position.
My mother spent years making sure I could function in rooms I had no business being in—the etiquette, the languages, the dancing—because an Omega's value, in her framework, is her ability to attract the right situation and the right situation is determined by the quality of the pack.
And I picked badly. And that's what they see.
Not the debt, not the manipulation, not the three men who built an exit strategy around leaving me liable. Just: she picked badly."
The rain through the ceiling.
My soaked books on the floor.
The specific, final sound of something that has been barely holding its shape giving up on the last of it.
"I have a best friend who would write the check tonight if I asked her," I say.
"No strings, no judgment, she means it entirely.
And I can't ask her. I won't. Because I came to Oakridge Hollow alone and I'm going to fix this alone, which is either integrity or pride or stubbornness, and I know all three are possible and I can't tell them apart right now.
But Danny—my boss—he gives me shifts that shouldn't be profitable for him, sets out a coffee mug before I arrive so I don't have to ask, hung my competition plaques on his wall without telling me he was going to do it.
He believes in something I've been trying not to believe in about myself because believing in it and then not achieving it is worse than just not believing in it at all. "
I press the heel of my hand against my cheekbone. The mascara is doing what it's doing and I've stopped caring.
"And then there's Elvin, who is a genuinely good person who has been building up to something for six months and tonight watched a stranger get on his knees on a bar floor and I couldn't give him that—couldn't give any version of it—because what Elvin wants is gratitude and gentleness and I'm not in a place where I have enough of either to spare.
I'm running on the minimum and I can't give people what they need from me right now and I hate that.
I hate being insufficient for people who are kind. "
More tears.
They're not pretty and I've given up on them.
"The collectors will come in the morning," I say.
"Not the calls—the actual people. When I don't pay by the third notice they send someone.
I know this because I got the third notice two weeks ago and I've been calculating how much time I had.
The answer was not much. And my car is on a road fifteen minutes from here.
And this apartment—" I gesture at the ceiling holes, at the wet floor, at the books, at all of it.
"—isn't a place I can sleep tonight. And I have no savings because my savings go directly toward the interest so the principal doesn't keep growing, and that's the best I can do, every week, and some weeks I can't even do that. "
I grip the book.
The pages are wet in my hands, the paper gone soft and yielding in the way of things that have lost their structural integrity from the inside.
"I went along with everything," I say, and this is the core of it, the one beneath all the others, the thing I've been circling for fourteen months and am now finally just saying.
"I accommodated. I made myself useful and flexible and present and I said yes when I meant no and I managed situations that weren't mine to manage and I made myself into the person the pack needed me to be rather than the person I actually was, and what it bought me was this.
A ruined apartment and a ruined car and a debt with my name on it and the knowledge that they traded me for a better situation the moment a better situation presented itself, and I wasn't even surprised enough to be properly devastated.
I was—" I stop. "I was mostly just tired. "
The sob that gets out is the real one.
Not the controlled, managed kind I've been producing since I opened the door. The actual thing—deep and involuntary, the kind that comes from the part of you that existed before you learned to manage the presenting of distress to other people. It doesn't last long. Long enough to be real.
"I just—" My voice is smaller than I intend.
"I work hard. I don't sleep and I can't afford to eat properly and I haven't stopped trying for a single day since I got here.
And I don't understand why the trying isn't enough.
I don't understand what the correct move is from this position.
The collectors are coming and my car is gone and my apartment is—" Another breath.
"—and I don't know what I'm supposed to do now.
I genuinely don't know. And I hate not knowing because I always have a next step and right now I don't have one. "
I close my eyes.
I wish, briefly and completely, that I could simply not be here.
Not in a way that means anything permanent—I'm too tired for permanent—but in the specific way of wanting to not occupy this moment while it's this hard.
To be somewhere else while the situation resolves.
To skip forward past the part where I'm crying on a wet floor over a soaked book while a stranger witnesses the full inventory of my circumstances.
Hands.
They find my face before I register the movement—warm, large, settling against my wet cheeks with a steadiness that has nothing demanding in it and everything grounding. The contact is—
I open my eyes.
Rowan is crouched in front of me.
He came across the wet floor of my ruined apartment in his formal wear at four in the morning and he is crouched in front of me with both hands against my face, his dark eyes level with mine at this angle, close enough that the scent of him arrives in full—the black pepper immediate and warm, the ink underneath it, and the dark chocolate base note that doesn't sweeten and doesn't need to.
It's just present. Grounding in the specific way of certain scents that don't ask anything but make the room feel more bearable by existing in it.
His thumbs move—one slow pass across each cheekbone, the specific gesture of someone clearing the evidence not because it should be hidden but because it's in your eyes and that's inconvenient when you're trying to see clearly.
He doesn't say: it's going to be fine.
He doesn't say: don't cry.
He doesn't offer the inventory of things that people offer when they don't know what else to do—the reflexive reassurances that are meant to make the person saying them feel less helpless, and mostly don't make the person receiving them feel anything at all.
"Breathe," he says.
Low. The same unhurried register from the car, from the road, from every moment of this interaction, where I've expected a different kind of person and found this one.
"You're not unlucky."
A beat.
"We'll figure this out."
I look at him.
We.
We.
A man I met thirty minutes ago on a rain-dark road in a Cadillac, who got out in a storm to hold an umbrella so I wouldn't get wet, who arranged a tow without being asked and sent a text so I'd have his number, who followed me to a ransacked apartment because he hadn't left yet—
We.
I don't know what to do with it.
I'm also not in a position to argue with it, which is possibly the most honest thing I can say about the state I'm in.
The tears have stopped—not because the situation has changed but because the hands on my face and the scent in the room and the single word delivered with the absolute certainty of someone who has said it and means it have done something to the particular quality of the despair. Not fixed it. Changed its texture.
From the kind that swallows you to the kind you can stand in.
I give him a nod.
Small. But real.
His hands stay where they are for a moment longer—warm on my cold-rain cheeks, completely steady—and then they lower slowly, and he sits back on his heels, and the apartment is still ruined and the rain is still coming through the ceiling and there is a very long and complicated several months ahead of me that I cannot see clearly from this position.
But there is something else now.
Something that wasn't here before I opened the door, before I said all of it, before a stranger crouched on a wet floor and held my face and said the word we with the quiet conviction of someone who was not making a promise he wasn't prepared to keep.
I look at Rowan.
He's looking at the apartment—not at me, giving me the moment, reading the room the way he reads everything: completely, without display.
The dark eyes moving across the ceiling holes and the floor and the scattered books and the forced lock with the focused, unsentimental attention of someone who is identifying the situation rather than reacting to it.
"The collectors did this?" he asks.
"Or someone they hired," I say. My voice is steadier. Not all the way steady, but enough. "There's a third notice. I knew something was coming. I didn't think—" I gesture at the ceiling. "I thought it would be a person at the door in the morning. Not this."
He nods.
The nod of a man cataloguing information.
I look around the apartment one more time.
The mop is still propped against the wall near the bathroom, which is the most consistent thing in the room.
The floor it was for is now beyond mopping.
"I have to call Elowen," I say. "She'll—" I stop.
"She'll come. And she'll bring about fifteen things I don't need and one thing I do and she'll want to talk about all of it immediately and I don't have the energy for all of it immediately, but she's the call I make from here. "
"Call her," Rowan says.
I look at him.
He's still in my apartment. Still in wet formal wear. Still with that controlled, watchful expression that I am beginning to understand is not the absence of feeling but the very deliberate management of it.
"You can go," I say. "You've done—you've done considerably more than you had any obligation to do tonight. You can go."
He looks at the apartment.
Then at me.
"Call your friend," he says. "I'll wait."
Two words, stated with the same matter-of-fact quality that he'd used to say he wasn't a serial killer and that the car would be towed. Not a negotiation. Not a declaration. A simple statement of what he's going to do, delivered as if the decision has been made and requires no further discussion.
I look at this man.
At the dark eyes and the wet coat and the hands that were warm on my face a minute ago and the complete, steady absence of anything that resembles performance.
I thought I'd used up whatever luck this night had to offer before I even got home.
I reach into my jacket pocket for my phone.
I'm thankful to have some luck finally on my side.