Chapter 32
Maya
The front door opens, and the scents of the alphas meet me before I'm fully inside. Amber and cedar and that darker spice beneath it settle around me with familiar warmth, and I feel my shoulders relax.
Adrian comes in behind me. He still has a smear of paint at his hairline that he missed while cleaning up at the facility. I almost point it out, but then he catches me looking and tilts his head.
“You want to know something humbling?” he asks as he sets his bag down by the door.
“You're going to tell me anyway.”
“The ricochet that hit me in round two.” He pauses. “I saw it coming. I misjudged the angle by six inches.”
“You've been thinking about that the whole drive back,” I accuse.
“I've been thinking about it since it happened.” He says it with absolutely no embarrassment.
Something about that is so specifically Adrian that I have to press a hand over my mouth for a second to muffle a laugh.
From the kitchen comes the sound of a cabinet opening, then a plate hitting the counter. Then Bash’s voice: “Tell me you stopped somewhere to eat.”
“We had water bottles,” I say as I come into the kitchen.
He turns away from the counter and looks at me with an expression that clearly communicates that water bottles do not constitute a meal. “Sit down.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been running around a paintball course for three hours and only drank water to refuel.” He opens the refrigerator. “Sit.”
I sit. Adrian leans against the counter and watches Bash move through the kitchen with a smirk on his face.
Elias appears in the doorway. One hand rests on the door frame as his gaze sweeps over my face, checking in the way he always does, and then his expression shifts by a fraction.
He doesn’t say anything. He just nods once, as if he’s come to a conclusion, then walks farther into the kitchen and sits at the corner of the island.
Bash puts food in front of me. It’s reheated leftovers from last night. I eat without much comment as I watch the alphas interact. Adrian tells Elias about the course in spare, factual sentences. Bash stealthily adds more food to my plate whenever I look away from him.
Something occurs to me while I'm eating.
I haven't spent the last ten minutes wondering what every reaction means.
The realization catches me off guard. I'm not analyzing every instinct or second-guessing every moment of comfort. I'm just sitting at the island eating reheated pasta with paint still faint on my forearms while the three of them move around the kitchen, and my omega is completely relaxed.
I feel good. I felt good this afternoon running across that course and laughing until I couldn't stand up straight, and I can still feel traces of it now, some lingering lightness in my chest from having been genuinely happy.
I haven't felt that in a while.
The conversation moves around me, and I let it.
Bash makes a comment about the facility's liability waiver being three pages long, which he apparently read in detail on Adrian's phone while we were gone.
Adrian points out that Bash reads every waiver, unprompted, in every situation, and Bash doesn't even attempt to deny it.
Elias looks like he has a comment and is exercising impressive restraint by keeping it to himself.
After a while, I push back from the island. “I'm going to clean up,” I say. “Shower and decompress.”
Bash's eyes immediately drop to my plate. “You finished it.”
“I finished the first plate and everything you added afterward.”
He just smiles.
Adrian straightens slightly when I stand. “We'll be down here if you need us,” he says.
“Goodnight,” Elias adds from his seat.
I smile at him before heading for the stairs.
My nest is warm. The lamp is off, but evening light slips through the gap at the edge of one curtain, leaving a thin golden line across the wall. My eyes adjust quickly to the dimness, and I stand in the doorway for a moment before stepping inside.
The room looks lived in now. Really lived in.
The blankets are layered the way I left them this morning, with the heaviest one slightly rumpled on Elias's side and two pillows migrated from the headboard to a corner of the mattress where they apparently belong now.
My cardigan is draped over the chair beside the desk, and beneath it is Adrian's hoodie, the one I keep borrowing and never returning.
My phone charger sits on the shelf beside a book I haven't opened and the tube of lip balm that appeared the first night I stayed over.
I step farther into the room, and the door swings shut behind me. The scent settles around me the way it always does.
A few weeks ago, I wouldn't have understood what I was breathing in.
I would have noticed something pleasant about the air and moved on.
Now I recognize it immediately. Cedar and amber linger deep in the fabric of the heaviest blanket.
The softer throw on the left side carries the warm, dark edge that belongs to Bash, while Elias is woven through the blanket I always reach for first in a way that feels steady and unmistakably him.
All three of them are here.
Warmth spreads through my chest, and I stand there for a moment letting myself feel it.
A week ago, I would have looked at this room and seen a problem to solve. I would have told myself that needing a space scented by other people before I could fully relax meant something was wrong. I would have treated every instinct as something to manage.
Now I'm standing here thinking that this is a nice room.
And I mean it.
I take my phone out of my pocket and set it on the side table before grabbing clean clothes from the drawer. My phone lights up.
The number on the screen is familiar in the way production contacts become familiar over eight months. It's not saved, but I've seen it often enough to recognize it immediately. I stare at it for a second before answering.
“Maya.” It's the director's voice. “I hope I'm not catching you at a bad time.”
“I have a minute,” I say as I sit down on the edge of the bed.
“I wanted to call.” He pauses. “I owe you an apology. I've been sitting with this since Wednesday, and I realized that waiting to say it wasn't doing either of us any good.”
I don't speak. I let him say what he called to say.
“The way we handled things,” he says. “Sending you home.
I want you to know that the decision came from a genuine desire to support you, not from any concern about your ability to do the work.
You've been running this production at a level that I don't think we fully appreciated while it was happening.”
He pauses again, and this one feels different. “That's actually the other thing I wanted to say.”
“Okay,” I say.
“We're struggling,” he says quietly. “Without you on set. I don't mean that as pressure. I'm not calling to ask you to come back. I just wanted you to know. The shot list confusion yesterday. The prop issue this morning. Things we never had to think about because they were already handled.”
He pauses and starts again. “We didn't realize how much of the floor you were holding together before any of us got there in the morning.”
The words are honest, and that's what makes them land the way they do. He means every one of them. There's no performance behind this, no political maneuvering, and no attempt to manage me. He called because he felt bad and wanted to make it right, and now he's telling me the truth.
“I appreciate that,” I say, keeping my voice level.
“I hope when things settle down, when you're in a better place,” he continues, “there's a path back. You're exactly the kind of coordinator we want on every production. That hasn't changed.”
The phrasing lingers after he says it. When things settle down. When I'm in a better place.
“Thank you for calling,” I say. “I mean it.”
Then I hang up.
The phone sits on my knee. I look at the blankets across from me, that cream and soft gray and pale blue.
We didn't realize.
I sit with that phrase for a minute. He didn't realize until I was gone.
Nobody noticed the work happening until it stopped.
They sent me home because they were trying to protect me, because my designation changed and suddenly I was something that needed protecting instead of someone trusted to run the floor.
I know the intention was good, but I keep catching on the outcome.
I was removed, and now he's calling to tell me they didn't realize what I was doing until I wasn't there to do it anymore.
I get up from the bed.
I don't consciously decide to. I just find myself standing and then pacing from the bed to the window and back again.
I should be getting ready for a shower, but instead I reach for the nearest blanket and smooth it even though it doesn't need smoothing before tucking the edge beneath the corner of the mattress.
I move to the other side and straighten the fold in the heavy blanket, pressing the seam flatter than it already is.
When I come around the foot of the bed, I see Adrian's hoodie draped over the chair. I pick it up and pull it to my face, breathing in his scent.
What if every set is like this from now on? What if I walk onto a new floor six months from now and the first thing everyone sees is my designation?
I pick up a pillow from the foot of the bed and add it to the pile near the headboard.
Then I reach for the soft throw Bash used on the couch when he fell asleep watching that terrible reality show.
It's somehow ended up on my desk chair. I don't question how it got there.
I just carry it to the bed and spread it across the top blankets.
My hands keep moving. I straighten one corner, tuck in an edge, and pull the second-heaviest blanket closer to the center.
By the time the door opens, I'm still standing at the window with the sleeve of Adrian's hoodie pressed against my face.
I turn and see Elias. His gaze sweeps over the room in a single pass taking in the room.