Reed comes undone. “I KNEW IT.” He’s got the stuffed bee up in one fist, which he gracefully insisted on carrying so my hands would be free, now jabbing it wildly at the wiry old man and the whole wide sky.
We walk up to the stage together, Ash and Reed crowding in close behind Bram and me. Bram lifts the ribbon for everyone to see then tucks it safely into his breast pocket before looking down at me with a grin.
Pretty sure this is going on the fridge,I smile.
After, it all loosens at once. The crowd breaks back apart into the stalls, the fiddle starts up again somewhere, and Maren and I end up shoulder to shoulder against the warm flank of a haybale, her blue ribbon pinned crooked to her apron (the apple’s ribbon riding fifteen feet off in Bram’s pocket while he lets a very small girl shake his hand about it).
“What?” I ask, catching Maren watching me with a steady, knowing look.
“Nothing.” She’s grinning, and whatever she turns up there, she sits with it a second, then folds it away somewhere to keep. “You just look happy, is all. You look really, really happy.”
I feel something sitting low in my chest like the warmth off a cup of cider.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “I think I am.”
Maren’s smile softens, and she nudges my knee with hers. “That being said... are you going to tell me what that flicker of something wrong was that I felt from you earlier?”
41
Luna
We’re past the last of the food stalls before I clock that the fiddle music has gone thin behind us and the crowd noise has dropped to a hum: we’ve reached the back of the festival, down to where the tents give out and a split-rail fence runs the top of the slope, the grass going gold all the way down to the creek.
She hitches herself up against the top rail and lets out a long breath, the blue ribbon’s still pinned crooked to her apron. Down in the shallows a heron stands one-legged, ignoring us.
For a minute neither of us says anything.
“So,” Maren says. “You want to tell me, or do you want to do the thing where I guess and you make a face every time I get close.”
“There’s no thing,” I say. “I’m a grown woman who met her scent matches and got a ribbon. I peaked. Even if things turn out to be all downhill from here, I’m living the dream right now.”
“Babe,” she says softly.
I look at the heron. The heron looks at the water. We’re all very busy.
“It’s stupid,” I say.
“Tell me anyway.”
So I do. I tell her my heat is impending—and as she well knows, that knocks me out for a week, give or take. I tell her about the two-million-dollar December deadline sitting at the other end of the orchard, and how I highly doubt their production window has a spare week to lose, no matter how much the alphas swear otherwise.
“There are pills to push a heat down the calendar,” I admit, staring at my boots. “But if I take them, it cancels my heat leave, and I want to stay with them so badly. At the same time... I can’t help thinking it might be the best thing to do for their sakes.”
Then, I tell her that, even if they do meet their deadline, and even though I don’t doubt their intentions for a second, I’m terrified of what happens after my heat leave is up.
Maren listens to all of it without moving. Then she says, “Okay. And what do the guys think about you medicating your heat into next quarter?”
“I haven’t told them I was thinking about it.”
“Lun.”
“I know, but I—I didn’t have the heart to tell them,” I say, rubbing my fingers. “I mean, they said they’d help me through it, handle the timing, and all.”
“So why not trust them and let them?” she asks.
“Because they are biologically incapable of being objective about this,” I say, meeting her gaze. “Maren, they’re scent-matched to me. You think any one of them is going to look his own omega in the eye and say, actually, sweetheart, your heat is wildly inconvenient this quarter, please go ahead and chemically delete it? They’d say yes if I asked them to carry me up a mountain. It doesn’t mean I should let them if I think it’ll hurt them.”
The heron gives up and flaps off downstream.
