Her eyes come up to mine. They are very dark and very real and the crying-she-won’t-admit-to is still there at the edges. She is looking at me with the same gaze she has had since the first night on the carnival ground.
“I can’t ask you to—”
“You’re not asking.” I take the last of the distance between us. We are close enough now that I can feel the warmth of her. “We decided. In the pack house, the morning after you first stayed over. We decided. Not about asking. Not contingent on anything you give us. We decided you’re ours and we’re handling what’s yours.”
Her breath is audible. “You didn’t tell me that,” she says.
“You would have left sooner.”
The silence between us has weight. Her bag is still on her shoulder. Her hands are still in herpockets. She is still technically in the posture of leaving and we are both aware of this and neither of us is pretending otherwise.
I have been holding things, with her, for weeks. Held the distance, held the instinct, held the want and the certainty and the bond-pull that has been running at a frequency I’ve never felt before. I have held all of it at the correct distance because that is what she needed and I knew it and I don’t regret a single day of it.
Tonight I hold it differently.
Tonight I hold it here, visible, in my expression, in the proximity of the two of us along the riverside at the early hour of two in the morning. I let it be visible because she needs to see it, needs to understand that she is not doing this by herself, that walking back through the door of the house is not surrender or sacrifice or the closing of an exit. It is just the choice that’s true. The one that matches what she told me at the pier before the sirens, when she looked at the water and had something in her expression that was real.
I know what I saw. I let her see that I know.
“Ryan,” she says. Her voice has changed. The warning is gone out of it. Something quieter in its place.
“You’re not leaving,” I state. Not a command. A fact. The same way I state all facts after I’m certain.
Behind me at the front door, Jack appears. His hands in his pockets, saying nothing for the first time in recorded history. Tristan is beside him, arms loose at his sides, present and warm and steady in the way ofsomething that does not move under pressure. Archer, a half-step behind them, looking at her with the expression that has been changing for two weeks and has now finished changing.
She sees them.
Her eyes move across the men and come back to me. In them is the thing I’ve been watching get closer to the surface since she drove into this valley. She is not afraid. She is not running the exit calculation. She is standing on the river path at two in the morning with her bag on her shoulder and her hands in her pockets and she is so close to the thing she’s been fighting that I can feel it, the way you feel weather before it arrives.
I wait.
I am very good at waiting.
“You’re not leaving,” I repeat.
Chapter 24
Lola
My hands are out of my pockets. I don’t know when I decided to do that. I don’t know if I decided, it might have been the pack behind him, the sight of them at the door, or it might have been Ryan sayingyou’re not leavingthe second time in the quiet way that wasn’t a command.
Or it might have been something that started before any of this, some internal mechanism that’s been shifting incrementally for two weeks and has finally moved to a position I can’t move it back from.
Ryan is close enough that we’re breathing the same air, and behind him is the rest of the pack. All looking startled, scared, and hopeful.
Here is the thing about running: You have to believe the next place is possible. That’s what keeps you moving.It’s not the fear of what’s behind you, or not only that. It’s the belief that there’s a next place. That the motion has a destination even if you haven’t identified it yet. I’ve been running for a month and I’ve been running in some form for way longer than that. For a month the belief has been:the next place exists, I’ll know it when I find it.
I drove into Sweetwater Valley and the air changed and I didn’t understand why. I know why now. There is no next place.Thisis the next place. The final place. The destination.
This weird little town with its cobblestone main street and its sixty-year carnival. It’s Elsie at the gas station who gives briefings as a public service and a bookshop owner with strong opinions about genres. It’s the noodle lady who told the police that I left days ago.
This house. The couch. The blanket that I just folded into its corner and tried to leave behind.
I know this.
I have known this, in the part of me that knows things before I’ve given them permission to be known, for days. Maybe longer. Maybe since the Ferris wheel with Jack when I saidI don’t have a Ryanand heard the past tense in my own voice.
The problem is not not-knowing. The problem is what knowing costs.
