“Ryan,” I say.
“Hi, sweetheart,” he whispers.
And then Ryan, who is controlled and strategic and acts from clarity rather than reaction, kisses me like he has been thinking about nothing else since the moment he saw me.
Which, I understand now, he has.
The kiss is Ryan’s version of everything. Unhurried and completely certain. Deeper than I expected from a first kiss and exactly what I should have expected from him, because Ryan doesn’t do anything halfway and he’s been waiting long enough that the waiting is in it, the whole weight of it. I lean into him and his hands at my face are gentle.
When we separate it’s gradual, and he rests his forehead against mine. I breathe him in. Cedar and snow,the warmth of the pack bond finding its center.
I turn my head.
Jack is leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed and the expression of someone watching something they’ve been anticipating with great personal investment. He raises an eyebrow.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi yourself,” he replies.
The partial bond hums. I hurry in his direction.
He unfolds his arms and I walk into them. The partial bond sings and I stop managing it. I let it run. The full thing, warm and entirely his. He makes a sound against my hair that is real and nothing like the surface-Jack, the playful-Jack.
This is the underneath Jack. The one I’ve been craving since the maze.
“Told you,” he says, into my hair. “You stayed.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“Completely,” he agrees. “You stayed anyway.”
I pull back far enough to look at him. His eyes are focused entirely on me. This is what has been building since a bar called The River and a conversation that lasted until last call and a bite we didn’t choose that changed everything.
“Jack,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“The bond. I don’t want it undone.”
His lips quirk into a smile. “Me either,” he says quietly, intimately.
I turn.
Tristan is in the kitchen doorway, and he is looking at me with the expression I’ve been receiving across prep tables and café counters and midnight stalls for weeks.
I go to him.
He meets me halfway, which is also entirely Tristan. He doesn’t wait to be come to, he moves toward you, always, the generosity of someone who understands that meeting people halfway is its own kind of care.
His hands find my waist and mine find his chest. I feel his heartbeat under my palms the way I felt Ryan’s on the pier, and he looks at me with the honey-jar expression, the one from the midnight stall, the one that has never once required anything from me.
“Tristan,” I say.
“I know,” he replies.
“I know you know. I’m saying it anyway. Thank you. For all of it.”
“You don’t—”
