He takes me to the river pier.
I’ve been here before and it was just as beautiful now as it was then. Ryan walks me through the last of the crowd and out onto the old boards. The noise drops by half with every step, the tree cover and the distance doing their work, until we’re at the end of the pier and the water is below us. The carnival is a warm glow through the trees and it’squiet.
Not silent. The music still reaches here. But it’s manageable.
I put my hands on the railing and breathe. He stands beside me. Closer than his usual careful distance, but not touching, not crowding. Just presentat a proximity that my nervous system registers as…
I breathe.
“You don’t have to explain it,” he says.
“I know.”
“The crowds can be a lot. Especially with…” He stops. Reconsiders. “Especially at peak.”
“It wasn’t the crowd,” I reply, before I decide to say it.
He’s quiet.
“It was…” I look at the water. The lantern reflections from earlier in the week are gone, just the carnival glow moving on the surface. “It was all of it. The…” I have no safe language for what it was.The pack bond reaching for me. Your collective scent at full density. Days of gravity becoming something I can’t calculate my way around.
“I know,” he says. Two words. Quiet and direct and carrying about fifteen things.
I glance at him.
He’s looking at the river and his profile in the low light is beautiful. It’s the absence of excess, everything present and nothing ornamental. He’s close enough that I can see the detail of it. Close enough that when he breathes, I can feel the shift in the air.
“Ryan,” I say.
“Mm.”
“This is…” I stop again, frustrated. Why can’t I finish my sentences?
He spins to face me then. This close, with the carnival glow behind us and the river below and the noise at its managed distance, the look is very different from across aroom. This is close. This is close enough that I can see what’s in his expression, not the controlled surface but what’s underneath it. The thing he holds back in company and is not quite holding back right now.
Hewantsme. That’s what’s underneath. Steady, patient, entirely clear-eyed about what it is, and he’s been holding it at the exact distance required. The effort of that is visible in him now, in this moment, in a way it hasn’t been before.
“I know what this is,” he begins. Low. Direct. “I know what you’re feeling. I’m not going to pretend I’m not feeling it too.”
I should say something that puts distance back in. I need to find the sentences. I’ve been maintaining the sentences since I arrived in this small town.
I don’t say them.
He turns his body toward me slightly and his hand comes up to my waist. Not grabbing. Not claiming. Just resting there. One hand, steady, at my waist, and the heat of it goes through everything between us and lands somewhere I have no defenses for.
Then his other hand comes up.
Not to my waist. To my hands, which are at the pier railing, and he covers them with his. The contact is warm and large and deliberate. I feel it from my fingers up through my arms and somewhere in my chest where the bond has been pressing for days.
“Give me your hands,” he directs calmly.
“They’re—” I look down. “They’re right here.”
“I know where they are.” He doesn’t move. Just waits, with the patience that is his fundamental quality, and I understand that he’s asking something specific. Not for my hands at the railing. For my hands.
I let him take them.
He turns them over—slowly, giving me every moment to stop him—and places them flat against his chest. Both of them. My palms against the fabric of his shirt, and underneath the fabric…
