His heartbeat.
Slow. Steady. Completely, infuriatingly, impossibly constant. The heartbeat of a man who is feeling everything I’m feeling and has not let it move him from his own center. I can feel it under my hands, the rhythm of it, and something in my nervous system responds before I’ve decided to let it.
Slowing.
My pulse, which has been running at emergency speed since the crowd and the scent and the bond-pressure of ten minutes ago, begins to find the rhythm under my hands. Like something being tuned. My system reaching toward his the way a compass needle reaches toward north, and I cannot tell if this is biology or choice and I’m not sure the distinction matters right now.
He exhales.
And his scent, which I’ve been aware of all evening in the layered carnival warmth, opens differently at this proximity. Deeper. The cedar and snow of him, and underneath it something that is purely Alpha, purelyRyan.Something that my instinct doesn’t have neutral language for because the language it has is:safe, anchored, here.It moves through me like a slow tide.
“You’re overwhelmed,” he says. “I’ve got you.”
I’ve got you.Three words and the bond hits me like a wave, the full force of it, something I’ve been standing sideways against for days, and it would be so…
It would be soeasy.
Step in. Let him hold it. Let all of them hold it. Stop carrying this alone. Put it down with the people who have been quietly arranging themselves around me like a structure, like something built for a specific purpose.
My hands are on his chest and his heartbeat is under them and his scent is around me and I am…
I am so tired.
The thought arrives with a clarity that bypasses all my defenses. I am so tired of not having this. Not him specifically, not in the way that requires a decision and the full weight of what choosing means. Just… this. Hands on something steady. A heartbeat that doesn’t waver. Something to orient by that isn’t the next move or the exit route or the carefulness of being alone with something enormous.
His thumb moves at my waist. Once. A small, unconscious press of warmth.
And the bond surges.
I step back. One step, clear and deliberate. My hands leave his chest. His hand falls to my waist. Theair where he was is cold. My palms are warm. I can still feel his heartbeat in them, the ghost of the rhythm, and I press them together briefly at my sides before I make myself stop.
We’re positioned at the end of the pier and I breathe through what I just did, which is the right thing, which is the only defensible thing, which has left a space in my chest that feels like it has sharp edges.
“I can’t,” I say. It comes out quieter than I want. More honest than I can afford.
He looks at me. He doesn’t move toward me. He doesn’t fill the void with reassurance or argument. He stands where he is and holds whatever he’s holding with the steadiness that I have been watching all week, and his expression is not hurt. It’s not fake. It’s patience. Real and unhurried and without an end date.
He looks at my hands.
I realize I’m pressing them together again.
I stop.
“Okay,” he says. One word. That’s it.
I observe the river. My waist is still warm where his hand was. “I should go back,” I say.
“I’ll walk with you.”
We walk back through the trees and into the carnival light and neither of us speaks. The pack finds us at the edge of the ground within minutes and they adjust without asking, making the space I need without being told I need it. I move through the rest of the evening inside their orbit and outside their reach.
The warmth of his hand stays with me all night.
I'm at a loss regarding what to do with the fact that I stepped back.
I don’t know what to do with the fact that a part of me—the part that is not strategy, not history, not the carefulness of self-protection I’ve been building since Amber—that part thinks I was wrong.
Maybe I was.
