Chapter 17
Tristan
I know something happened at the pier. Not the details, Ryan doesn’t offer them and I don’t ask, because there are things that belong to the people they happened to and extracting them serves the extractor more than the situation.
But I felt it in the bond, the feeling of something that almost was and then wasn’t. When they came back through the carnival ground together I saw it in her. The careful way she was holding herself, the extra work of it, the set of her jaw that meant she was coping with something recent and significant.
I know what that looks like.
I know what most things look like, on people, I’ve spent enough time watching.
She moves through the rest of the evening close to the pack but not inside it. She maintains a radius like something has gotten past her guard and she’s rebuilding the perimeter. A half-step further out than her current normal, which has been moving inward all week and has now retreated outward.
I let her have it.
The whole evening, I let her have it. Space, normalcy, the low demand of just being in the carnival without anything being asked of her. I make sure she has water because the stall work runs long and hot and she won’t get it herself. I make sure she has something to eat around nine because the evening rush doesn’t leave time for proper food and she’ll work through it without registering the hunger. Both times I do it quietly, without ceremony, without making a big deal of it.
She takes both without comment. That’s the language we’ve built, she and I. The taking without comment. The giving without conditions.
By eleven, the fireworks are over, the carnival is winding down, and the pack is together at the edge of the ground. Lola is standing slightly outside our circle, her arms crossed, and her expression far away.
“I’ll walk you back,” I offer.
She looks at me. Not the sharp assessment she gives most things, just looking. “You don’t have to.”
“I know. I want to.”
She looks at me a beat longer, reading something,and then she nods. Once.
I tell the others goodnight. Ryan’s eyes meet mine briefly. He knows what I’m doing, Ryan always knows, and what’s in his look is permission and gratitude. I take care of the people in my orbit. That’s what I do. He trusts me to do it.
We walk.
Main Street at eleven on a Saturday night is quieter than the carnival ground but not actually quiet. People are still out, the pub is alive and rowdy, a few families are heading in the same direction we are with tired children and the satisfied energy of a day well-spent.
Lola walks with her hands in her jacket pockets and her pace is even. We’re silent for the first block, the comfortable kind.
“You okay?” I ask.
“People keep asking me that.”
“People keep having reasons to.”
She utters a sound that is somewhere between acknowledgment and protest. “I’m fine.”
“I know you’re fine.” I look ahead, at the cobblestones, the clock tower, and the dark shop fronts. “Fine isn’t the same as okay.”
The pause is a length that means something. “No,” she says. “It’s not.”
Which is more than she usually gives, and I receive it the way I receive most things she offers—as something worth handling carefully. We walk another half-block.
“The carnival is loud,” she says. A deflection, but alsotrue.
“It is. More than you’d think, for a small town.”
“It’s the density. Everyone compressed into a small space.” A pause. “And everything. All at once.”
She means the pack. She means the bond-pressure, the accumulated weight of days of proximity reaching a saturation point. It’s partly the Omega in her, the innate desire to let Alphas in can be overwhelming. I know this without her saying it because I felt the edge of it myself. The intensity of the four of us around her in a crowded sensory environment, our scents and presences amplified, the bond doing its best to tie us all together.
