ASHER
"Asher." Julian’s voice was quiet but it snapped out of thoughts.
"Co on, Scott," Julian said, signalling for Scott to co closer.
A pause, footsteps drawing closer and I kept my eyes on the floor.
"I’m sorry," Scott and I said at the exact sa mont. I looked up and he looked at . A beat of pure silence.
"You go first," I said.
"No, you—"
"Scott." Julian’s voice carried the particular exhausted patience of soone who had been managing both of us for longer than today.
Scott exhaled and he uncrossed his arms and dropped them to his sides and looked at with the expression of soone who had been rehearsing sothing and was now discovering that rehearsed things never co out the way you planned them.
"I’m an idiot," he said.
I waited.
"I should have — when it happened, in the hallway, I should have been the one pushing through that crowd. Not standing against the wall like—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "Julian told why you did it. Why you enrolled. What it costs you to keep it going for a year plus." He looked sowhere past my shoulder briefly. "And instead of coming to find you I spent three days sitting with the fact that you — that an Oga—"
He stopped again.
I watched his face and I understood exactly what he wasn’t finishing. That an Oga had more courage than I did.
He didn’t say it but it was there in the set of his jaw and the slight tension around his eyes and the way he was looking at like I was sothing he was still figuring out how to recalibrate.
My chest did sothing complicated because I knew what it ant for him to stand here and say this. Scott’s pride was not a small or simple thing. It was the architecture of everything he’d been built to be. And he was standing in a corridor at seven in the morning next to a mop bucket telling he’d been wrong, and I could see in his face exactly how much it was costing him. He thinks I’m braver than him, I thought.
He had no idea that I was terrified every single day. That there was nothing brave about it. That I did what I did because the alternative was disappearing completely and I wasn’t ready to disappear.
He thinks I stood up for Reed because I was brave and I wanted to be a hero.
Because the version of events that had Scott looking at with sothing close to reluctant respect was doing more good than the truth would right now.
"I also—" Scott paused. "I didn’t stand up tall when Rred—" He stopped. Looked at the floor. "You stood up for when I didn’t have the courage. And that’s—" His jaw tightened. "I didn’t know how to sit with that."
That I hadn’t expected. I looked at him and felt sothing in my chest loosen that I hadn’t known was tight.
That’s what the distance was, I thought. Not just the Oga thing. Not just the pride. He was ashad. He was sitting with his own failure and looking at and seeing the shape of it reflected back.
"I understood why you kept your distance," I said finally and Scott looked up.
"If soone had been deceiving for years," I said carefully, "I wouldn’t have known how to process it either. I would have needed ti." I paused. "And I’m sorry. For the deception. For all of it. You deserved better than that."
Sothing shifted in Scott’s expression.
The complicated tension in his jaw loosened slightly.
"I’m sorry," I said again. "Both things can be true."
Scott looked at for a long mont.
Then he nodded. Once. The particular nod of soone who has decided to put sothing down and move forward.
Julian looked between us with the expression of soone who had been waiting for this specific mont and was deeply relieved it had finally arrived. Then he stepped forward and pulled us both into a hug.
Not a brief one. A real one. His arms went around both of us and he held on for a second too long to be casual and I felt Scott tense for a mont before sothing in him gave and he let it happen.
When Julian released us Scott was looking sowhere else and clearing his throat.
I almost smiled.
The three of us stood there in the corridor with the mop and the bucket and the morning light coming in through the windows and sothing between us that felt, tentatively, like it might beco normal again.
Julian looked at .
"Better," he said simply.
I nodded and it was.
In that mont, in that corridor, with Julian’s arm briefly still around my shoulder and Scott examining sothing on the wall with exaggerated interest, it genuinely was.
But underneath it, quiet and certain as a current beneath still water, the other thing sat.
The thing I hadn’t said out loud to either of them. The thing I’d been carrying since I walked out of Voss’s office with Reed’s forehead pressed against mine in the empty corridor.
The sester was moving not quickly but it was moving and at the end of it Reed would have to go ho. He would have to face his father and the pack and the ultimatum that had been waiting since before any of this happened. Would have to stand in front of the man who had spent years building a future for him and explain what he’d chosen and why.
Because the bond was real and the mate mark was real and what had happened between us in every dark and quiet hour was real, but none of that changed the structure of the world Reed lived in. None of it changed his father. None of it changed what losing the pack would cost him.
And Reed had hesitated once already.
I had seen it on his face. I had watched him weigh it, had watched the calculation move behind his eyes even while he was looking at .
He had hesitated and I had forgiven him for it in the sa breath that I understood it, because I knew what was being weighed and I knew what I was worth in that equation and I had made my peace with the answer.
The problem was that Reed hadn’t and until he did, every mont of warmth and proximity and I won’t let you leave existed inside a countdown I could feel ticking even when everything on the surface looked fine.
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