Chapter 308

Chapter 308
Caitlin's POV

"I want to show you that I can be a person outside of all of this," he said.

"That is all no agenda no pressure just a few hours somewhere that isn't here."

The library was quiet around us. Outside the window the garden was grey and still, the afternoon light flat and low.

I thought about the car ride back from my parents' house. His voice stripped down to plain words. I want to make you happy, Caitlin.

I thought about tea at two in the morning and the right cupboards opened in the right order and a jacket on the hook by the back door.

I thought about the pull in my chest that had been pointing at him since the first night I woke up and had not once pointed me wrong.

"One condition," I said.

He looked at me carefully. "Name it."

"We don't talk about what I am not once. For the whole day I want to just be a person having lunch in a town. No wolf, no pack, no bond, no turn none of it."

Something in his expression shifted. Not quite a smile something quieter than that.

"Done," he said.

"Then yes," I said. "I will come."

He looked genuinely surprised for exactly one second before he recovered himself. I filed that away without commenting on it.

After he left I sat with the book in my lap and looked out the window at the grey garden and tried to work out how I felt about what I had just agreed to.

The honest answer was complicated.

I was still angry not the hot furious kind from the forest, not anymore, but something quieter and more permanent that lived in the back of my chest alongside everything else.

What he had done to me was real and the consequences of it were going to be real for the rest of my life and that did not go away because he was good at finding the right cupboards and making tea without being asked.

But I was also still here i had said that to him in the kitchen and I had meant it. I was still here and that meant something and I was done pretending it didn't.

The pull in my chest had never once felt like a threat. It felt like information. Like something patient and certain sitting quietly inside me waiting for me to catch up.

I was not all the way there yet but I had said yes to lunch in a town and that was a beginning.

Luna found me in the hallway before dinner.

She didn't say she knew about tomorrow. She didn't have to. She just looked at me with those calm, warm eyes and handed me a dark green scarf I had admired once without thinking she had noticed.

"It gets cold in the evenings," She said. "Keep it.”

I looked at the scarf in my hands. "Luna."

"Mm."

"How do you do that. How do you just keep being kind to people even when things are complicated."

She considered the question seriously, which I appreciated she didn't brush it off.

"Because complicated doesn't mean broken," She said.

"And because kindness costs me nothing and it might cost you everything to go without it right now."

I looked at her.

"Also," She said, with a small shift in her expression that was the closest she usually got to a smile,

"Because you deserve it whatever happened and however you got here you deserve it."

I pressed my lips together and looked down at the scarf.

"Thank you," I said. My voice came out smaller than I intended.

She put her hand briefly on my arm and then walked past me down the hallway and left me standing there holding a green scarf, trying very hard not to cry in the corridor over an act of kindness from a woman who had every reason to be complicated about me and had chosen not to be.

I stood there for a moment then I folded the scarf carefully over my arm and went in to dinner.

That night I lay in bed and looked at the ceiling and let myself think about tomorrow without attaching too much to it. It was lunch. It was a town forty minutes away.

It was a few hours of something that had nothing to do with shifting or bonds or any of the enormous things that had turned my life completely around.

It was also Alex, sitting across a table from me in a normal place, trying to show me who he was outside of all of it.

I was curious I was not going to pretend I wasn't the pull in my chest was quiet and steady in the dark.

I closed my eyes for the first time in over a week I fell asleep without having to work at it.