Page 29 of What We Don't Say: Part Two

It is still damaged at the edges, still rough from the interrupted heat and crying and everything Garrett put in me, but it’s mine. It moves from my chest into the place where Idris’ mouth is sealed to my shoulder, and Idris shudders so hard his hand tightens once before he forces it loose again. Sloane bends over our joined hands and presses his mouth to my knuckles.

When Idris releases the bite, he does it slowly. His tongue touches the mark once, instinctive and careful, cleaning the small bead of blood before he pulls back. My breath breaks. I'm shaking with the aftershock of the bite.

Idris looks wrecked. There’s blood at his mouth. My blood. The sight should frighten me, but it doesn’t. He wipes it away with the cloth Dr. Mercer hands him and keeps his other hand visible, away from me, waiting until I reach for him first.

So I do.

My fingers touch his jaw. His eyes close for half a second, and when he opens them, there are tears there. Not falling. Held.He stays on his knees in front of me while Dr. Mercer steps in to check the bite, her gloved hands gentle, her voice soft and clinical enough to keep the room from tilting too far into feeling.

“Clean,” she says. “Temporary anchor response is present. Pulse elevated but within expected range. Theo, can you tell me how you feel?”

I look for the answer inside my body. The bite aches, warm and new beneath the air. Idris is there, a thread I can touch if I breathe toward it.

But Garrett isn't the only Alpha the room can name anymore.

“I feel…” My voice catches. I try again. “I feel like I chose.”

Dr. Mercer’s expression softens. “Good.”

Zana’s pen moves across a final line on the document. “I’m noting Theo’s verbal confirmation after the bite. Dr. Mercer, you’ll attach the vital readings and your medical opinion that the consent was valid?”

“Yes,” Dr. Mercer says. “And my recommendation that Theo not be left with Garrett Crane under any circumstances during active recovery.”

Sloane’s head lifts, and for the first time all night, something like air enters his chest.

Zana gathers the signed papers into a folder, leaving copies on the table. Her face has gone hard again, but not cold. “From this moment forward, Theo isn't alone with Garrett. Not in a room, not in a hallway, not for a recovery check-in. Placement conversations go through me or Dr. Mercer. If Garrett wants to discuss Theo’s status, he does it with witnesses and records.”

Idris finally rises from his knees, but he doesn't sit beside me until I tug once at his sleeve. Then he comes carefully, fitting himself on my other side so I'm between him and Sloane again. His arm goes along the back of the sofa, not around me yet. I lean into him anyway, pressing my newly bitten shoulder gently against his chest because I want the pressure there. The bitegives one warm pulse, and my purr stutters out in answer before I can stop it.

Embarrassment moves through me again. Idris feels it somehow, maybe through the temporary thread, maybe because he watches too closely. His mouth lowers to my hair, and he speaks against it quietly enough that only I can hear.

“Still nothing to be sorry for.”

My eyes sting. I turn my face into his shirt and breathe in black tea and rain, then reach blindly for Sloane until his hand finds mine. He holds on immediately, his thumb moving over my knuckles with shaking tenderness. For a while, the room is all paper and witnesses and the faint ache of teeth in my shoulder, but underneath that is something Garrett didn’t write.

A mark that will fade, but not before it tells the truth.

Calliope

The vending machine on the second floor hums like it has secrets and no intention of sharing them. I stand in front of it with my new phone in one hand, my office keys looped around my finger, and a campus ID that still feels temporary clipped to the hem of my cardigan. The machine offers pretzels, granola bars, peanut butter crackers, and a row of chocolate I’ve stared at for long enough that the hall light flickers off and leaves me in the glow of the buttons.

I should go grocery shopping. I’ve been telling myself that since Monday, which means I’ve been telling myself that for three days while the mini fridge in the hotel holds a bottle of water, two yogurts I haven’t touched, and the small container of grapes I bought Monday.

The university put me up somewhere nice while I look for housing, an extended-stay hotel with clean carpet, polite front-desk staff, a kitchenette I keep avoiding, and pillows so white they make me feel like I’m leaving evidence every time I lie down. It’s generous. It’s comfortable. It’s better than a motel room off the interstate with an AC unit that rattles all night, and somehow that makes it harder to hate.

The machine refuses my first dollar. I smooth it against my thigh and feed it back in, watching the little green light accept what I’m apparently still allowed to give. Peanut butter crackers fall with a thud, then a packet of trail mix after I press the wrong number and decide that counts as variety. I buy a bottle of water too because the pills in my desk drawer need something better than coffee, and because Dr. Patel’s voice has started living in the back of my mind with the same quiet firmness as every person who has seen the tremor in my hands and pretended not to look too long.

My office is three doors down from the faculty lounge, tucked at the end of a hall that goes silent after five-thirty except for the building settling and the soft buzz of old fluorescent lights. Someone taped my name to the door the first morning I arrived, Dr. Calliope Monroe printed in neat black letters beneath the laminated title of Visiting Lecturer. I stood outside staring at it for too long that day, keys in my palm, waiting for the letters to look like they belonged to someone who hadn’t been served paperwork in an administrative wing and told not to return to her own home.

Two weeks later, the sign still feels like a borrowed coat.

I unlock the office and nudge the door open with my hip. The space smells like old paper, dry-erase markers, and dust warmed by the radiator. There is a faint trace of Dash too, nearly gone now, and I hate how quickly my body notices what my mind is trying not to name.

My desk is covered in proof that I’ve been functioning. Printed rosters. Student emails flagged for later. A revised syllabus with my notes in the margins. A stack of library forms I’ve signed in every place someone put a sticky arrow. There’s an onboarding packet half-filled out beneath the keyboard, the page asking for emergency contact still blank even though HR sent a reminder this morning with three exclamation points and a smiley face I stared at until my eyes watered.

The first day, I wrote Sloane’s name without thinking. Then I crossed it out so hard the pen tore through the paper. Idris' name came next and I had to leave the room.

Now the form sits under a folder, still blank. HR can wait one more day.