Nikki
Adam was still holding me like nothing was wrong, but he knew, too. Maybe that was better. My head was resting on his shoulder, my hand on his chest, feeling the pounding of his heart under sweat-slick skin and listening to his breathing. His fingers stroked my back. If I looked up, would his eyes be closed, or would he be staring at the ceiling, thinking and overthinking us to death?
We’d said we weren’t doing this anymore.
We’d said it a few times, and we always ended up back here.
We could just try. Really, really try this time. It doesn’t have to be like this.
I often had thoughts like that. Hard to say whether it was coming from the part of me that still loved him or the part of me that saw loving him as a problem. My heart was weighed down and full of disgust with myself for going back again, when I’d promised myself I wouldn’t. Even as a small voice in my soul crowed with smug triumph that he was just as weak as I was.
My heart was convinced that if I just loved him enough… it would be enough. If we just decided it was going to work, it would. It had to work. We were soulmates. The universe had conspired to bring us together. We were the two parts that made up something bigger than ourselves.
After a year of this back-and-forth, my brain had spent so much time analyzing every moment for red flags and signs that I had talked myself out of being able to believe him when he told me he loved me.
He couldn’t. Circumstances were impossible.
I heard Adam sigh and looked up. He was staring at the ceiling—so he was ruminating, just like I was. Two chronic overthinkers in one relationship.
Not for the first time, I stared at the lines of his face and his lips and thought he was perfect. I loved every scar, every flaw; they were made for me to touch, to study in the low light lying in bed next to him. To hold close.
Love does funny things to your vision. It makes things beautiful, or it blinds you.
“You don’t have to go.”
I didn’t know why shit like that still came out of my mouth.
I hated it because I knew how needy it sounded. I also hated the way my heartbeat picked up, waiting for his reply.
“I don’t want to.” His voice was flat, the words automatic.
He doesn’t mean it. He’s just saying it to appease you, came the snap response from the depths of my brain.
I shut that voice down.
Why would he do that? He has literally no reason to lie. If he didn’t want to be here, he wouldn’t be here. We hadn’t spoken for two months.
Until I’d texted him, of course.
There didn’t have to be a villain in this story. The situation wasn’t anyone’s fault. This was a case of bad timing and soulmates that fate was keeping apart. He couldn’t help how his pack saw me. He couldn’t help what I was.
But he could have chosen you. He could have stood up for you. He could fight for you.
I hated this fucking emotional seesaw. Too high when he touched me, from the moment the door opened and he was on the other side—crashing to new lows every time we lay there afterwards and I berated myself for letting it happen.
Mortification washed over me along with the memories. Whispering in his ear that I loved him while he was inside of me. Crying after he made me cum, because it was true, and the only time I could make myself say it anymore was during stolen moments like this. He’d squeezed me tight against his body, not saying a word. I’d felt something in his touch that screamed regret louder than any words he could’ve spoken. It was a tenderness, a gentleness I didn’t need or want.
I sat up, making my break for the bathroom. Usually the post-sex bathroom trip was my time to pull myself together before we slept. But his hand came up and snatched at my arm, dragging me back to the mattress where he turned onto his side to glare at me.
“Stop it,” he bit out.
“Stop what?”
“Can we just stop?”
“Stop what?”
His eyes bored into mine. The frustration was evident. I could only stare back at him, waiting. Silence stretched out between us.
Adam made a small sound of discontentment and pressed the heel of his hand into his eyes.
He tried to hide the pain from me, but I knew he was fighting something internally that made this difficult for him: an alpha command. He’d never explicitly told me he’d been ordered to stay away, but it was obvious to me now.
The stretches of no contact had started small, at first. Only a few days. Then weeks. Then months.
I hadn’t blamed him for needing relief. I’d never been subjected to an alpha command myself, having grown up outside a pack. I couldn’t imagine the feeling.
The anniversary of our meeting at the Autumn Harvest Street Fair had passed the month before without a word from either of us.
It must be a relief.
That thought choked me, constricting my throat until it hurt to breathe, and I pulled away from his grasp to launch myself into the bathroom.
He didn’t try to hold me back a second time.
I turned on the shower and stepped in before it was hot, resting my head against the tile. If I could just stop, the pain would stop for both of us. But I wasn’t prepared for the waves of grief that washed over me each time I began to contemplate a life without him. Any time I allowed myself to dwell on the silence, my fear grew from a whisper into a scream.
He won’t fight for you because he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want you.
No one fights for you. Not your birth pack. Not your parents. Not your soulmate.
Because I’d died during my transition and been reborn. Because the animal spirit in me had killed me as she’d tried to emerge into the world, and then she’d dragged me back from death with the strength of her will. Because I lived when I should have been buried.
I put my hand over my mouth to silence my tears and let them fall as the water ran over my face. I cried without a sound until my body ached from holding myself close, attempting to control the outpouring of grief.
Pain seemed to swallow my whole future no matter which way I looked. How long could I do this? And yet I didn’t want to live a life that didn’t have him in it.
At that thought, however, a twinge of intuition shimmied up my spine.
He would never be able to give me what I needed; it was clear to me now. It had been clear for months, if I were being honest. He’d never quite said the words, but it rang loud in his actions. Sometimes silence was your answer.
And how could I expect him to leave his pack for me? To keep defying his leadership over and over again, just so I could keep him close? To keep putting him through this terrible pain that, when I reached for him, I could feel eating away at his mind and soul. Defying an alpha command came with a heavy price. It was only because he was strong that he was able to do it at all.
It was only because he felt guilty that he kept doing it in spite of the cost.
A quiet settled over my spirit then, curling solidly around the wound in my heart and lifting the weight of fear from me just enough.
I’d always known the right answer. I’d known it from that first day, when we’d met and his pack had come at me with their hate without so much as a hello.
I hadn’t wanted to accept it, because…
Because we were soulmates. Because I wanted what it meant to be with him—to have his love when I had never felt loved before. But I wasn’t without love, was I?
No. I was part of a family. I was wanted in House Gabriel.
He’d been giving me the answer all along, and I hadn’t wanted to hear it, because I knew it would mean walking away from… possibility.
From potential.
I lowered the temperature to splash cool water over my face and body which had grown feverish from crying. Stepping out of the shower, I eyed myself in the mirror and wrapped my body in a towel. My eyes were puffy and swollen.
That was okay.
Taking a fortifying, shaky breath, I opened the bathroom door and returned to the quiet, dim light of my room. He was still lying there, gazing off at nothing. Adam glanced up at me wordlessly as I stood in the doorway.
“I think it’s time for you to go.”
He sat up, posture rigid. His expression was shuttered and unreadable.
“This isn’t working, and it’s time to be very honest with ourselves about that, Adam.” I swallowed back the lump in my throat. Tears welled up again and I brushed them away as they slid down my face without acknowledging them. “We’re both adults. Anything you have to keep secret… it’s really not something that you should be doing. You can’t change Jackson’s mind about us. And you can’t leave your pack—I understand that now. It was unfair of me to have expected it. I’m sorry for that, for putting that on you.”
“Nikki—”
I shook my head, holding up a hand to swipe at more stray tears. “I’m sorry. This—this is my answer. I kept waiting for you to give me one. To tell me you decided it was worth it—that I was worth it. I can’t wait anymore. We’re soulmates. And for a little while… it was good to explore what that might mean. But it’s time to move forward. I need more than what you can give me. You deserve peace. And I… so do I.”
For a tense moment, neither of us moved nor said a word more, and then he slowly stood and grabbed his jeans from the chair where I’d tossed them when we’d stumbled into my room.
I refused to reach for him, to touch his body or his energy to know if he believed me this time or whether this was hurting him as much as it hurt me. I turned my back while he dressed.
Slow, deep breaths. Just keep breathing.
He slipped out of my room and from the apartment. The deadbolt slid home—he stopped to lock my door on his way out. What would he do with the key?
A wave of dizziness passed over me, and the room swam in front of my eyes. “Fuck.”
I stumbled back into the bathroom just in time to catch the toilet as I vomited. The linoleum was cold under my knees, contrasting the feverishness of my skin. My gut ached from the urgency of my body’s protest.
When I had nothing left to evacuate, I leaned against the tiled wall, trembling, and closed my eyes.
A slender hand touched my shoulder.
“Open your eyes and drink this.”
I obeyed Raziel’s voice, peering at them through slitted, puffy eyelids. They pressed a steaming mug of peppermint tea into my hands and sat with me there on the bathroom floor while I sipped. I burned my tongue on the first mouthful.
My teeth and fingers tingled numbly.
Raziel waited, reaching out gentle fingers to stroke hair away from my face, sorrow evident in their red eyes. They could never understand this. Archangels didn’t have soulmates—or at least, not other than Gabriel and Celeste.
But Raziel loved me. They understood me. And they had been drawn here by my inner turmoil. Even though they’d warned me against contacting Adam again in the first place, they said nothing; even though this was my own fault, they wouldn’t leave me alone.
When I finished the tea, they disappeared from the bathroom to deposit the cup elsewhere and returned to find me in bed, curled under my quilt wearing a soft oversized shirt.
I’d expected agony—before, I’d always been overwhelmed by a jarring and suffocating anxiety anytime I contemplated Adam’s absence. Swamped with fear.
I felt… nothing.
I was quiet inside.
And when Raziel crawled into bed beside me, tucking their thin, steely arms around me tightly, I felt sleepy. Exhaustion rose over me and I let the emptiness come, while I took shelter in the arms of my best friend.