Choose Me Awake

I had nothing to wear on a date with an Alpha.

Ruth stood in my doorway and considered the three dresses laid across the bed.

“Which one do you like?”

“That seems less relevant than which one is appropriate.”

“He has seen you covered in flour, poster paint, and a substance Maisie called garden soup. Wear the one you like.”

I chose the dark green dress Mrs. Pike had persuaded me to buy for a nursery holiday supper. Its hem had needed shortening. I had done it by hand and never quite removed the crease.

Ruth brought a steamer.

Maisie sat on the bed supervising.

“Are you getting married tonight?”

“We’re having dinner.”

“Daddy put on the good coat.”

“He can wear a good coat for dinner.”

She considered that. “Will you bring me a biscuit?”

“If there are biscuits.”

“Ask.”

Ronan waited downstairs with a small bunch of flowers that looked suspiciously as though he had picked them himself. One stem was shorter than the others.

“Maisie helped,” he explained when he saw me notice. “She felt that one was too tall.”

I took them, touched by the unevenness.

His gaze moved over my face and stayed there.

“You look beautiful.”

It should have been an easy compliment to accept. Julian used to say it while choosing what I wore.

Ronan simply waited.

“Thank you,” I said at last.

He drove us to a small restaurant beside the lake. No musicians waited to announce our arrival. No one knelt. The owner greeted him by name and led us to a table overlooking the water.

“You’ve been here before,” I said.

“My father brought me when I was young. I was banned for a month after a disagreement with a swan.”

“You fought a swan?”

“I lost a bread roll to one.”

“A formative defeat.”

“I try not to let it define me.”

I laughed, and the evening became easier.

We talked about things we had not needed to know as parents or survivors. He liked mornings, disliked formal speeches, and read history with the skeptical expression other people reserved for suspicious food. He had once wanted to build boats.

“What happened?”

“My father died. The pack needed an Alpha.”

“Do you still build anything?”

“Bad towers, according to our daughter.”

I told him about wanting to study botanical restoration, about following my mother through the old gardens with a notebook too large for my pocket. I admitted I disliked black coffee despite drinking it for years because milk cost extra in the places where I worked.

He looked at the untouched coffee near my hand.

“Would you like tea?”

“Very much.”

He signaled the server without making a lesson out of it.

After dinner we walked along the shore. The moon had not yet risen. Lamps cast broken gold across the lake.

I could feel him beside me with a part of myself I had spent years trying to silence.

“When we first met,” I said, “I didn’t know whether I would live through the night.”

He slowed.

“I know.”

“Later, after Mara’s antidote worked, after everything stopped spinning, I remember feeling angry. Not only frightened. Angry that they had decided my body and my future could be traded.”

He listened without interrupting.

“Being with you was the first choice I made after that. But the morning swallowed it. Then everything else happened, and I stopped knowing how to remember anything without fear attached.”

He turned toward me.

“What do you remember now?”

I looked at his hand, at the scar I had touched before I knew his name.

“You moved slowly. You made bad tea. You let me laugh.”

“The tea was the hotel’s fault.”

I smiled, then reached for his hand.

His fingers closed around mine.

“I remember wanting you,” I said. “I still do.”

He drew a breath that moved visibly through his chest.

“Nora.”

“I don’t want the bond to speak for me.”

“Then tell me what you want.”

“Kiss me.”

He touched my cheek first. His thumb rested lightly near the corner of my mouth, giving me time to move closer.

I did.

The kiss was gentle until I caught his coat and held him there. Then it deepened, warmth gathering between us while my wolf pressed forward in recognition.

I felt none of the frantic uncertainty of that first night. There was the lake, the cool air, his hand at my back. There was room to stop, room to laugh when we drew apart too quickly and nearly collided again.

“I’ve wanted to do that since you smiled at the breakfast table,” he admitted.

“Which time?”

“The owl controversy.”

“That was an excellent defense of your performance.”

“I thought so.”

He kissed my forehead. I let myself rest against him without calculating how long it would last.

On the drive home I remembered the biscuit.

Ronan turned the car around.

“We can tell her there weren’t any,” I said.

He looked at me in astonishment. “And risk the consequences?”

The restaurant owner sent us away with a paper bag and an expression of deep amusement.

Maisie was asleep when we returned, despite having claimed she would wait up. We placed the bag on the breakfast table with her name on it.

Outside my room, Ronan took my hand again.

“Would you go out with me another time?”

I smiled at the earnestness beneath his composure.

“Yes.”

“Good. I’ll research the biscuit situation in advance.”

I kissed him before he could say anything else.

Later, alone in bed, I touched my lips and laughed quietly into the pillow.

For once, being awake in the dark meant I was happy.

The following afternoon Ronan asked whether I would like to walk in the south woods with him and Maisie.

“As wolves?” I asked.

“Only us. You can walk however you prefer.”

I had seen him near a shift, the gold eyes, the change in his voice. I had not seen his wolf completely.

He waited until we reached the clearing, then stepped away with Maisie while I sat on a fallen log. The change came smoothly, power moving through a body already familiar with its own shape.

An enormous black wolf stood where he had been.

I went still.

He could have reached my shoulder without rearing. Silver threaded the fur along his chest, and his eyes held the same patient attention I knew from breakfast tables and midnight conversations.

Maisie became a small wolf beside him, then immediately climbed over his front paw.

The contrast startled a laugh out of me.

Ronan lowered himself until his head rested near my knee, giving me the choice of approaching. I put my hand between his ears.

Warmth moved beneath my ribs.

Maisie scrambled against his shoulder, failed to climb higher, and complained in an indignant series of squeaks. He nudged her toward the lower slope of the log. She used it as a step and finally reached his back.

For a moment she stood there, triumphant.

Then she slid sideways into my waiting hands.

I caught her against my chest while Ronan shook his head with an expression so recognizably paternal that I laughed again.

We walked slowly beneath the trees, one huge wolf at my side and a small one racing between us. Whenever Maisie ran too far, her father stopped and waited. She looked back, saw where we were, and returned.

I began to understand that power could feel like this, too: an immense animal shortening his stride so a woman and a child could stay beside him.