Wrong love 2

Chapter Ten: Just Us

Saturday arrived quietly.

No bond disturbances. No calls from Cole. No feeling at the edges of the world that something was watching or moving or building toward them from a direction they hadn't identified yet.

Just — morning.

Grey and soft and entirely ordinary in the specific way that ordinary had started to feel like a gift rather than a default.

Elara woke to the sound of him in the kitchen.

Not loud — Jace was never loud, moved through spaces with the unconscious quiet of a predator who had learned centuries ago that silence was an asset — but present. The specific domestic sounds of someone who had decided something was happening today and was already in the process of making it happen.

Cupboards. The fridge. The particular sound of the good basket being pulled from the top shelf.

She lay still for a moment.

Listened.

Felt him through the bond — warm and unhurried and carrying that quality he had on mornings when he'd already made a plan and was quietly pleased about it.

She smiled at the ceiling.

Then got up.

He was at the kitchen counter when she appeared in the doorway.

Hair still from sleep. One of his shirts — oversized, falling to her thighs, the sleeves pushed up because they were too long — and nothing else. She'd stopped being self-conscious about that approximately forty-eight hours into living here and had not revisited it.

He looked up when she came in.

Silver eyes moving over her with that look — the quiet morning version of it, warm and unhurried, the one that didn't need to announce itself because it wasn't going anywhere.

"Morning," he said.

"What are you doing," she said.

"Packing."

She looked at the counter.

Bread. Cheese. The good fruit Mason had stocked. A bottle of something. The basket open beside all of it.

"Packing for what," she said.

"Picnic," he said.

She looked at him.

"It's January," she said.

"I'm aware."

"Jace. It's January. Outside."

"I run hot," he said. "And you don't feel cold. So." He picked up the bread. "Picnic."

She stood in the kitchen doorway in his shirt and looked at him — at this thousand year old wolf packing a picnic basket on a Saturday morning in January with the complete unbothered certainty of someone who had decided this was happening and found the weather's opinion irrelevant —

And felt something in her chest that was so warm and so simple it almost ached.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay," he said. "Go get dressed."

"I am dressed."

He looked at her over his shoulder.

At the shirt.

"That's my shirt."

"I'm aware," she said, using his own word back at him.

Something moved in his expression.

He turned back to the basket.

"Go get dressed," he said again. But quieter. "Or we won't make it to the picnic."

She went to get dressed.

She came back twenty minutes later.

Dark jeans. A sweater the colour of winter. The gold ring catching the kitchen light. Her blue-black pixie cut neat and effortless in the way it was effortless — one of the things about short hair she'd discovered was that it asked very little of her in the morning, which she had decided was a reasonable trade.

Jace was closing the basket when she appeared.

He looked up.

And stopped.

Not dramatically — not the performed double take of someone making a point. Just a genuine fractional pause, silver eyes moving over her face and her hair with an expression she couldn't immediately categorise.

Something honest in it.

Something slightly unresolved.

She tilted her head.

"What," she said.

"Nothing," he said.

"Jace."

"Nothing." He picked up the basket. "Ready?"

She looked at him for a moment.

Then followed him to the door.

They were in the car — basket in the back, the winter morning moving past the windows, his hand on the wheel and her hand in his on the console — when he said it.

Not looking at her.

Eyes on the road.

"Why did you cut it," he said.

She looked at him.

"My hair," she said.

"Yes."

She looked out the window.

At the winter trees moving past. At the grey sky doing its grey sky thing. At the ordinary Saturday morning that had no idea it was carrying them through it.

"I needed air," she said.

"Air."

"In my head," she said. "Everything got very heavy for a while. The war. The bond strengthening. Orion." A pause. "It felt like — I don't know. Like the hair was weight I didn't need. Like cutting it was the one thing I could control when everything else was—" She stopped. "It sounds ridiculous."

"It doesn't," he said immediately.

She looked at him.

He was still watching the road but his thumb had started moving across her knuckles — slow, absentminded, the way he touched her when he was listening with his whole body and his hands needed something to do with the feeling.

"It doesn't sound ridiculous," he said again. "It makes complete sense."

She watched his profile.

"You hate it," she said.

A pause.

"I don't hate it," he said carefully.

"Jace."

"I don't," he said. And then, after a moment, with the specific honesty of someone who had decided she deserved the whole truth: "I miss it."

She turned to look at him fully.

"The long hair," he said quietly. "I know that's — I know it's yours and it's your choice and I'm not—" He exhaled. "It used to fall across your pillow. When you were asleep. All of it. Blue-black everywhere." His jaw moved slightly. "I used to watch it and think I'd never seen anything like it in a thousand years."

The car was quiet.

She looked at him.

At this wolf who had faced wars and smoke demons and his entire family at a dinner table and hadn't flinched for a second at any of it — talking about her hair with more vulnerability than most of those things had produced in him.

"Jace," she said softly.

"I know," he said. "It's just hair."

"It is just hair."

"I know." He glanced at her briefly. Then back to the road. Then — after a moment, with a small exhale that was almost a sigh: "However you are though."

"What?"

He was quiet for a second.

Like he was arranging the words.

"However you are," he said quietly. "Whatever you cut or don't cut or change or don't change." His thumb traced her knuckles again. "Any haircut. Any version." He glanced at her one more time — silver eyes warm and direct and entirely honest. "You still look beautiful to me, Elara. You always look beautiful to me."

The words landed simply.

No performance. No flourish.

Just Jace Ryder stating a fact he'd apparently decided she needed to hear and finding the most direct route to saying it.

She looked at him for a long moment.

At the profile she had memorised without meaning to. The jaw. The eyes on the road. The hand holding hers on the console.

"You're going to make me feel things in a car," she said quietly.

The corner of his mouth pulled up.

"Good," he said.

"Jace—"

"You cut it because you needed to," he said. "And I love your reasons. And I miss the long hair." A beat. "Both things are true. That's all."

She looked at him.

Both things are true.

That was so entirely him — the specific refusal to resolve things that didn't need resolving, to pretend that honesty required picking one feeling and discarding the other.

Both things true. Both things held. Neither one cancelling the other out.

She lifted their joined hands and pressed her lips to his knuckles.

Felt him exhale.

"Thank you," she said.

"For what."

"For saying it," she said. "Both things."

He turned to look at her briefly.

Silver eyes soft in the winter morning light.

"Always," he said.

He looked back at the road.

She looked at the trees.

And the car moved through the Saturday morning carrying them toward a picnic in January and the bond ran warm and quiet between them and neither of them needed to say anything else for a while.

They didn't need to.

Both things were true.

That was enough.

The field wasn't their field.

Their field was the flower field — the secret one, the one with no name, the one that bloomed impossibly in winter and belonged only to them. They hadn't gone there today. Some unspoken mutual decision — today wasn't for somewhere that carried weight. Today was for somewhere new. Somewhere that didn't have history yet.

Somewhere they could just be.

He found it twenty minutes from the house — a hillside, open, with a view of the city below and the winter sky above and nothing between them and either. He spread the blanket with the efficiency of someone who had been doing practical things for a thousand years and had gotten very good at all of them.

She sat.

He sat beside her.

Close. Because he was always close now. Because close had become the default and distance felt like something that required a reason.

He opened the basket.

She watched him unpack it — the bread, the cheese, the fruit, the bottle of something that turned out to be good wine — with the specific attention she gave him when he wasn't performing anything. When he was just doing a thing. Moving through the world.

He handed her a glass.

She took it.

"A picnic," she said. "In January."

"You keep saying that," he said.

"Because it keeps being January."

"And yet here we are," he said. "Warm."

She looked at the city below.

At the winter view — pale and grey and quietly beautiful in the way that things were beautiful when they weren't trying.

"Here we are," she said softly.

He looked at her.

She felt it — the bond carrying the warmth of it, the specific quality of him looking at her when he thought she was looking at something else.

She turned.

Caught him.

He didn't look away.

"What," she said.

"Nothing," he said.

"You were doing it again."

"Doing what."

"Staring," she said.

"I told you," he said. "You're worth staring at."

She shook her head.

But she was smiling.

He reached over.

Tucked a piece of her blue-black pixie cut behind her ear — the same gesture, the same hand, the one he'd been making since before she'd cut it and had adapted to without being asked — and looked at her with those silver eyes in the winter light.

"Eat something," he said quietly.

"You're feeding me now," she said.

"Someone has to," he said. "Mason's not here."

She looked at the food he'd packed.

At the blanket on a hillside in January.

At the wolf sitting beside her with wine and the winter view and both things true and all the time in the world.

She picked up the bread.

He picked up his glass.

And they sat on a hillside on a Saturday morning in January and ate and talked about nothing important and everything that mattered and the bond hummed between them like something that had finally, completely, found its home.

On the drive back she fell asleep.

He noticed when her head dropped to his shoulder — gradual, the specific surrender of a body that had decided it was done being awake — and he adjusted without thinking, shifted slightly so she'd be comfortable, kept his speed smooth so the car wouldn't disturb her.

He drove.

One hand on the wheel.

Her head on his shoulder.

The bond warm and even — the sleeping version of it, the one that was softer and deeper than the waking version, the one that felt like the truest version of all.

He thought about long blue-black hair across his pillow.

He thought about pixie cuts and air in your head and the things people cut away when the world gets too heavy.

He thought about both things being true.

At a red light he turned his head slightly.

Looked at her sleeping against his shoulder.

At the blue-black pixie cut and the gold ring on her hand and the face that had been the most beautiful thing he'd encountered in a thousand years in every version it had ever been.

Still, he thought.

Always.

The light changed.

He drove them home.