THE SUMMIT, THE BETA, AND THE BEGINNING
1341 Words
The conference room on the second floor of the Summit Lodge was the kind of room that had been designed for exactly the situation it was currently being used for — rectangular table, territorial flags along the walls, chairs arranged with the precise symmetry of political architecture, the kind of lighting that was functional rather than warm. It smelled of wolf and strategy and the specific anxious efficiency of negotiations that had been proceeding for two days without two of their expected participants.
I walked in at eleven forty-five.
My colleague Portia, who had been covering my absence with the calm efficiency of a woman who had developed a reliable suspicion about the nature of my absence, looked up from the table and gave me the specific look that communicated: we will discuss this later and extensively. Out loud she said: "Ms. Corrine. I hope the room situation has been resolved."
"Fully," I said.
The other representatives around the table shifted. There were seven packs represented, various levels of interest in the specific negotiations at hand, and I spent the next ninety minutes being extremely professional and competent and entirely focused on the matters before the group, which was easier than it should have been given that Knox was in the room.
He had come in behind me. He had taken the seat for the Stormcrest representation at the far end of the table and he was doing the same thing I was doing — being entirely professional and focused — and we were not looking at each other specifically more than we were looking at anyone else, which required a certain discipline, and that discipline was perhaps visible to observers, but the observers were politely pretending otherwise.
Finn, who was sitting at Knox's right hand, was not pretending otherwise.
Finn was a lean, dark-haired Beta who gave the impression of someone who was generally amused by the world and specifically delighted by the current situation. He caught my eye across the table at one point and gave me the expression of a man who had arranged a booking error through his aunt and was now watching the results. I gave him the expression of a woman who was going to have an opinion about that later. He smiled wider.
After the meeting, in the hallway, Knox introduced us.
"Finn," Knox said. His voice was entirely neutral. "You remember the delegate from the Northern Omega Council."
"Of course," Finn said, with warmth so excessive it was nearly a performance. "Ms. Corrine. I hope your stay at the lodge has been comfortable."
"It had certain logistical challenges," I said.
"I heard there was a booking error," Finn said.
"Unusual," I said. "Given how well these events are usually organised."
"Terrible," Finn agreed. "Though hopefully not—" He glanced between Knox and me with the expression of a man who had already completed his sentence internally. "—too terrible."
"Finn," Knox said, a single word, a single note.
"I'm going," Finn said, still smiling, and went.
We watched him disappear around the corner.
"He's very pleased with himself," I observed.
"He is," Knox said. "He is going to be insufferable about this for the next—" He considered. "The rest of my natural life, probably."
"You could tell him it wasn't necessary," I said. "The engineering."
"I could," Knox said. "If it weren't true."
I looked at him.
"It was necessary," he said. "I would not have found my way to you without a reason I could stand behind. That's not — that's not something I'm proud of. But it's true." He met my eyes. "Finn knew that before I did. He is insufferable about it. He is also correct, which is the worst kind of insufferable."
The hallway was empty. The afternoon light coming through the windows was the bright, post-storm light that followed the clearing, the world outside recently washed and very clear.
"Thank you for your insufferable Beta," I said.
Knox's mouth moved. The real smile — the one I had seen exactly twice, both times in the last two days, the one that changed his whole face.
"I'll tell him," he said.
The pass opened at three-fifteen. The parking lot began to empty in stages — the representatives who had the farthest distances to cover leaving first, the others following in the orderly sequence of people who have been in enforced proximity for long enough to be genuinely glad of separation. I packed my bag. Knox packed his. We did not perform intimacy in the hallway or the lobby and we did not pretend to be strangers, and the middle territory between those two positions turned out to be exactly the right size for what we were.
At my car, in the cleared parking lot with the mountains very white and very present on three sides and the sky that specific shade of post-storm blue that existed nowhere else, Knox stood with his hands in his coat pockets and looked at me.
"Tonight," he said.
"Tonight," I agreed.
"Drive carefully. The roads will be—"
"Knox."
He stopped.
"Drive carefully yourself," I said.
He looked at me for a long moment with the expression I was going to spend a significant time learning. Then he leaned forward and kissed me — brief and certain and public, in the cleared parking lot in the post-storm light — and straightened.
"Go," he said. "Before I change my mind about the two weeks."
I got in my car. I backed out. In my rearview mirror I watched him standing in the parking lot watching me leave, and he did not look like a man who was walking away. He looked like a man who was watching someone go with every intention of following.
My wolf purred the entire four hours home.
My phone rang at nine that evening. Knox's name on the screen. I picked it up after one ring because I had been waiting since I got home and I was not pretending otherwise.
"Hello," he said.
"Hello," I said.
"How were the roads?"
"Fine after the first hour," I said. "Yours?"
"Clear," he said.
A beat.
"This is the call," he said.
"I noticed," I said.
"I'm still learning how to—" He stopped. "I told you I was better at practical situations. Phone calls are not practical situations."
"You're doing fine," I said.
"Am I?"
"Yes," I said. "Keep going."
He exhaled. And then — slowly, in the quiet of what was apparently his study at Stormcrest, with the fire going by the sound of it — he talked to me. Not about anything urgent. Not about the summit or the pack politics or the logistics of what came next. About the drive home. About the way the mountains looked after the storm. About a book he had been thinking about since I mentioned it in the hotel room that he now intended to reread.
I sat in my apartment in the specific warmth of a woman who has come home from somewhere to a place that is unchanged but somehow feels different, and I talked back, and the ease was still there, translated perfectly from the firelit hotel room to the ordinary phone call, carrying its quality across the distance.
At eleven-thirty he said: "I should let you sleep."
"Probably," I said.
"Two weeks," he said.
"Two weeks," I said.
"Good night, Maya."
"Good night, Knox."
I put the phone down and sat in the quiet of my apartment and thought about three years and what they had been and what they had cost and what, against all reasonable expectation, they had been leading toward.
My wolf was warm against my ribs. Settled. Patient in the way of something that has finally been given what it needed and can afford to be patient now.
I went to bed and I slept, and I dreamed of cedarwood and rain and a grey-eyed man who was, it turned out, very good at keeping his word.
- Writer
