Page 11 of Heat Unscripted

The Beta Neutral came out of her bag. She sprayed it down with the ease of pure habit, and the chemical flatness dropped over everything like a door swinging shut.

The scent went. Honey and milk pulled back behind the fake curtain. The animal part of me howled about it, but the part that had spent years filing Isobel Gretan under colleague and friend and absolutely-not-someone-I-think-about-at-3-a.m. shoved itself back behind the wheel.

“Right.” My voice came out wrecked. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Right. Good. The, uh. Stance looked better. Before.”

She turned to face me. Glasses back on, sitting a little crooked, and behind them her eyes had gone dark and there was something moving down under the surface. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.

Cillian’s hand was still on my shoulder. Lighter now, but there. A leash. A reminder.

“I think,” he said, in the same even tenor he always used, not one thing about it shifted, “we take a break. Get water. Let the lanes clear.”

It wasn’t a suggestion. It came with the whole weight of how Cillian ran a room, quiet, unhurried, no opening to argue.

I made myself step back. Made myself let go of the last thread of tension holding me pointed at her like a compass at north. My own scent was doing something it hadn’t done in a decade. Sharpening at the edges. Taking on a note I’d spent ten years training out of myself.

Claiming. That was the note. The broadcast that said this one is mine and I’ll put anyone who says different on the floor.

I was not going to put that out in the middle of a recreational axe-throwing venue. I was a professional. A grown adult who’d spent years in rooms with Isobel Gretan without making it weird. I was?—

I was completely, comprehensively fucked.

“Water sounds good,” I got out.

Cillian nodded. His hand finally came off my shoulder, but his eyes stayed on me one more beat, and that look hadn’t moved. He knew something. He knew something, and he’d known it long enough that this, this whole disaster of proximity and scent and biology coming online, wasn’t news to him.

How long? How long had he known?

I looked at her. She had the axe handle in both fists like it was the one solid thing left in a room that had gone to liquid, and her face was doing something that put an ache low in my gut. I’d seen that face before. In the booth, deep in a session, in the dead air between takes when she thought nobody was looking.

Fear. That’s what it was.

Fear of being known.

“Come on.” Cillian was already moving toward the bar, that wiry frame slicing the crowd the way he sliced everything, clean, nothing wasted. “Session’s paid. No rush.”

She fell in step beside me. We didn’t touch. We didn’t talk. The spray was working now, that flat chemical wall locked in place, and if I hadn’t just had my face in her hair I’d never have known there was a thing under it.

But I had. And I did. And nothing, not the spray, not the distance, not years of careful fiction, was going to make me un-know it.

Cillian bought bottles of water at the bar and handed one to each of us with the same matter-of-fact he’d bring to setting a mic gain, then took a high table with a clean line on the lanes. Still watching. Still filing.

I drank half of mine and tried to drop my heart rate. The water was cold and did nothing for the heat still going through me, but it gave my hands a job that wasn’t reaching for her.

“So,” I said. My voice sounded wrong in my own ears. “That was?—”

“Don’t.” Quiet. Controlled, and the control was costing her. “Not here. Please.”

The please landed somewhere soft. Somewhere I’d spent years swearing didn’t exist.

“Okay,” I said. “Not here.”

Cillian said nothing. He sat with his tablet, dragging his fingers across the screen in patterns that could’ve been work or could’ve been nothing, and he held the room steady just by being in it.

The lanes called us back after a while. We threw more axes. Her stance got better. Her aim stayed dogshite. I kept a full arm’s length, minimum, and kept my mouth to technical notes only. Cillian watched from the side, calm, still filing.

When we left, the late sun was coming through the cloud in the kind of light photographers chase. She pulled her sweater tighter around herself and said something about prepping for tomorrow’s rehearsal. Cillian offered to split a cab. I said I’d walk.

I walked. Through town, down toward the canal, past houseboats and joggers and couples shoving walking dogs. My scent came down off the edge. The claiming note thinned out and went. The reasonable part of my brain climbed back on top and started building, frameworks, explanations, all the reasons what just happened didn’t have to mean the thing it obviously meant.