Page 55 of What We Don't Say: Part One

My fingers brush the cards in my pocket, but I don't pull one out. There is no one standing in front of me to read it. There is only the house, and my breath, and the growing pressure undermy skin that makes me need someone before I know how to ask for anyone.

I go upstairs.

Callie’s room is at the end of the hall, her door half-open. I stop outside it with both hands tucked into the sleeves of her hoodie. No one has told me I can go in. No one has told me I can't. The space between those two things makes my chest ache, so I stand there for a few seconds before I step past the doorway.

Her room looks like she left in the middle of doing three things at once. One side of the bed is tangled, the sheets kicked down and the pillow dented. A book lies facedown on the nightstand beside a mug with tea dark at the bottom. A sweater hangs over the back of the chair near the window, and her bag is open on the bench with papers tucked inside at crooked angles.

Callie is everywhere, except where I need her.

I sit on the edge of the bed before my knees decide for me. The scent there is warmer than it is in the closet, sleep-soft and threaded through the sheets. I curl my fingers into the blanket and try to breathe, but the ache under my skin only spreads. It makes me think about her mouth in the closet, her fingers in my hair, her hand turned palm-up during the movie so I could find it when sitting in Garrett’s lap got too full.

She isn't here, and wanting her in her empty room starts to feel like touching something I shouldn't touch without her.

I leave before the air can tighten around me.

Downstairs, I follow Garrett’s scent.

Cold mint reaches me first, then polished leather and the faint bitter trace of coffee. The scent leads down the quieter hall to the study, where the door is open and Garrett’s typing clicks in a steady rhythm. I stop at the threshold with Callie’s sleeves still covering half my hands.

Garrett looks up before I make a sound.

His hands leave the keyboard. He turns his chair toward me, but he doesn't stand, and that helps more than I expect. His gaze moves over my face, then down to the way I have my fingers curled into Callie’s hoodie.

“Color, Theo?” he asks.

I tap once against the doorframe.

“Green,” Garrett says, and his voice stays low. “Come in.”

The study smells like paper, rain, coffee, and him. Files sit in careful stacks on his desk, and his tie is loosened at his throat, the top button of his shirt undone. He looks less like the head Alpha who spoke to Miller and more like the man who kept one arm around me during a movie without making me explain why I picked his lap.

I stop beside his chair.

Garrett watches me for a moment. “Do you want to sit?”

I nod.

He pushes back from the desk, giving me room to choose. I could sit on the arm of the chair. I could sit on the rug. I could leave again if I needed to. The options press at me until the simplest one becomes the only one I can bear.

I climb into his lap.

Garrett adjusts around me without making a sound, one arm coming behind my back while the other shifts the chair so my knee doesn't hit the desk. His body is firm beneath mine. When I press my face into his neck and breathe him in, the warmth under my skin answers hard enough that I make a small sound against his shirt.

His hand stills. “Color.”

I tap once against his chest.

“Green,” he says. His arm tightens, and he lets me hide my face where the scent is strongest.

He doesn't ask me to name the sound. He doesn't make it bigger by reacting too much. He holds me while I breathe againsthis neck and try to settle the restless thing moving under my skin.

“You’re warm,” Garrett says after a while. His hand moves once over my back, slow enough that I can follow it. “Uncomfortable?”

I nod against him.

“Is it heat?”

The word makes my body tense. I shake my head, then stop, because no isn't right either. It is near heat. It is the edge of something my body recognizes before my mind can make a safe place for it.