Free Web NovelChapter 8: Coming Apart
James’s POV
Four days.
It had been four days since the lake and James felt like he was slowly losing his grip on something fundamental, like the floor of the person he thought he was had developed a crack and things were falling through it.
He couldn’t sleep. When he did manage it, he’d wake up at three in the morning with her scent still in his nose and the tail end of something vivid behind his eyes, and then he’d be awake for the rest of the night, which was four days of maybe three hours a night and counting.
He wasn’t eating right either. He’d figured that out at yesterday’s dinner when he caught himself moving food around his plate and realized he hadn’t actually tasted any of it. The kitchen had made something good, he could tell by the way the rest of the table was eating, but the smell of it sat wrong and flat and he’d pushed the plate aside after six bites.
He’d switched who brought his meals. He’d done that on day two, sending one of the other omegas instead of her, because having her stand next to him and set a plate in front of him had produced, that first morning, a particular kind of tension that he couldn’t sit through every day without it becoming visible to the wrong people.
It hadn’t helped as much as he’d hoped. Mostly because his brain had immediately noticed her absence and treated it as a problem to be solved.
He had one of her shirts in his desk drawer.
He was aware of how that sounded. He was choosing not to spend time with how that sounded.
The other women in the pack had started to feel like a sensory problem. It had started the morning after the lake, that first breakfast, when Candice had leaned past him to refill the coffee and the usual chemistry he’d always registered around her had just, simply, not been there. Replaced by something closer to aversion. He’d moved his cup and said nothing and she’d read his body language and stepped back, and he’d sat there trying to figure out what was happening and had come up with nothing useful.
By day three it wasn’t just Candice. It was all of them. Their scents, which had never bothered him, had started to grate in a way he couldn’t control. He’d walked through the common area that morning and someone’s perfume had hit him wrong and he’d had to redirect outside to clear his head.
The only thing that touched it was the shirt in his drawer.
He knew what this was. He knew exactly what it was and he didn’t want to look at it directly yet because looking at it directly meant admitting something that was going to significantly complicate his life.
Jack found him in the training yard on day four, standing at the fence line watching the junior warriors run drills he should have been running himself.
"You gonna get in there?" Jack said, stopping beside him.
"Not today."
Jack looked at the side of his face for a moment. James kept his eyes on the yard.
"Okay," Jack said. He didn’t push it. That was the thing about Jack, he picked his moments. They’d been friends long enough that he knew the difference between when James needed to be pushed and when he just needed someone to stand next to him.
They watched the drills in silence for a while.
"You look terrible," Jack said eventually.
"Thanks."
"I mean it. You look like you haven’t slept since Tuesday." A pause. "You haven’t eaten properly either. I noticed."
"I’m fine."
"Yeah, you’re clearly fine." Jack crossed his arms and leaned on the fence post. "Do you want to tell me what’s going on or do you want to keep standing here looking like a man who’s being haunted?"
James didn’t answer.
"Is it the Goldmoon letter? Because I’ve already got Dae and Torres running background on them, it’s handled."
"It’s not the Goldmoon letter."
"Is it the Summit? Because--"
"It’s not the Summit, Jack."
Silence. The junior warriors ran the drill again and one of them made the same transition mistake he’d been making for a week and James catalogued it automatically and said nothing.
"It’s her, isn’t it," Jack said. Not a question. Quiet, careful, like he’d been carrying the guess around for a few days and had just decided to set it down. ƒгeeweɓn૦vel.com
James’s jaw tightened.
"I’m not judging," Jack said. "I’m genuinely not. I’m just saying I’ve known you since we were four years old and I have never seen you look like this over a woman. So whatever it is, it’s not nothing."
"Drop it."
"Dropped." Jack straightened up. "But the offer stands. When you want to talk, I’m here. Okay?"
James looked at him then. Jack looked back, steady and without agenda, the same way he’d always looked, and James felt something in his chest shift slightly.
"Okay," he said. "Thanks."
Jack nodded and walked back toward the pack house, hands in his pockets.
James turned back to the training yard and watched the junior wolf make the transition error for the third time and thought about nothing in particular and everything all at once.
The meeting was supposed to be about pack business.
It mostly was. Territory reports, resource allocation, the maintenance schedule for the boundary fence that was still overdue, a roster conflict in the patrol rotation that Marcus had already half-solved and just needed sign-off on. James moved through it with enough presence to make the right calls, but Jack could see the drag in him, the slight delay between question and answer, the way his eyes went somewhere else between agenda items.
The Goldmoon letter was last on the list.
James picked it up and read through it quickly. Jack had already briefed him on the basics. Large pack, clean council approvals, full documentation. New territory on the undeveloped land to the northeast, big enough that it was clearly a significant operation. Three months to the formal introduction visit, which was standard.
James stared at the Alpha’s name at the bottom of the letter.
"This name," he said. "Alpha Cade Wolfe. Why do I know it?"
"I thought the same thing," Jack said. "I’m still pulling on it. Dae thinks he may have competed in the regional combat rankings about four years back. Placed well."
"That’s not where I know it from." James set the letter down and rubbed his temple. "Pull everything you can on him. Pack history, bloodline, ranking, known alliances. I want to know who we’re dealing with before he shows up on our doorstep."
"Already started." Jack paused. "You think he’s a problem?"
"I think I don’t know enough yet." James looked back at the letter. "Large pack moving onto adjacent land isn’t automatically a problem. But I want to be ready either way."
Jack nodded and made a note.
James looked at the letter for another second, at the name that kept snagging on something in the back of his mind. He’d have gotten there faster if his brain wasn’t currently running at about sixty percent, the other forty percent occupied by a specific dark-haired omega who had no idea she was doing it.
He pushed the letter aside and rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand.
"That it?" he said.
"That’s it." Jack gathered his papers and stood up, then didn’t leave immediately, which James noticed.
"What."
"Nothing." Jack looked at him for a moment, the honest, direct look that had always been one of his more useful qualities. "Just. You know I’m here, right? Whatever it is."
James looked up. Something about the way Jack said it, no angle to it, no agenda, just the plain fact of twenty years of friendship sitting behind the words, landed differently than usual.
"Yeah," James said. "I know. Thanks, man." freewebnovёl.ƈom
Jack nodded and left, pulling the door quietly closed behind him.
James sat alone in his office.
He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out the grey shirt and just sat there holding it, and didn’t try to explain it to himself or make it make sense, because it didn’t make sense and he was tired of trying.
His head was pounding. So was the rest of him, in the specific, relentless way it had been for four days, every time she crossed his mind, which was every few minutes, which meant it was basically constant.
Why wasn’t he just doing something about it? If it were anyone else, he would have handled it by now. He would have made his interest known, she would have said yes because they always said yes, and it would have run its course and been done.
The answer came back the same way it had every time he’d asked himself the question over the past four days. Quiet and certain and without a good solution attached to it.
Because she wasn’t anyone else.
He sat with that for a moment. Then he stood up, pocketed his keys, and decided that a change of scenery was the only tool he had left that he hadn’t tried.
Two towns over there was a club he’d been to a few times. Good music, no wolves, no pack politics. Just people who didn’t know him and didn’t want anything from him except a good night.
Maybe that was what he needed. Something completely different. Something that had nothing to do with grey shirts and crescent moons and the specific warm scent that was currently living in his head rent-free.
He looked at the shirt in his hand. Put it back in the drawer.
He took a shower, got dressed, grabbed his keys, and headed out.
He was already pretty sure it wasn’t going to work.
He went anyway.
