Get It 8

I wake up wrong.

The sheets are soaked through, twisted around my legs, and my skin is so hot I check for fever before my brain catches up. Two a.m., the house silent—Mom and Richard at the summit dinner’s afterparty, gone until morning—and every nerve ending I own is screaming.

I press my face into the pillow and try to breathe, but the air tastes like him. Not literally—he’s behind two doors and twelve feet of drywall—but my lungs keep pulling for something warm and cedar-dark that isn’t oxygen.

This isn’t a crush. This isn’t proximity. This is my wolf clawing through every wall I’ve ever built, and the word for it is one I’ve pretended my whole life doesn’t apply to me.

Heat. Wolves go into heat, and I don’t have a wolf—that’s the story, the lie, the load-bearing wall of every day I’ve survived in this pack. My body is dismantling it without consulting me, and the irony of being betrayed by my own biology is not lost on me.

I roll onto my back and the cotton drags across my stomach and I nearly come out of my skin. My thoughts keep cycling to the same reel on loop: Max’s hands on my hips, his voice saying breathe, his body three feet away while steam blurred the glass between us.

I lock my door, drink cold water until my teeth ache, sit on the bathroom floor counting breaths the way Mom taught me—in for four, hold for seven, out for eight. By the fiftieth cycle the counting has stopped working and started sounding like his name.

The knock comes at eleven minutes past three. I know the exact time because I’ve been watching the clock like it owes me money, waiting for this to break the way a fever breaks.

“Kylie.” Max’s voice through the door, low and careful, and my whole body rolls toward the sound like I’ve lost jurisdiction over my own bones. “Open up.”

“I’m fine.” My voice sounds like someone dragged it across a gravel road and then reversed for good measure. “Go back to bed, Max.”

“You’re not fine—I can smell you from the hallway.” A pause, then quieter: “Your scent—just open the door.”

My scent. The glamour strips it, always has, since I was a child. If he can smell me through a closed door, the suppression isn’t cracking—it’s collapsing, and my hands shake so hard the water glass clatters against the nightstand.

“Max, please go away.” My back finds the door and I slide down it, pressing my weight against the wood like physics can do what willpower no longer manages. “I’m serious—I don’t need you here.”

Unfortunately, I need him here so badly my bones are vibrating with it, which is exactly why he has to leave.

“You’re in heat.” He says it plainly, no shock—the way you’d say the stove is on. “I’ve known wolves my entire life. I know what this is.”

He can tell. The secret I’ve buried since I was eight years old is seeping through my pores and he’s reading it like a headline through an inch of wood, and every organ in my chest is rearranging itself around that fact.

“That’s not possible.” My voice splits down the center, and I pull my knees to my chest because I’m shaking too hard to hold myself any other way. “I don’t—I’m not—”

“Your wolf is surfacing—late bloomers aren’t uncommon.” His tone is steady, clinical, and it nearly undoes me because he’s not asking the right questions—he thinks this is a first emergence, not a prison break. “I’m not leaving you alone with this.”

“You have to.” My palms press into the floorboards hard enough to ache. “You don’t understand—if you come in here—”

“Then what?” His voice drops, closer—he’s leaning against the other side, I can hear his weight shift, and my whole body orients toward the sound. “Tell me what happens.”

Every lie folds, every wall falls, every year of careful invisibility burns in the space between his body and mine. I open my mouth and what comes out is a sound I’ve never made before—low, involuntary, dragged from somewhere beneath language.

The lock clicks—shared bathroom, connecting doors, I only secured one. He comes through the bathroom entrance and the room contracts to his shoulders in the doorframe, backlit, wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants.

“Don’t.” I hold up one hand from the floor, and even from six feet the pull is so violent my arm trembles with the effort of keeping it raised instead of reaching. “Max, don’t come closer.”

My mother’s voice echoes in my skull—invisible, Kylie, you need to be invisible—but there is nothing invisible about a girl on fire in the dark, and he’s already crossing the room.

He crouches slowly, the way you’d approach something wounded. His eyes move across my face with a focus that strips every layer I’ve hidden behind. “Your skin is burning. Your pupils are blown. You’re shaking.”

“You don’t know what you’re walking into.” My throat works around each word. “I’m not who you think—”

“I think you’re a girl whose wolf just woke up and who’s too stubborn to ask for help.” He’s close enough now that his scent reaches me full-force—cedar, salt, soap—and my vision narrows to him and nothing else.

My eyes burn and my chest is caving under the weight of a truth he’s accidentally circling without knowing he’s near it. Twenty-one years of careful architecture, and I’m watching the wrecking ball swing.

“If you stay, I can’t control what happens.” My voice is thin, fractured, barely qualifying as speech. “I won’t be able to stop.”

“I know.” He reaches me and his hand finds the side of my face—and the contact is a detonation, white-hot, total, my entire body arching toward his palm like it’s the only solid thing left in a world that’s gone liquid.

His thumb traces my cheekbone and I make a sound I didn’t authorize, half gasp, half plea. “I’ve got you.” His forehead drops to mine and we breathe the same stolen air.

His nose runs along my jaw, down my throat, inhaling—learning me, the scent I was never supposed to have. A shudder rolls through him that I feel in his fingertips against my skin. “I’ve got you, Kylie.”

I stop fighting. Not because the heat wins—though it does, brutally—but because his hand is in my hair and his mouth is a breath from mine and for the first time someone is choosing to stay with the version of me I was taught to bury.

He kisses me—or I kiss him, the distinction dies the second our mouths connect—open, desperate, tasting like the end of every careful thing I’ve built. His hands slide to my waist, pulling me flush against him.

His mouth moves down my throat and his hands find the hem of my shirt, pushing it up, fingertips tracing bare skin with a slowness that contradicts every urgent thing his mouth is doing. Memorizing me while everything burns.

My back meets the floor, his weight settles over me, and the last thought I have is that my mother built a cage for this exact moment—and it wasn’t nearly strong enough.