Get It 25

His door is unlocked. My identity collapsed six hours ago and I’m in a hallway fixating on doorknob mechanics—coping is an art form, and I’m Picasso.

The handle gives and Max is at his desk, ceremony notes spread in front of him. Whatever he reads on my face makes him push the chair back without a word.

“I need to tell you something.” I close the door, arms folded tight because my hands won’t stop shaking and I’d rather look defensive than destroyed. “Several somethings, and none of them will improve your evening.”

“Sit down.” He says it gently, which is worse—gentleness means he’s already bracing for impact.

“I’ll stand—sitting feels permanent and I might lose my nerve.” My voice sounds scraped raw, like someone took steel wool to it and called it therapy.

He waits. He’s good at that—the patience of a future alpha, or a man who’s learned I talk faster when nobody chases.

“My wolf has been suppressed my entire life—not dormant, not late-blooming.” I say it to the doorframe because his eyes are too much right now. “Buried on purpose, since before I understood what was being taken from me.”

His chair creaks—his weight shifting, the quiet recalibration, like he’s absorbing something he didn’t expect tonight.

“My mother did it.” Each word tastes like something toxic I’ve swallowed for thirteen years, finally surfacing. “She locked my wolf away and told me it was the only way to keep people safe—from me.”

“Safe from you how?” Low, steady—the kind of calm that means he’s holding very still on purpose.

“She told me the last time my wolf surfaced, someone died—my father.” My nails dig into my elbows through the fabric. “I was eight, and his blood was on my hands.”

The silence has texture—thick, pressing against my skin from every direction. I count his breaths because mine have quit.

“It’s not real, Max.” My voice cracks clean down the center. “The memory—none of it happened that way.”

“Dad died at the Eastern Ridge with six wolves who bled beside him.” I grip the doorframe to keep standing. “She only needed to rewrite one mind—mine.”

“How did she do that?” Not a question—a demand, and the controlled edge behind each word tells me his hands are fisted at his sides.

“I can’t explain that part, not yet—maybe not ever.” My eyes burn and I press the heels of my palms against them until sparks bloom. “But what she’s done goes deeper than anyone in this pack suspects.”

Max crosses to the window, hands on the sill, shoulders tight. He stays there long enough for the clock to tick through a minute of nothing.

“The ceremony is tomorrow.” He turns and his face is stripped of everything careful—just bone, just certainty. “I’m not choosing Mina.”

My knees nearly buckle—not weakness, but the vertigo of someone handing you the thing you wanted while you’re still mid-fall.

“They’ll tear me apart, Max.” The words tumble unfiltered. “A hidden wolf, a deceived pack, a bond nobody saw coming—”

“Let them try.”

Three words, spoken the way you’d say the sun rises east—like the alternative hasn’t occurred to him. I stare at him across six feet of moonlit carpet, and my ribcage does something it’s never done without guilt riding underneath. It expands.

I don’t remember crossing the room. One second the door is behind me, the next my hands are gripping his jaw and my mouth is on his, and the kiss tastes like salt and wreckage and the freefall of a girl who just discovered the ground she’d been standing on was painted onto air.

His hands close on my waist and he kisses me back with a slowness that answers every frantic signal my body is throwing. I’m shaking and he’s steady, and the gap between us is the whole point.

I fumble his buttons because my fingers haven’t stopped trembling since my mother’s kitchen. He covers my hands, undoes them himself, lets the fabric fall.

My palms find his chest—warm skin, the hard knock of his pulse under my fingers. I stay there, just pressing in, proving that something in my world still has a heartbeat.

He draws the zipper of my hoodie down, watching my face. I shrug it off and his hands find bare skin and the breath I pull is so sharp my ribs protest.

This isn’t the heat—not the wildfire, not the loss of control. This is a girl whose foundation dissolved reaching for the one person who makes the groundlessness survivable, and every place his skin meets mine is a new coordinate on a map I’m drawing from nothing.

His mouth traces my collarbone and I grip his shoulders hard enough to leave marks. Thirteen years of believing my hands were weapons, and his skin under my palms is the first counter-evidence I’ve ever had.

He lifts me onto the bed and I pull him down after me, fingers hooked into his waistband. If I hesitate I’ll think—and thinking is the room my mother still owns.

Clothes come off in fragments—his hands on my jeans, mine shoving his sweats down, the tangle of urgency and tenderness of him brushing hair from my face before pressing forward.

He enters me with an ache that has nothing to do with patience—the pace of someone writing a vow directly into skin. My spine curves toward him and the sound from my throat is something the old version of me would never have released—raw, unguarded, stripped of twenty-one years of performing small.

His hand slides beneath my back, pulling me closer. The angle shifts and my vision blurs—not gold, just wet, just human, my eyes spilling over while my body rises to meet his.

He presses his lips to the wetness on my cheek and keeps moving—steady, devastating. He doesn’t ask if I’m okay, because he knows this is how it has to leave.

Every stroke rewrites something—the lie that my touch means destruction, the cage built around my wanting, the years of rationing myself into the smallest shape a girl can occupy.

His hands on my hips are sure, not careful, and the difference sends me toward an edge I’ve never approached from this direction. The release comes like an exhale held since childhood—long, shuddering, total.

My body curls into his and the sound from my chest is half sob, half the noise freedom makes when it’s too new to tell apart from its opposite. He follows with his mouth against my hair, a low groan I feel through my collarbone.

We lie in sheets that smell like cedar and salt. His fingers draw a slow line from my shoulder to my wrist—no pattern, just contact, and I let him, because the girl who would have flinched doesn’t exist anymore.

“I don’t know who I am without the guilt.” I whisper it into the hollow of his throat. “Every choice I’ve ever made, every wall—all of it sitting on something that wasn’t real.”

His arm tightens around me. His mouth presses against my hair, long and unhurried—a promise that doesn’t need language.

I close my eyes and his heartbeat counts time against my cheek. When I open them, grey light presses through the curtains, and the ceremony I was never supposed to survive is tonight.