Owned By The Possessive Alpha, Bounded To My Mate novel Chapter 64

Chapter 64

Chapter 64

DENISE

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The third dress shop in two days had a pale grey waiting area and a consultant named Miriam who had the quiet efficiency of someone who had been doing this long enough to read people accurately within the first five minutes.

Rosaline sat in the chair that had become her natural position in these outings-slightly to the left of the main mirror, with a good angle on everything, her tea ordered and delivered before I’d finished introducing myself to Miriam. She had the comfortable authority of a woman who knew exactly what she was there for and required nothing from the environment except that it do its job.

I stood in front of the mirror in something ivory and structured and looked at myself and then at my phone on the small shelf beside the mirror where I’d set it when Miriam handed me the dress.

No new messages.

I picked it up, checked the screen, put it back.

“The neckline is better than yesterday’s,” Rosaline said, from her chair.

“It’s still not right,” I said.

“No,” she agreed. “But we’re getting closer. The problem is the waist seaming-it’s doing something it shouldn’t.”

Miriam, to her credit, did not defend the dress. She looked at the waist seaming and nodded with the honest expression of someone agreeing with an accurate assessment.

I turned slightly in the mirror and looked at the back.

Checked my phone again.

Rosaline made a sound that was not quite a word.

I looked at her in the mirror.

She was looking at me with the expression she used when she had something to say and was deciding how to say it-not sharp, not intrusive, just the warm, considered attention of a woman who paid close attention to things she cared about.

“Young love,” she said, with the particular fondness of someone identifying something they recognized. “Distance is very hard.”

I opened my mouth.

Closed it.

She was already looking back at the dress, reaching for her tea, the comment delivered and completed. She hadn’t asked a question. She had simply named what she thought she was seeing and moved on, with the comfortable certainty of someone who didn’t need confirmation.

I looked back at the mirror.

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Chapter 64

She thought I was checking my phone because I missed him.

I stood in the ivory dressin Miriam’s fitting room and looked at myself and thought about whether that was true.

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By the time we reached the car after the third shop, khad tried on eleven dresses and found zero that were right, and I had checked my phone a number that I was not going to count.

Kieran had texted that morning at seven forty-two: *Good morning. Hope the shopping is better today.”

I had replied: *Optimistic. How are things there?*

He had said: *Complicated. Working through it. And then nothing since.

That was the pattern of the two days. Good morning, good night, the occasional brief exchange that told me he was present and functioning and not available to elaborate. I had not pushed. I had asked once, on the first evening, if everything was alright, and he had said yes, and I had accepted yes because it was the answer he’d given and I had committed to not being the kind of person who kept asking the same question in different shapes until they got the answer they wanted.

In the car home, Rosaline talked about a venue she’d heard had a good indoor garden for winter ceremonies, and I contributed appropriate responses and looked out the window and thought, with the particular clarity of someone who had been doing their honest accounting, about what the past two days had actually felt like.

The answer was uncomfortable.

Not because I was worried in the practical sense-or not only that. It was something more specific, something I had been identifying and then looking away from since approximately the second morning when I’d woken up and checked my phone before I’d fully remembered why I was checking it.

I had been keeping Alyssa Stone at arm’s length in my mind. The name arrived and I redirected, the way you redirected away from something that was trying to become a preoccupation. Each time: “this is a contract. You are getting an education. You are getting stability. You are getting your name on something real. Stay in your lane.*

The redirection was getting less effective.

This was a problem.

Not because I thought Kieran was being dishonest with me. He had been, in every demonstrable way, exactly what he’d said he was-direct, thorough, respectful of the terms as I’d understood them. He had told me, at Seren, that he would be honest with me. He had told me to get my own lawyer. He had told me to take my time.

The problem was not Kieran.

The problem was me, and what I was apparently doing without having signed up for it.

At home, I made tea and sat on the sofa and looked at the penthouse around me.

It was a good space. It had the quality of somewhere that had been put together by someone with taste and no interest in performing it–functional, considered, with the particular warmth of rooms that were actually lived in rather than arranged for effect. I had been here for several weeks and it had stopped feeling unfamiliar, which was its own kind of information.

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Chapter 64

thad started knowing where things were without looking for them.

I had started sleeping without waking up in the first hour, which I hadn’t done in a long time.

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¡ had started, somewhere in the past week, looking forward to the evenings when Kieran came home from the office and we ate in the kitchen and talked about things-his work, my thoughts about the degree programs I’d been researching, the council dynamics he was navigating, the St. Mira’s/updates from Mrs. Adeyemi that I shared without explaining why they mattered to me and which he received without requiring explanation.

I had started looking forward to him.

I put my tea down on the coffee table and sat back and looked at the ceiling

This was not what I had agreed to.

The contract was clear. I had read it twice with Adaeze Obi, who had been thorough about every clause. There was nothing in it about feeling. Nothing about the specific discomfort of checking your phone eleven times during a dress fitting and not being able to name what you were hoping to find there.

had told myself, when I called Kieran’s number the day after the accident-the day I’d stood at the curb watching Dante walk away from a car I was still trapped in-that this was practical. Exit strategy, education, the name that opened doors. Anger at Dante wearing the shape of a plan.

All of that was true.

But it had not stayed only that, and the not-staying was something I needed to look at honestly rather than redirecting around every time it appeared.

picked up my phone.

Kieran’s thread. The sparse two days of it, the good mornings and good nights and complicated, working through it.*

put the phone down.

I was not going to spiral. Spiraling was for people who hadn’t spent years learning to sit with uncomfortable information and wait for more facts before drawing conclusions. I had spent years doing exactly that.

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