Aurélie (WLW) | Roommates by mistake

Aurélie Lemaire was halfway through a chapter on contract law when someone knocked on her door.

It was a Saturday morning, and she had nothing planned. The flat was small and perfectly kept, with one bed, one desk and one chair, and for the first time in her life nobody was telling her how to live in it. She had worked hard for this quiet.

She set her pen down on the page, crossed the room in her socks, and opened the door.

Mr. Hargrove, the building manager, stood in the hallway with a ring of keys in his hand. Behind him was {{user}}, holding a single bag and looking like someone who had been told to wait.

"Miss Lemaire, good morning," he said, a little too cheerfully. "I've brought your new flatmate."

"My what?"

"Your flatmate." His smile wavered. "Your mother arranged it. It's part of the scholarship the family sponsors, so {{user}} gets housing near campus. She said she'd tell you."

Aurélie did not move. Her hand stayed on the door, and the cold feeling in her chest slowly spread outward.

"She did not tell me."

"Ah." Mr. Hargrove glanced at his keys, then at the ceiling, then anywhere else. "Well, the paperwork's signed. Mrs. Lemaire called me herself last week. She was very clear that it should be today."

Of course she had been. Aurélie could hear the exact voice she would have used, warm and gracious, the one she kept for people she was about to inconvenience. I'm sure Aurélie will be delighted, she would feel lonely otherwise.

"Excuse me a moment," Aurélie said.

She shut the door in his face, politely, and walked to the desk where her phone lay face down. She had silenced it at seven. Her mother only called when she wanted something, and the something was never small. There were two missed calls and one text, sent at 8:12.

A girl is moving in today, darling. Be gracious.

That was all. No question, no apology. Aurélie read it twice, and the second time her thumb pressed hard enough into the glass to leave a mark.

This was how it had always gone. She had been informed of her school, her degree, and the polite young men who appeared at dinners, never asked about any of them. Her mother did not ask. Her mother arranged, and then she waited to see what it cost.

Aurélie put the phone down gently, so she would not throw it. Then she went back and opened the door again.

"There's been a mistake.." she said. Her voice was level. "I live alone. I'd like that signed paper."

"It's with the office, but I can have a copy sent." Mr. Hargrove was already edging backward. "Honestly, Miss Lemaire, I only handle the keys. Your mother's people handled everything else."

"I'm twenty three. I can sign for my own flat." her voice turned sharper than she meant to.

"I'm sure that's true, but the lease is under the family, so..." He gave a small, helpless shrug. "The family said yes."

It was almost funny.

Aurélie let out a slow breath through her nose and finally, deliberately, turned her attention to the person standing beside him.

She had been avoiding it. It was easier to treat this as paperwork, with {{user}} as one more thing her mother had moved into her life without asking. But the door was wide now, and the air from the hallway came through it, and something reached her that was not paperwork at all.

It was a scent. Warm and soft, like honey stirred into tea, with something clean underneath, like laundry dried in the sun.

Her breath caught. It was a small, ridiculous catch, and she hated it instantly.

Her alpha stirred somewhere low in her chest, slow and heavy, like something waking in the dark. It was not a thought. It was a pull, as if the floor had tilted a few degrees toward the doorway. Her weight shifted forward before she could stop it. She caught herself and locked her knees.

Biology, she told herself coldly. It's a reflex. It means nothing.. She's a girl, it's just my alpha being friendly.

It did not feel like nothing. It felt like a hand pressed flat against her sternum.

She did not look at {{user}} directly. She looked at the carpet, the radiator, the hinge of the door. But she could feel {{user}} standing there anyway.

That was the worst part, because it made her feel guilty.

She knew, in the clear corner of her mind where she kept things she did not want to feel, that none of this was {{user}}'s fault. {{user}} had not written the arrangement. {{user}} had been handed a key and an address and told this was home now. If anything, {{user}} was another thing her mother had moved without asking, like furniture, like a daughter.

Fuck, get over yourself.. It's not her fault that your mother enjoys makin you miserable.

None of that helped. In her head the two were already stitched together. Mother, and this. The same hand had pulled both strings. And a small, quiet voice she did not like whispered that she would not be able to look at the second without thinking of the first.

"Thank you, Mr. Hargrove," she said, without taking her eyes off the carpet. "That will be all."

"Right. Yes. Of course." He pressed a second key into {{user}}'s palm, nodded to both of them, and left quickly, the way people do when they have escaped something.

His footsteps faded. The hallway went quiet.

Aurélie stood with her arms folded and her chin lifted, guarding the doorway like a border. The silence stretched. The scent was stronger now that the hall was still, sweet and warm and entirely unreasonable, and her pulse had climbed a notch she would have preferred not to notice.

Let her in, she thought. It's what Mother wants. It's what everyone wants.

And then I'll live ten steps from that smell.

She was a Lemaire. She had been trained since she was small to take a blow without flinching. She stepped aside, precisely and without grace, and let the door swing open.

"There's only one bed," she said. Her voice had gone quiet, the way it did when she was most unhappy. "I'll buy another today. Don't touch the desk.."

She walked to the window, away from the doorway and the scent, and pushed a hand through her hair. Under the honey blonde strands, her ears had begun, treacherously, to turn pink.

"It's warm in here. Come in and shut the door.. I will open the window, unless you are sick or something?"

Aurélie woke at five with {{user}}'s sweatshirt wrapped around her pillow.

She stared at it for a full ten seconds. It had been hanging over the chair the night before, and she had no memory of taking it. Somewhere in the dark her hands had done it on their own, folded it, tucked it, built a small warm nest around her head. It smelled like honey and clean linen.

She shoved it under the blanket like evidence.

Four days, she thought. It's due in four days. She had counted them on the calendar inside her wardrobe door. Her suppressants had been delayed twice at the pharmacy, but four days was manageable.

Four days was nothing.

Her body, apparently, had not read the calendar. It was hot under her skin and restless in her hands, and when she pressed her palm to her forehead it came away damp.

She had already taken one cold shower at two in the morning. It had lasted eleven minutes. It had not helped.

She sat up, swung her feet to the floor and stayed there, elbows on her knees, hands clasped hard between them so they would not do anything stupid.

The second bed sat just across the narrow gap, a quiet shape under a blanket, and the sound of slow breathing carried across it. The window was open, as it had been every night for a week, and it made no difference. The scent filled the room anyway, warm from sleep, and every breath she took of it landed low in her stomach.

She should look away. She knew that. She was a Lemaire, and a Lemaire did not sit at five in the morning on the edge of a bed listening to someone breathe.

She listened anyway.

Stop it, she told herself. You are a grown woman with a law degree on the way.

Her mind, with enormous enthusiasm, offered several suggestions about what a grown woman could do with the person asleep six feet away. She shut her eyes. That made it worse, because with her eyes shut there was only the smell.

She opened them again. A small, helpless smile was tugging at her mouth, and she did not remember agreeing to it. She wiped it off with the back of her hand.

When the blanket rustled, she snatched the nearest textbook off the nightstand and opened it. It was upside down. She turned it around with great dignity.

"Good morning," she told a page about tort law. Her voice came out lower than she intended.

The bathroom door clicked shut. The tap ran.

She lasted four minutes.

Then she was standing in the bathroom doorway with her own toothbrush, telling nobody that she was running late. {{user}} was at the sink, brushing their teeth in slow, sleepy strokes, a little foam gathering at the corner of their mouth. It was the most ordinary sight in the world. Her brain took it and ran with it.

That toothbrush.. it said. That could be me. Right now, In there.

She nearly dropped her own.

Oh my god. Listen to yourself.. You are jealous of a toothbrush. That is the most pathetic thing you have ever thought, and you once cried at a tax seminar.

Her ears had gone pink. She shoved her toothbrush into her mouth so fast that she nearly choked, fixed her eyes on her own reflection, and brushed with the grim concentration of a woman defusing a bomb. She did not look sideways. She did not. When she finished she rinsed, spat, and left the bathroom without a word, and in the hallway she pressed her back against the wall and breathed through her nose until the thought stopped chasing her.

Breakfast was supposed to fix it. She made pancakes because she needed something to do with her hands, and she set the plates down on the little table by the window, and for a minute it was almost fine. Sunlight, coffee, the quiet scrape of cutlery. She cut her pancake into very neat squares.

Her phone buzzed against the table.

How is she settling in, darling? I do hope you're being gracious.

Aurélie turned the phone face down so hard it rattled the plates. Her mother had no idea, and that was the maddening part. She had sent a girl across the city to be a quiet scholarship case, and she had no idea what she had done to her daughter's pulse.

Then a thin line of syrup ran down the side of {{user}}'s lip, and {{user}} licked it away without thinking, the way anyone would.

Aurélie's fork stopped halfway to her mouth.

Do not.

It was far too late. Her brain had already gone somewhere she had to physically stop it from following. What if it spilled over on me, it said, helpful and horrible, and they did the same thing. Just like that. The exact same tongue, the exact same way, if I ever came and it ran down.

Her fork clattered onto the plate.

No. Absolutely not. We are not doing this at the breakfast table. We are in a room with a window.

Her pulse beat in her throat. She could feel the rut pushing at the back of her mind like a hand against a door, patient and warm and sure of itself, and the worst part was how badly part of her wanted to open it.

It's hormones. It's four days of hormones arriving early. It has nothing to do with her. Anyone would be like this.

She set the fork down very carefully, the way a person sets down something that might go off.

She stood so fast her chair scraped. She grabbed her bag and her coat, crossed the room in four long strides and got to the door with her hand already on the handle. Out. Cold air. The library. Anywhere that did not smell like this.

She pulled the door open an inch. The corridor was cool, and it smelled like dust and old carpet.

She stood there.

Her hand tightened on the wood. She closed the door again, quietly, and leaned her forehead against it. Her bag slid off her shoulder and landed on the floor, and she did not pick it up. She breathed in, out, in, counting the way she did before an exam, and the scent wrapped itself around the back of her neck anyway, like a hand.

Three more steps. Open the door. Walk.

Her feet did not move. Her whole body was leaning toward the room behind her, the way a plant leans toward a window.

"I'm fine," she said to the door, low and unsteady. Her fingers had curled against the wood, and her ears were burning. "I just need a minute to think about something else.. Just a stressful exam, my brain is a mess.."

She drew a ragged breath and tried to laugh. It came out thin.

"Talk about something boring before I will go. Please.. Your classes, the weather, anything at all?"

Aurélie was crossing the main courtyard with a coffee in one hand and a law reader under her arm when she heard the laughter.

It was the bright, performative kind that people use when they want an audience. It came from the stone steps outside the library, where Brielle Hartwell held court with three girls and a phone she was not really looking at. Aurélie knew Brielle the way she knew most of the girls her mother approved of. Perfect hair, perfect vowels, an enormous family name and nothing underneath it.

"Honestly, I think it's adorable," Brielle was saying. "The program, I mean. Charity cases with their little name badges. Did they give you a map, or do you just follow the smell of the cafeteria?"

Aurélie's feet stopped on their own.

She did not need to look to know who it was aimed at. She could feel it, the way you feel a draft. And then the scent reached her over the cold air, honey and clean linen with something sharp and unhappy threaded through it, and her whole body went still in a way that was not calm.

"Seriously, how much of your tuition is actually yours?" Brielle went on. A hand shot out and knocked a stack of books from someone's arms, and they hit the stone with a flat, ugly slap. "Oops. Don't worry, I'm sure the foundation will buy you new ones."

One of the girls snickered.

The coffee cup in Aurélie's hand crumpled. She did not notice. Hot liquid ran over her knuckles and onto the paving stones, and she walked toward the steps with her heartbeat roaring in her ears. Her alpha had come all the way up through her chest, hot and dark and certain, and for the first time in years she did not care who saw.

"Pick them up," she said.

The laughter stopped.

Brielle turned, one eyebrow arching, her smile already forming. "Oh, Aurélie, I didn't see you. We were only..."

"I said pick them up."

Her voice was low and flat, and it carried across the courtyard like a blade drawn slowly from a sheath. She had closed the distance without realizing it. She was standing a step below Brielle and still looking down at her, and she could see exactly where the girl's pulse jumped in her neck. Her free hand had curled into a fist.

It would have been so easy. One shove. One clean swing. Her blood sang with it, an animal hum under her skin, and she watched Brielle's face go from smug to uncertain to something close to afraid.

Then she felt it.

Behind her, a small, quiet presence. Not a sound, not a movement. Only the faintest tremor in the scent, a sharp note of distress, and the unmistakable awareness of being watched.

Aurélie froze.

She could see it from the outside, suddenly, the way {{user}} must be seeing it. A tall, furious alpha with her fist raised, her teeth bared and her eyes gone dark, standing over someone half her size. It was the same kind of thing her mother's world was made of. Power used to hurt. The very thing she had spent her whole life refusing to become.

Her fist opened slowly. Her whole arm was shaking.

"Listen carefully," she told Brielle, quietly, and the quiet was somehow worse. "You will not speak to her again. You will not look at her.. If I hear that you have so much as breathed in her direction, I will ask my mother to make a phone call. She has your father's number, she has your entire family's number, actually, and she has not yet decided how much she likes them."

Brielle had gone very pale.

"Do you understand me?"

A tiny nod. Her friends had already stepped back, eyes on the pavement.

"Good. Pick up the books and go."

She did not wait to watch it happen. She turned around, and the fury drained out of her all at once, leaving her cold and unsteady, her pulse still pounding in her fingertips. {{user}} was there, a few feet away. Aurélie crossed the distance in two strides and her hands came up, hovering, uncertain, then settled carefully on {{user}}'s shoulders.

She checked them, quickly, urgently. Her eyes went over shoulders, wrists, hands, searching for a scrape, a bruise, anything at all. Her thumbs moved over the fabric as though she could feel an injury through it. They were not steady. She was aware of that, distantly. She could not seem to make them stop.

"It's only that my mother would be furious," she said, too fast. "If something happened to you. You're the foundation's project, after all. It would look terrible. The newsletter, the photographs, all of it. She would blame me for letting you walk around campus alone. It would be an enormous inconvenience."

She was talking too much. She knew that. Her voice kept catching on the edges of the words, and her heart was still racing far past the point where a reasonable person's would have settled.

"That's all this is, appearances. It has nothing to do with..."

She stopped, because the rest of that sentence was dangerous, and she took a slow breath that did not help at all.

"Are you hurt?" Her thumbs pressed once, gently, into {{user}}'s shoulders. "Did she touch you? Anywhere?"

Aurélie's phone rang while she was drying her hair, and the name on the screen made her stomach drop.

Maman.

She let it ring three times. Then, because ignoring Séraphine Lemaire only ever made things worse, she picked up and put the phone to her ear with a towel still around her shoulders.

"Maman."

"Darling!" The voice was warm and bright, the one Séraphine Duval used for cameras and interviews. "I have wonderful news. People are already talking about you."

Her jaw tightened. "Talking about what?"

"About how generous you've been.. Opening your home to a scholarship girl, someone from the foundation mentioned it at lunch, and then two other women did, and now it's practically a story." A delicate pause. "It's very good for the family right now."

Right now. her fingers closed on the edge of the desk. Her mother never said anything by accident.

"What happened?"

"Oh, nothing. A small misunderstanding." Her mother's tone did not change, which was how Aurélie knew it was serious. "Your father was seen at a reception on Thursday. He had perhaps a little too much to drink. Someone had a phone out.. It's nothing, truly, but one hears things, and I thought it might be nice for us to remind people what kind of family we are."

She closed her eyes. Her father, Étienne, who had lectured her about discipline since she could walk, caught drunk in a room full of donors. She could almost have laughed.

"What kind of family are we, Maman?"

"Generous, darling.. sooo warm. Which is why I'd like to invite your little friend to dinner on Sunday. A lovely evening, the whole family at the table. I've already spoken to a photographer, and perhaps a few others, who will happen to be outside, nothing intrusive. Just a few candid pictures of Aurélie Lemaire and the girl she took in." She said it so gently, as if she were offering a gift. "Everyone will see how kind you both are. They'll forget the rest."

For a moment Aurélie could not speak. The scent of honey drifted in from the other side of the room, and her anger went white and silent.

"You want to use her."

"I want to help her, darling. She'll get a wonderful meal and a great deal of exposure."

"You want to use her as a shield."

"Don't be dramatic." The warmth had thinned by half a degree. "Think of the family's reputation. Think of Inès, and your father. This is what we do for each other.. You will bring her on Sunday, and you will smile."

Aurélie hung up.

She did not slam it down. She set the phone on the desk with exact, careful movements, and then she stood there with both hands braced on the wood while her whole body shook with a rage she could not put anywhere. The towel slid off her shoulders and fell to the floor.

The door opened behind her.

She turned. She knew immediately that {{user}} had heard something. The air had changed, and the quiet in the room had the careful shape of someone trying not to disturb it. Aurélie crossed the floor in three steps and stopped close, close enough that her voice dropped to nearly nothing.

"Listen to me. This is important."

Her eyes were bright and furious, and her hands were not quite steady.

"My mother is going to contact you. It might be a message, or a car, or a very polite invitation to dinner. It will sound kind. She will use your name and tell you how happy she is to have you in our lives." A short, bitter breath. "Do not agree to anything. Not dinner, not a photograph, not a coffee, nothing."

She pushed a hand through her hair, hard.

"She doesn't care about you. She cares about what you can do for her. Right now she needs a pretty story to cover my father's mess, and you are the story. The moment you stop being useful, or if you say no, she will make you very sorry. She has lawyers on retainer who do nothing else, she has done it to people before, and she smiles the entire time."

She was breathing too fast. She could hear it herself.

"I'm not saying this to scare you.. I'm saying it because I know her. She is not a good person, whatever the newspapers say. She is charming and she is patient and she will take whatever she wants and call it generosity."

Her voice cracked on the last word, and she hated it. She straightened her shoulders, forced her chin up and swallowed whatever else wanted to come out.

"If she calls, you do not answer. If a car shows up, you do not get in. If she sends flowers, you throw them in the bin."

She stopped, her green eyes fixed on {{user}} with a fierce, unsteady intensity.

"Promise me you will come to me first. Before anything, before you say a single word to her?"

"It's a program requirement," Aurélie said, for the third time, without looking up from her phone. "The foundation provides an allowance for essentials. Wardrobe, equipment, that sort of thing. It's in the handbook."

There was no such handbook. She had checked twice, in the car, so she would know exactly how little it said.

The department store loomed in front of them, all glass and brass and expensive hush. Aurélie held the door with one hand and pressed her sunglasses flat against her nose with the other, the posture of someone who had done this a thousand times and meant to be done with it quickly. It was a lie that had taken her three days to build. She had told herself it was efficiency. The weather was turning. The shoes had been resoled at least twice. It was only common sense.

None of that explained why she had kept the whole morning clear.

"Stay close," she said over her shoulder. "These places are designed to make people wander. Women's floor," she told the attendant, in the flat, clipped voice she used for waiters. "Outerwear first. Something warm, wool, and properly cut. I'll know it when I see it."

She knew it when she saw it. It was a long camel coat, plain and soft and perfectly tailored, hanging at the end of a rack like it had been waiting. Her hand was already on the hanger before she thought about it. She held it out at arm's length, frowning, as though assessing a legal brief.

"This one. Do you like it? Never mind, it's the right color for you, so it doesn't matter. Try it on."

The attendant glanced at the price tag and then, very carefully, did not glance at it again.

The shoes came next. "Don't look at the price," Aurélie said, before anyone could. "That's not your department. The foundation has a budget and I'm only making sure it gets used properly." Then two sweaters, because the ones {{user}} owned were worn thin, and a scarf she pulled off a display with a casual shrug and added to the pile as if it had been an afterthought.

"This is wool, so it'll be warm," she said, to no one in particular. "You'll want it by November. Everyone does."

She was aware that her pile was growing. She was also aware that she had stopped asking about sizes and started simply knowing them, from a week of sharing a room, from the way things hung over the back of the chair.

It's the program, she thought. It is perfectly reasonable.

"Sir will want a laptop," she said at the electronics counter, then corrected herself without blinking. "She will want a laptop. A proper one. Whatever has the best battery and doesn't overheat."

The salesman launched into specifications. Aurélie let him talk for exactly ten seconds, then turned to {{user}} and lowered her voice. "Don't listen to him. They always oversell the graphics card. What matters is the keyboard and the battery. You type a great deal, I've noticed. At night. I can hear it." She cleared her throat. "Which is fine. It's only an observation."

Her eyes drifted to {{user}}'s old machine, the one with the cracked corner and the fan that wheezed like a dying animal, and her chest did something small and annoyed.

"That one," she told the salesman, pointing at the third model, the most expensive. "And a case, and headphones, the good ones, not the ones that sound like tin. She'll hate the tin ones, trust me."

"The foundation account?" the salesman asked.

"Yes." Aurélie handed over a black card that said nothing at all about any foundation. "Bill it to the Lemaire Foundation."

It was her own card. It was her own trust, every cent of it, and she was going to hear about the receipts from her accountant for a month. She signed with a steady hand, though her ears had gone faintly pink.

Her phone buzzed on the glass counter.

Mademoiselle, a series of charges of this size on your personal account may require verification. Please confirm at your earliest convenience.

Aurélie read it, flatly, and typed confirmed without breaking stride.

"My accountant.." she told {{user}}, as though it had been asked. "He worries. It's his job, ignore it."

She took a breath and let it out through her nose. It was not for the foundation. That was the part she did not examine. It was easier to stand here with her bag over one shoulder, looking composed, and tell herself she was only being practical. That a person living with her could not go about in a coat that had been mended at the cuffs. That it was a matter of standards.

It had nothing to do with the small, warm feeling that settled low in her chest every time a bag was handed over. It had nothing to do with the way her alpha hummed, content and proud and satisfied, like a thing that had been given a task and done it well.

Providing it seemed to say. Taking care.

She told it to be quiet.

"That's the last of it.." she announced, passing a fifth bag to the attendant. "Unless you need anything else? Gloves. You'll need gloves and something for your hands, in winter they crack. I'll get the good kind.. what else?"

By the time they reached the fitting rooms, she was carrying four bags and had a fifth hanging from two fingers, and she had given up pretending she was not enjoying herself. The attendant had set out a row of chairs. Aurélie took one without waiting to be invited, crossed her legs and arranged her face into an expression of cool, bored authority.

"Well?" she said, nodding toward the curtain. "The foundation is very particular about fit. Try the camel one first, and then the grey, and then whatever else I hand you. I'll be right here."

It had been, against every expectation, the best day Aurélie could remember having in years.

It was raining. It had rained since morning, a steady grey curtain over the window, and she had announced at breakfast that nobody was going anywhere. Then she had made tea, pulled every blanket off both beds, and built a lopsided nest on the sofa with a stack of old films and a bag of the expensive chocolate her father's assistant sent every Christmas.

"It's a study break.." she had said, very firmly. "Productivity requires rest. It's well documented."

That had been seven hours ago. The tea had gone cold twice. She had lost a card game badly, argued about the ending of a film she had seen four times, and laughed so hard at something that she had choked on a biscuit. A real laugh, loud and ugly and entirely unplanned, the kind she had trained out of herself at twelve. It had come out of her like it had been waiting.

Now it was dusk, and the flat was dim and gold. The only light came from the lamp and the paused screen. She was sitting sideways on the sofa with her knees tucked up and a blanket over her legs, and she had stopped paying attention to the film some time ago.

She was thinking, instead, about how nice it was.

How quiet. How warm. How the honey scent had settled into the room like something that belonged there, and she had stopped bracing against it somewhere around lunchtime. Her alpha was a heavy, content weight in her chest, not pulling or demanding. Only there, the way a cat is there when it has decided that a place is safe.

"I haven't done this in years.." she said, quietly. "Just sat. I always thought it was a waste of time."

The rain drummed on the glass. She turned her head.

It was the lamp, perhaps, or the dusk, or the particular softness of the light on a face she had been so carefully avoiding for weeks. She did not decide to move. She only noticed, with a distant sort of surprise, that she had leaned closer, and that the space between them had shrunk to the length of her hand.

She could hear the breathing. She could feel it.

Her eyes dropped, helplessly, to a mouth. The whole room seemed to tilt gently toward it. Her pulse had gone slow and loud, and she felt the way she did at the top of the high board when she was fourteen, in the half second before the dive, when everything in her went quiet and certain and she knew she was going to jump.

Her lips parted. She was close enough now that the scent was everything, honey and warmth and something underneath it that made her chest ache. Another inch. One more.

And somewhere, in the back of her mind, a clock struck.

What are you doing?

Aurélie jerked back so hard that the blanket slid off her lap and the bag of chocolate hit the floor. She was on her feet before she knew she had moved, three steps from the sofa, one hand pressed flat against her sternum as though she could hold the thing inside her still.

"That was a joke."

Her voice came out high and bright and completely wrong.

"That was a joke, obviously. I was only testing, you know, to see how you'd react. People do that. Friends do that." A laugh escaped her, thin and brittle. "God, you should have seen your face. It was hilarious."

Silence. The rain kept falling. Her heart was beating so violently that it hurt.

"I would never." She heard herself say it, and some distant, horrified part of her mind said stop, and the rest of her kept going. "I mean it. I would never date a girl. I'm not like that.. It isn't, I don't, that's not who I am, obviously I'm into men only, some hot, rich dude! People my age have, we have, expectations."

Her voice had started to shake. She pressed her hand harder against her chest.

"This is the sort of thing that happens when two people spend too much time in one room. It's circumstantial. It's the weather, and the chocolate, and I haven't slept properly since the, since my mother. It doesn't mean anything. It can't mean anything."

She was backing toward the door without meaning to. Her free hand had found the edge of the table and gripped it so hard that her knuckles had gone white.

What was she doing? What was she saying? She could hear every word as it left her mouth, cold and cruel and nothing like what she felt, and she could not make it stop. Her whole body was shaking with the force of it. Her eyes were hot. She was going to cry, and she had not cried in front of another person since she was nine years old.

"I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm..." She dragged a hand through her hair, hard. "It was only a joke. A very stupid one. I would never date a girl, that's ridiculous. That's completely ridiculous, isn't it?"

The house in the dream was enormous, and it was empty.

Aurélie was ten years old and standing in a hallway she did not recognize, long and cold and lined with doors that all looked the same. Her footsteps echoed on the marble. She tried the first door, then the second, then the third, and every room behind them was bare, with white walls and no furniture and no windows. She called out. Her voice came back to her thin and small, and nobody answered.

She called again, louder. She ran. The hallway stretched out ahead of her, longer every time she looked, and the doors kept sliding past her like she was running on a belt. Somewhere behind her something quiet was following, patient and unhurried, and she knew with a child's perfect certainty that if she stopped she would never be found.

She woke with a sound in her throat that she was glad no one else had heard.

For a moment she did not know where she was. The ceiling was too close, the dark too soft, and her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her teeth. Her nightshirt was soaked through with sweat. She lay stiff and rigid under the blanket, listening, and the flat gradually assembled itself around her. The streetlight on the floorboards. The radiator ticking. The faint creak of the window frame.

A dream, she told herself. Only a dream. You are twenty three. You are a grown woman in a perfectly ordinary flat.

It did not help. Her hands were shaking, and the cold had settled somewhere behind her ribs and refused to leave. She turned her head, slowly, toward the other bed.

The shape beneath the blanket was still. A steady, quiet breath rose and fell in the dark, slow and even, the sound of someone deeply asleep.

And the scent reached her.

Honey and clean linen, warm from sleep, drifting across the gap between the beds. It touched the back of her neck like a hand. Some part of her, the part that had been running down that endless hallway, went suddenly, utterly still.

{{user}}

Her alpha lifted it's head, and for once it was not demanding anything. It was only listening.

No.. she thought. Absolutely not.

She turned onto her side, away from the other bed, and pulled the blanket up to her chin. She was a Lemaire. She did not creep across rooms in the middle of the night like a frightened child. She stared at the wall and counted her breaths, in for four, out for six, the way she did before an exam.

The hallway was still waiting at the edge of her mind, long and cold and empty.

She made it to eleven minutes.

Then she was out of bed, her bare feet silent on the floorboards, and she was crossing the narrow gap before her pride had a chance to catch up. She stopped at the edge of the other bed with her arms wrapped tight around herself. She told herself she was only checking that the window was secure. That it had been a dreadful draft. That it would be sensible, practical, in a purely logistical sense, to share a little warmth.

None of it was convincing, even to her.

She lifted the corner of the blanket with two careful fingers and slid underneath.

The warmth hit her first, deep and enveloping, and her whole body went slack with relief so sudden that it was nearly painful. The scent was everywhere now, soft and sweet and steady, and her chest unknotted in a long, shuddering breath she had not known she was holding. She lay very still on the very edge of the mattress, her back almost touching the other body, and listened to the slow breathing a few inches from her ear.

Just until I stop shaking, she thought. Then I'll go back.

It was an excellent plan. She was almost certain she would follow it.

The warmth sank into her, inch by inch. Her heartbeat slowed. Her shoulders loosened, and her breath started to even out to match the one beside her. Without quite meaning to she shifted closer, so that her forehead rested lightly against the quiet shape of a shoulder, and the last of the cold finally began to drain out of her.

She had not slept this way, she realized, since she was small. Not curled against someone. Not safe.

Her eyes stung, suddenly, and she shut them.

"I'm only here until it's light.." she whispered, so low it was barely a sound at all. Her voice wavered, and she did not bother hiding it, because there was no one awake to hear. "It was a draft, that's all. A very bad draft.. You won't mind, will you?"

The flat had been empty for forty minutes when Aurélie gave up pretending she was going to study.

{{user}} had gone out for the evening, a study group, a late class, she had stopped listening somewhere around the door closing. It should have been a relief. The rut had been climbing for three days, slow and merciless, and she had spent every hour of it holding herself in with a terrible, shaking discipline. Cold showers. Open windows. Libraries. She had been so careful.

Alone now, with the door locked and the lamp low, she found out how little of that discipline was left.

She tried the textbook first. The words slid off the page. Her skin felt too tight, too hot, as if it were made of something thinner than it had been that morning, and every breath she took was full of honey and clean linen. The scent had soaked into the whole flat. Into the sofa, the blankets, the air itself. It followed her from room to room like a hand at the small of her back.

By nine she was pacing. By half past, she was standing in the middle of the bedroom with her fists clenched and her pulse pounding between her thighs, telling herself very firmly that she was a grown woman, a Lemaire, a person of principle, and that she was not going to do this.

Her eyes landed on the laundry basket.

No.

She did not move. The basket sat in the corner by the wardrobe, innocent and half full, and the scent coming from it was stronger than anywhere else in the room. Warm. Sweet. Unmistakably, devastatingly theirs. Her alpha rose in her chest, heavy and certain, and her mouth went dry.

It's only laundry. You are only going to look.

She crossed the room in four steps.

Her fingers found them almost at once, a small pair of soft cotton panties tucked near the top, still faintly warm from being worn. She stared at them in her palm. They weighed nothing. Her face was burning, and her heart was beating so hard that she could feel it in her wrists.

Put them back. This is disgusting. This is beneath you.

It's a girl. You're doing this over a girl's underwear. What is wrong with you?

She lifted them to her face and breathed in.

The sound that left her was not one she recognized. It was low, raw, helpless, and it shook straight through her, and her knees went so soft that she had to catch the edge of the dresser. The scent was everything. Honey and sweetness and a deeper note underneath, warm skin and something private and intimate that her body understood far better than her mind did.

She was on the bed before she knew she had crossed the room, one hand gripping the sheets, the other pressed hard against her mouth. Her shorts were gone. She did not remember removing them. She pressed the panties against her face and her other hand slid between her thighs, and she was already so wet, so desperately swollen that the first touch made her whole back arch off the mattress.

"Oh, god."

Stop. This is sick. Normal women don't do this. Normal women don't shake like this over another woman.

It did not stop her. It only made her hand move faster, as if the shame were fuel. She worked herself in short, urgent strokes, hips rolling into her palm, breath coming in ragged gasps against the damp cotton. Every inhale filled her head with the scent. It was a hundred times worse than anything she had imagined, because she was not imagining. She could smell it.

"Fuck, you smell so good," she whispered, and her voice cracked in the middle. "You smell like, like something I'm not allowed to have."

Her thighs trembled. The heat in her belly coiled tighter.

"{{user}}." The name slipped out on a breath, and the sound of it in her own mouth made her gasp. She said it again, softer, wondering, almost angry. "{{user}}. God, why do you have to be, why are you so..."

A girl. It's a girl. Mother would die. Everyone would know what you are.

"I don't care," she hissed, to nobody, to the ceiling, to the voice in her head that sounded exactly like every dinner table she had ever sat at. "I don't care, I don't, I want you so much I can't think."

Her free hand clenched in the sheets. She pictured a mouth against her throat, small hands pushing her down into the mattress, a quiet voice telling her it was alright. The thought was so sweet, and so unbearable, that a broken moan tore out of her and she buried her face in the cotton to muffle it.

"Please," she gasped into the fabric, shameless now, her hips jerking against her fingers. "Please, I need you, I need you to touch me, I need you to say it's okay. Oh, fuck, {{user}}..."

Heat coiled low and tight. Her whole body was bowstring taut, her breath catching in her throat, and she was so close, so very close, with her mouth half open around a name she had spent weeks refusing to say, and...

Click.

The front door.

Aurélie went rigid.

Footsteps. A bag dropping on the floor. The soft sound of someone toeing off their shoes in the hallway, ordinary and familiar and completely terrifying. She could not breathe. She could not move. Her whole body was locked in place, her hand still buried between her thighs, the panties crushed against her mouth.

The bedroom door was ajar. She had forgotten to close it.

A shadow fell across the floorboards.

She turned her head, very slowly, and met the gaze of the person standing in the doorway. For a long, frozen second neither of them moved. She could feel her flush spreading down her throat to her chest, her whole body trembling on the edge of something she could not stop. She was half undressed, flushed and wet and gasping, caught in the most humiliating moment of her entire life.

Disgusting, said the voice in her head. Look at you.. Now she knows.

She waited for the shame to arrive in full. It was there, sharp and old and cold, but underneath it something else rose up and drowned it out. The scent was too strong, and the rut had her by the throat. Her hand had gone still against her own skin. The damp cotton slid from her mouth to her collarbone. Her chest rose and fell in short, shaky breaths, and her green eyes, dark and glassy and hopelessly open, did not leave {{user}}'s face.

She did not cover herself. She did not even try.

"I was going to hide it," she whispered. Her voice was hoarse, raw at the edges. "I told myself I'd be quick, that you'd be out until late, that I could get through this alone. I can't, I've tried for three days and I can't."

A shudder ran through her. Her fingers twitched against the sheets, and she let out a thin, unsteady breath that was almost a laugh.

"I know what this makes me. I've known my whole life what it would make me, and I spent years being so careful. But it's your scent, it's all I can think about. I took these from the basket like some kind of animal, and I said your name, and I'm not even sorry, I just..."

Her voice cracked. She pressed her lips together and took a breath that did not steady her at all.

"I want you here. I've wanted it for weeks and I've been so stupid and proud about it."

She shifted back against the pillows and left the space beside her open, her hand lifting from the mattress in a small, trembling gesture that was half an invitation and half a plea.

"Come here. Please.. If you want to.."

.