Oren doesn't ask—he states it the way he states most things, like the world will rearrange itself around the fact. "I'm heading to the lake—boys are with Sable, you could use the air."
"I don't know how to fish." I say it like a defense, which is embarrassing, because it's a lake, not a tribunal.
"That's the best way to start." He shoulders a canvas bag with two rods poking out the top and walks toward the tree line without checking if I'm following. My feet didn't receive the memo from my dignity, because they're already moving.
The trail takes twenty minutes through birch and pine, the canopy thickening until the wind drops to nothing. The lake appears all at once—still and green, ringed by trees that turn it into something private, a place that exists specifically so the rest of the world can't find you.
Oren sets up two rods on a flat rock near the bank. His hands move through the process with that maddening ease he applies to everything—threading line, checking hooks, adjusting reels—each motion precise enough to make brain surgery look frantic.
"Here." He holds out a rod and I take it like someone who's been handed a weapon she hasn't trained on. "Cast toward that dip in the surface. Rod back over your shoulder, then forward—smooth, not hard."
I bring the rod back and the line goes approximately nowhere useful, landing in a heap three feet from the rock.
"Your wrist is doing too much." He steps behind me, and his hand closes over mine on the grip. His chest presses against my back—warm, solid, close enough that his breath stirs the hair at my temple—and every nerve ending from my scalp to my feet fires at once.
His other hand settles on my elbow, guiding the angle, and my fingers go loose on the rod. "Easy." His voice is low and near my ear and I'm going to drop this fishing rod into the lake and then walk into it myself.
He steps back. I breathe. The line lands somewhere in the water and I'm calling that a victory because I'm still vertical.
We fish in silence. I am catastrophically bad at it—casts landing short, going crooked, once wrapping around a branch behind me in a way that defies the known laws of physics.
Oren doesn't correct me. He fishes his own line with the same patience I've watched him use with his wolves—space without pressure, attention without demand. He lets me be terrible and doesn't try to fix it, and something between my shoulders loosens.
"Why do you come here alone?" The question leaves my mouth during a stretch of silence comfortable enough that it feels safe to fill.
"The lake doesn't ask me to be the Alpha." He reels in slowly, watching the water. "Every other square foot of this territory needs something from me. This one just sits there."
"The workshop is like that." My line drifts, untouched by anything resembling a fish. "Needles and yarn and nobody looking at me like I'm the woman who ran. Just Nell, making things."
He's quiet for a beat. "You've never been just anything." The words are plain and delivered to the water, not to me, which makes them worse.
My throat closes and my hands tighten on the rod and I stare at the lake so hard my vision swims. If I look at him right now something is going to show on my face that I haven't given permission to exist.
The silence stretches. A dragonfly skims the surface near my line and I watch it because watching anything else is a risk I can't take.
Then the rod jerks and my whole body jolts, the line goes taut, something alive thrashing at the other end. I yank back with zero technique and maximum panic.
A fish breaks the surface—small, silver, barely longer than my hand—and I let out a sound that is, objectively, a yelp. Loud enough that a heron launches itself from the far bank in a gray explosion of wings.
Oren laughs. Not the reserved almost-smile I've been studying like a graduate thesis for two years—a real laugh, startled out of him, warm and open, cracking through his composure like sunlight through a door someone forgot to close.
I look at him—wet boots on the rock, rod loose in one hand, laughing at my absurd fish—and something between us roars so loud I'm amazed the heron is the only one who fled. The pull is so physical that my free hand grips the rock just to keep from closing the distance.
He meets my eyes and the laughter fades into something that doesn't have a name but has a temperature—warm, intent, steady enough to pin me where I'm standing. The three feet of air between us hums like a pulled wire.
I look at the fish. It flops against the line, outraged and glistening, and I cling to it like a conversational life raft.
He clears his throat and the charged air between us breaks like a surface tension giving way. "We should probably throw it back."
"Absolutely not." I lift the rod higher, as if the extra inches of elevation make it more impressive. "I caught this. I'm eating this."
"That's going to be about two bites, Nell." The way he says my name—quiet, no weight behind it, just the shape of it in his mouth—does something to my pulse that I'm choosing to ignore.
"Then those will be the best two bites of my life." I am defending this fish like it's my firstborn and I am not sorry about it.
The corner of his mouth twitches—not the full laugh but its ghost, its aftershock—and it's nearly as devastating. He shakes his head and starts packing the tackle, and I hold my ridiculous fish and watch his hands and don't pretend I'm looking at anything else.
The walk back takes twenty minutes that feel like ten. Our shoulders bump on a narrow turn in the path. They bump again where the trail dips between two roots.
The third time, on a stretch of ground wide enough for a truck, I stop pretending it's accidental. The warmth of his arm through his sleeve presses against mine like a sentence neither of us is saying out loud, and his stride stays matched to mine.
The compound appears through the trees—smoke, voices, the distant rhythm of someone chopping wood. The world we left is waiting exactly where we abandoned it, full of every complication I'm supposed to be remembering.
Oren holds the gate. I walk through with my tiny fish and my pulse doing things that would alarm a cardiologist, and as I pass him our eyes catch and hold for one second too long—long enough for everything unsaid between us to crowd into the space like a held breath.
"Nell." His voice stops me two steps past the gate. I turn, and he's standing in the last gold light with the rod over his shoulder, watching me with an expression I could stare at for a very long time.
"Best two bites," he says. And the smile he gives me is so quiet and so real that I carry it all the way back to my cabin like something stolen.