(Third Person — Lucian)
The locker room had mostly cleared out by the time Knox caught up with Max near the exit, towel slung around his neck, grinning like he’d been waiting all practice to say whatever was about to come out of his mouth.
"We should celebrate," Knox said. "You know. Welcome-to-the-team thing. There’s a club a few blocks from campus, decent crowd, cheap drinks before ten. I’ll grab a few of the guys, make it official."
"I don’t know." Max hesitated, glancing toward Lucian’s locker without quite meaning to. "I’ve never really — I’m not great at that kind of thing."
"That’s exactly why you need it." Knox clapped him on the shoulder. "Tonight. Nine o’clock. I’ll text you the address."
Lucian, three lockers down, hadn’t said a word, hadn’t so much as looked up from the laces he was working loose — but he’d heard every syllable of it, and something in his jaw had gone tight enough to ache.
"You don’t need to do that," he said finally, flat, not looking over. "He doesn’t need a welcoming party. He’s fine."
"It’s not about need, Cap." Knox didn’t miss a beat. "It’s about fun. You remember fun, right? Heard it used to be a thing you did."
A couple of guys near the door laughed. Lucian didn’t.
"Nobody asked you to plan anything for him."
"Nobody had to ask." Knox shrugged, unbothered, tossing his towel into his bag. "That’s kind of the whole point of doing something nice, isn’t it? You don’t wait for a formal invitation to be decent to people."
"I’m decent to him."
"Sure you are." Knox’s grin didn’t waver, but something in his eyes sharpened slightly, like he was enjoying pushing at something he’d only half-understood until just now. "Real decent. Benching him, growling at anyone who looks at him wrong, refusing to let him buy his own lunch. Very brotherly. Very normal."
"Drop it, Ashford."
"Dropping it." Knox held both hands up, though the grin stayed firmly in place. "I’m just saying. If you wanted to come tonight, you could. Nobody’s stopping you."
"Max doesn’t have to go if he doesn’t want to," Lucian said instead, and it came out sharper than he’d meant it to, sharp enough that Max actually turned to look at him properly.
"I want to go," Max said, quiet but certain.
Lucian didn’t answer that. He just zipped his bag closed, harder than the zipper required, and walked out without another word, leaving Knox and Max to finish making plans without him.
That evening, Lucian stood on the balcony off his room, arms braced against the railing, watching the driveway below without admitting to himself that was what he was doing.
Max came out the front door a little after eight-thirty, hair styled differently than usual, wearing something that actually fit the occasion this time instead of the church-boy stiffness from that first disastrous night. He looked up, spotted Lucian on the balcony, and hesitated at the bottom of the steps.
"You could come, you know."
"I’m not going."
"It might be fun." Max shifted his weight, a faint, hopeful note creeping into his voice that Lucian made himself ignore. "Knox said he’d get a few of the guys. It wouldn’t be weird if you showed up."
"It’s not my party." Lucian kept his eyes on the driveway, not on Max’s face, because looking at Max’s face right now felt like a mistake he didn’t have the energy to correct. "I’m not going."
Max held the silence a beat longer, like he was waiting for the answer to change on its own. It didn’t.
Eventually he just nodded, said something Lucian didn’t quite catch over the sound of a car pulling around from the garage — Knox’s car, apparently, since Max climbed into the passenger seat a moment later — and then the car pulled out through the gates, taillights fading into the dark street beyond.
Lucian stayed on the balcony a long time after that.
Good, he told himself, the word landing hollow even in his own head. Good. He’s settled. He’s got friends. Nobody’s going to expect me to babysit him through every single thing anymore.
He almost believed it. He’d almost believed a lot of things lately that hadn’t survived long past the believing.
The thought sat fine for about ten seconds before another one crowded in behind it, unwelcome and immediate — some other Alpha at that club, some stranger with no idea what Max actually was, no idea how little he could actually defend himself if it came down to it. Max, three drinks in, laughing at something, not paying attention to the wrong hand landing on his shoulder.
Lucian’s jaw tightened.
Not my business, he told himself, firmer this time. He volunteered. He wanted to go. If he can’t handle himself out there, that’s exactly the lesson he needs to learn.
He believed that for almost as long as the first thought had lasted.
He pushed off the railing, went back inside, and stood in front of his closet for a full minute without actually deciding to get dressed, telling himself the whole time that he wasn’t deciding anything at all — that this was simply what a Tuesday night looked like, that he’d been meaning to go out for weeks, that none of it had anything to do with a club three blocks from campus or a laugh he already knew too well.
He went back inside, showered, dressed in the kind of clothes he hadn’t bothered pulling on in weeks, and told himself, all the way down the stairs and out to his own car, that this had nothing to do with anything except the fact that he, too, occasionally wanted to go out, and tonight happened to be one of those nights.
He didn’t examine that explanation too closely. Examining it felt like it might not survive the scrutiny.
The club he picked was one he hadn’t been to in months — a place a few of his old teammates still frequented, loud enough to drown out thought, dark enough that nobody bothered him about anything as long as he kept to himself near the bar.
The bouncer at the door recognized him, nodded him through without checking ID, and Lucian paid the cover anyway out of habit, some old, stubborn insistence on not taking things he hadn’t earned.
He pushed through the door into bass he could feel in his sternum, and made his way toward the far end of the room out of sheer habit, already scanning for a quiet corner to drink through the next hour before he could reasonably call the night a loss and go home.
He was three steps past the entrance when he heard it — a familiar laugh, bright and easy, cutting through the noise from somewhere near the center of the floor.
Lucian stopped walking.
A bartender leaned across the counter nearest him, calling out over the music. "Same as always, Cross?"
Lucian didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure he’d heard the question at all.
He knew that laugh. He’d been hearing it through a paper-thin wall for weeks now, muffled and half-asleep, and there was no mistaking it even buried under bad music and a hundred other voices.
He turned, slow, already knowing what he was going to find before his eyes actually landed on it — Max, near the bar, mid-laugh at something Knox had said, looking more at ease in a crowded room than Lucian had ever once seen him look.
The same club. The exact same club, out of every place in the city Knox could have picked.
The odds of it needled at him — small, absurd, and yet his feet hadn’t moved to test them.
Lucian’s hand tightened around nothing at all, jaw setting hard, some low, unfamiliar thing coiling tight in his chest that he didn’t have a name for and wasn’t at all sure he wanted one for.
He should turn around. He should leave, right now, before Max noticed him standing there, before he had to explain what he was doing in a club he supposedly hadn’t planned around anyone at all.
He didn’t turn around.
He stood there instead, half-hidden in the crowd near the entrance, watching Max laugh at something else Knox said, watching some stranger’s hand brush too casually against Max’s shoulder in passing, watching every small, ordinary thing happen in a room he had absolutely no business still standing in.
Max looked different tonight, and Lucian hated how long it took him to place what it was. Not the clothes, not the styled hair. It was the ease of him — shoulders loose, head tipped back mid-laugh, no trace of the careful, braced-for-impact posture he wore almost everywhere else. Whatever this room was giving him, Lucian hadn’t managed to give it to him once in five weeks of living under the same roof.
That thought landed somewhere it had no business landing, and Lucian pushed it down hard, reaching for the drink the bartender had set in front of him without remembering ordering it.
Then, across the floor, through the shifting bodies and the flashing lights, Max’s eyes lifted — scanning the crowd out of habit, nothing more — and landed directly on him.
Max froze mid-laugh, drink halfway to his mouth, staring straight at Lucian like he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.
Lucian didn’t move either. For one long, suspended second, neither of them did — the whole club still spinning and flashing around two people who had both, apparently, run out of anywhere else to look.