8. Rhys
Rhys
Miles let me get one boot off before he started.
"So," he said, from the depths of his chair by the fire, in the voice he saves for detonations. "The glasshouse."
I got the other boot off. I set the pair of them by the door, straight, heels together, taking my time about it. The longer I took, the more it would cost him to wait, and Miles pays that particular tax worse than any man alive.
"The staging wanted mending," I said.
"The staging." He said it the way a magistrate repeats your alibi back to you. "Hudson. He says the staging wanted mending."
Hudson was at the stove with his sleeves rolled, doing something patient to a pan of onions. He didn't turn round. "Did it?"
"Rotten at the post," I said. "She'd have come down by Friday."
"There," said Hudson. "Staging wanted mending."
"The staging," Miles announced, "could have waited a week.
I had it off Glenys, who had it off the twins, who burst into that glasshouse like the cavalry and found the pair of you stood over one seed tray like it was the last lifeboat off a sinking ship.
" He laced his hands behind his head, immensely comfortable.
"Tell me about the tray, Rhys. Was it a good tray? Did the tray feel the moment too?"
The fire cracked. The onions went on softening. I sat down at the table and looked at my hands, which had been steady on a saw all afternoon and were not entirely steady now.
"Nothing happened," I said.
"I know nothing happened. That's the subject of the meeting."
"There's a meeting?"
"There is now."
That's Miles for you. He clowns right up to the edge of a serious thing, and then he steps over it in the same stride, so you're laughing when it lands and the laughing holds the door open.
He came forward in the chair with his elbows on his knees, and the lamplight caught him, and the play had dropped out of him altogether.
"We should say it out loud," he said. "We've gone round it for two weeks, the three of us, all sideways looks and nobody saying the word.
That's no way to run a thing this size. So I'll start.
" He took a breath. "I want her. Not the way I want most things, easy come and grand and no harm done.
I want her at this table on a Sunday for the rest of my life.
There. One of us has said it. The sky's still up. "
The room was quiet. Hudson took the pan off the heat. He came and sat down at the table with us, wiping his hands on the cloth over his shoulder. He set his forearms on the wood like a man settling in to mend a net.
"And me," he said. Plain as that. "Since we're saying it."
Then the two of them looked at me, and waited.
Here is the thing about my chest. There's a word been living in it since I was fifteen years old.
It has never once made it as far as my mouth.
I have carried it up that hill and down again ten thousand times.
I have carried it through her leaving and her ten years gone and her coming home thin and grey and braver than the whole harbour put together.
That afternoon it had got as far as her name, in a glasshouse full of gold light.
Then two children came through the door at full gallop, and I had been glad.
That's the shameful truth of it. Glad, and sick with the gladness, because the word had been about to jump and I still don't know what I'd have done if it had.
"You don't have to," Miles said, quietly, watching me. "We know."
"You've always known."
"Since school," said Hudson. "You used to mend her bike."
"Her bike was always broken."
"Her bike was always broken," Hudson agreed, "because Miles kept loosening the chain so she'd bring it to you."
I stared at him. Then at Miles, who had arranged his face into the expression of a man being read a citation for bravery.
"You never told me that."
"You never asked. Fourteen-year-old Rhys needed help, and I was a strategist." He spread his hands. "I'd do it again. I'd do it tomorrow. Sadly the woman no longer has a bike, so we're going to need a better plan, which brings me to the meeting."
And then, between the three of us, with the onions going cold and the fire burning down, we had it out.
The whole of it. Not whether. Whether had been settled, I think, twenty years ago, in the slow way the big tides settle things.
We were just the last three men on the coast to be told.
How. That was the meeting. How three men love one woman without it curdling, and how they do it when the woman is Freya Bevan, who flinches at a gift of fish.
Miles talked the most, because he always does, and because under the noise of him he thinks about people harder than anyone I know. Hudson said the least and settled the most. I'll set down the shape of what we landed on, because I want it in writing somewhere, even if the somewhere is only me.
No competing. That was first, and it was Hudson who put it on the table.
"The minute it's a race," he said, "she's the prize.
She's nobody's prize. The whole world's been keeping score on her since she left, covers a night, stars, whatever they count in that city.
She comes home and finds three men keeping score on her heart, she'll be on the next bus, and she'd be right. "
It wasn't as if we hadn't been tried. An unmated pack in an omega haven gets noticed the way an empty mooring gets noticed.
The guesthouse alone had sent three lodgers down to the harbour over the years on errands that fooled nobody.
Lovely people, every one. There was the schoolteacher who laughed at all of Miles's stories and made Hudson three jumpers.
The spring she left, the whole town mourned harder than we did.
That told its own tale. There was the quiet lad who crewed with us a season and fitted everywhere except the one place it counts.
Good omegas, kind ones, and not one of them ever made the cottage feel less like a house with a room missing.
You can't explain that to a town. You can barely explain it to yourself.
The nose knows what the nose knows, my gran used to say.
Ours had been waiting, all three of us, on a scent that had got on a bus at twenty and taken itself away up the country.
"Remember the schoolteacher," Miles said, as if he'd been walking the same row of graves. "Lovely woman. I think of her every winter." He plucked at his jumper. "Mostly because I'm wearing her."
"You're not helping the meeting," said Hudson.
"I'm establishing precedent. The precedent is that we're not amateurs at not falling in love.
We've not fallen in love with some of the finest omegas on this coast. We are, in fact, the most experienced men in the county at this one not being it.
" He pointed at the fire, at the room, at all of it. "And this one's it. So…"
So not three men courting. A pack, being what a pack is supposed to be. The thing we'd been for her since school anyway, before any of us had a word for it. Hers to come into as far as she likes, one of us, two, all three, none, and every one of those an answer we'd take with our hats off.
Her pace. That was the second thing, and we'd half-agreed it the first night and meant it loosely, the way you mean things before they cost anything.
We meant it properly now. No declarations.
No standing under her window. The town did the courting this town does, a mended door, the best of the catch, and even that had nearly sent her running.
"She's been ten years somewhere that nothing was free," Miles said, and for once he wasn't performing anything.
"Every kind thing we do, some part of her is waiting for the bill.
So we don't ever bring one. However long that takes.
We're fishermen, for God's sake. We know how to wait for a tide. "
Then Miles, being Miles, wanted to talk about courting proper, by which he meant the old shapes of it, the things this coast has always done.
"Because there are rules," he said, counting them off his fingers like a man who'd been revising.
"Time-honoured. A pack courts an omega with provision.
Food off your own boat. Wood off your own saw.
You show her the living she'd share, not the men she'd put up with.
And scent, when she allows it, never before.
And when she nests, if she nests, you offer materials and you wait to be asked in, and being asked into the nest is the whole of the question and the whole of the answer, and any man who sets foot uninvited deserves the sea.
" He sat back. "My gran drilled it into me at the kitchen table.
I was eight. It frightened the life out of me. "
"It's not rules," Hudson said. "It's manners."
"It's both. It's manners with consequences.
" Miles looked at the fire. "Point being.
Provision we can do. We've been doing it a fortnight without admitting it.
Fish on her step. A door that swings. That's courting in this town whether we put the word on it or not, and the town's been doing it alongside us, which is handy cover. "
"It's not cover," I said. "It's the town."
"It can be two things."
Hudson turned his cloth over, thinking. "The nesting's the line to mind," he said at last. "All of it's the line to mind, but that most. The flat above the café's a bare little place.
Come a cold snap, an omega in a bare flat starts wanting soft things round her whether she's ready to know it or not, that's only biology keeping her warm.
Things will find their way up there. Blankets.
Cushions. They'll need to come from nowhere, same as the fish.
The day a single one of them comes with a name on it, it stops being shelter and starts being a question, and she's not ready to be asked anything. " He looked round the table. "Agreed?"
"Agreed," Miles said.
"Agreed," I said. I meant it with everything in me. And I put away, with some effort, the thought of her warm in something I'd provided and never having to know.
"And if the tide doesn't come?" I said, later, when the practical talk had burned down.
It was the coward's question and they both knew it. Miles looked at me a long moment, and what was in his face wasn't pity, which I couldn't have stood. It was the same thing that's been in it since we were boys and he loosened a bike chain for me.
"Then she's still ours," he said. "Not that way.
The way she's always been. She sits at this table on Sundays and you mend what she breaks and Hudson feeds her and I make her laugh, and we go to our graves her men whether she ever calls us that or not.
There's no version where we lose her, Rhys.
There's only versions where we don't crowd her out of her own town.
" He sat back. "But the tide's coming. I stood in that chippy and watched her catch your scent, brother. I've eyes."
I got up and saw to the fire so they couldn't see what my face did about that.
Because here's what nobody tells you about a scent-match, from the inside of one.
You expect it to feel like wanting. It doesn't. Wanting I'd had ten years of, and wanting is loud.
This was quiet, and it was worse. From the first lungful of her in that chippy, browned butter and sea salt under all the vinegar, something in me had simply stopped looking.
Not started. Stopped. The way a compass stops swinging, not because it's found something new but because it's found the thing it was built pointing at.
An alpha spends his whole life being told his scent will answer somebody's someday, and you nod along.
Then it answers. And it's her, and it was always going to be her, and you understand that the ten years weren't waiting at all. They were just the needle, holding.
Behind me, mercifully, the meeting moved to logistics, which with Miles means catering.
Hudson went back to his onions. There was a discussion about whether the supper Freya had carried down constituted a debt we now owed back.
Whether repaying it would start what Hudson called a kindness war and Miles called mutually assured dinners.
Whether that would actually be the worst thing.
The stew went round. The fire came up. The cottage did the thing it does of an evening, gathering us in, three chairs and the fourth one we have never once discussed and have never once moved.
Later, when Miles had gone up and Hudson was banking the stove, I sat on at the table with a bit of work I'd been carrying about in my coat for a week.
Applewood, an offcut from a job, about a hand long.
I'd had no plan for it when I picked it up.
That's what I'd told myself, anyway, and the applewood and I both knew better.
In the chippy that first day, and again at the glasshouse, I'd seen her knife roll.
Beautiful knives, kept the way you keep tools you live by.
And the small one, the paring knife, the one a cook's hand goes to a hundred times a day, had a split down the handle.
Glued and re-glued. The sort of mend you make when you can't afford the proper one, and then can't stop making because the thing is yours.
Her hands deserved better. Her hands deserved everything, but a handle was what I knew how to give.
Hudson paused behind me on his way to the stairs. He looked at the wood, and the knife-shape starting to come out of it under my thumb. He understood the whole of it at once. He always does.
"Don't tell her it was you," I said.
"Wasn't going to." A hand came down on my shoulder, brief and heavy as a coil of rope. "That's the whole trick of this house."
He went up. I sat with the fire and the applewood and the long patience I've been practising my whole life. A stroke at a time, the wood came toward the shape of something that would sit in her hand every day and never once say my name.
Her pace, however slow, wherever it landed, was something worth waiting for.
I'm a man who caulks hulls for a living. I know exactly how long a thing can take and still come out watertight.