Chapter Seventeen
JASON
Jason lined up the chopping board on the kitchen counter, the knife smooth and familiar in his hand. His body still felt loose from earlier, as if the imprint of Riley’s touch lingered on his skin, soft and sure.
They’d ended up skipping lunch in favor of Riley’s motel room, where their time together had been urgent yet interspersed with soft touches and kisses—a kind of intimacy even more meaningful than the sex had been.
He’d never have guessed at the things Riley was struggling with.
Now, he couldn’t stop thinking about them.
He wanted to hunt down Riley’s parents and shake them, demand to know how they could ever have thrown away the most wonderful man they could hope to have as their son.
For them to make him feel unloved was bad enough.
To make him feel unlovable went so far beyond that, Jason didn’t have words.
You gotta be useful in some way or another. Riley’s words kept echoing around his head as he listened to Dave and Christian chatting quietly out on the back porch.
Jason knew how lucky he’d been to find Matt’s pack. If he hadn’t come to Elk Ridge, if he hadn’t stayed in town long enough for Bryce to find him, he didn’t know where he’d be now.
He was lucky, no question. But maybe he’d been so grateful that he’d thought he had to make himself indispensable.
That’s what Riley had said he’d done—things he wasn’t proud of, just to fit in.
Had Jason been so careful to stay inside the guardrails, to fill the role he thought he had in the pack, that he’d never truly believed what he’d told Riley about belonging to the pack?
Maybe family wasn’t about being needed. Maybe it was about being wanted.
The back door banged open, and Jesse arrived, heading straight for the pantry.
“Cookies are on the bottom shelf,” Jason said, knowing Jesse’s habits, and also knowing that when he discovered they’d been moved, he’d root impatiently through everything in Jason’s nice, orderly pantry until he found them.
“Thanks,” Jesse said through a full mouth, cheeks bulging. He hoisted himself up onto the counter—onto Jason’s nice, clean counter—and kicked his boots against the cupboard. “I’m hoping the fact I’ve barely seen you means you and the travel guy are gettin’ on well.”
Jason couldn’t prevent the enormous, goofy grin that split his face at the thought of Riley. Jesse let out a laugh that sounded like a crow of triumph.
“About damn time,” he said around another mouthful of cookie, as he slid off the counter and headed for the door.
Jason was still smiling as he looked back down at the chopping board. Maybe he should reconsider his pot roast. Today deserved something better.
* * *
Tristan scanned the food on the table—braised short ribs, truffle mashed potatoes, green bean casserole and roasted carrots with maple and bacon glaze—and his eyes opened wide.
“This is awesome, Jason, like Thanksgiving or Christmas or something. What’s the occasion?”
Tristan had never been exactly tactful, but Jason hadn’t expected quite such a pointed question. And he hadn’t even seen the pumpkin and key lime pies yet.
“Just wanted to test-run a few dishes for the diner,” he lied, and concentrated on his plate.
“Anytime you want to test any more, just let me know,” Tristan said, happily if indistinctly through a mouthful of buttermilk biscuit.
“More chewing, less talking.” Bryce shot a disapproving look at Tristan, who rolled his eyes and concentrated on swallowing his mouthful.
Jason had never thought of their pack beta as a surrogate father, not really.
But watching the way Bryce looked out for Tristan, the way Tristan responded to him, there were moments when Jason felt the ache of wanting.
Wanting something like that for himself.
Wanting to have known his own father, even for a little while.
It wasn’t an ever-present feeling, but when it hit, it hit hard.
Jason pushed the thought aside, turning his attention back to the table just in time to catch Christian’s smirk at Bryce.
“Look at you, all fancy manners and shit,” Christian jibed. “Not like anyone here’s going to be impressed.”
“Hate to break it to you, Christian, but his manners aren’t for your benefit,” Bryce said. “It’s so Tristan can go out into the world without seeming as if he was raised by wolves.”
Jason groaned softly at the lousy joke, and Matt closed his eyes as if in pain. He must have had years of this.
Bryce gave them both a long-suffering look before turning back to Christian. “No one with a shred of class is going to want someone who eats their peas off their knife.”
“Just as well Dave’s got low standards, then,” Christian said cheerfully. “Anyway, if you stick them on with honey, they don’t fall off.”
“What’s in this gravy?” Dave asked Jason, thankfully interrupting the playful squabbling that otherwise would have lasted all night. “Your nut roast is always amazing, but this is sublime.”
Christian snorted. He didn’t mean to insult Jason’s cooking. He just found it funny whenever Dave dropped into the vocabulary of the elderly woman who’d raised him.
“Balsamic vinegar, red onion, and vegan red wine, mainly,” Jason said.
“Can I get the recipe later? It’s sublime,” Dave repeated, rocking to one side as Christian elbowed him.
Dave liked to cook—just not anything the pack liked to eat. They’d tried going vegan once, for Dave’s sake, and lasted almost a week before Christian declared he was going full carnivore and slapped half a cow on the grill. Typical Christian.
Typical Dave, too, quietly eating his own meals and never commenting on what anyone else was eating.
When Jason had first joined the pack, Dave had sat down with him and asked whether he’d prefer Dave to continue making his own food, or if that would annoy him more than the extra work of producing a different dish each mealtime. That was Dave, always thoughtful.
If not for Dave’s relationship with Christian, Jason thought he and Dave might have become closer. They were more similar to one another than to anyone else in the pack.
But Dave’s mate was Christian, who… he didn’t scare Jason, precisely, but his wolf was never far from the surface, and he was shorter-tempered than an angry yellowjacket. Jason, whose wolf liked to slumber peacefully most of the time, found him too volatile for comfort.
He glanced around the table at the members of his pack.
He was part of them. He felt it deep inside whenever he was with them.
The laughter, the teasing, and the warmth were real.
But so was the way every conversation that involved him came back to food.
To what he did. He couldn’t stop hearing Riley’s voice, about only being worth what you could offer.
He swallowed around the tightness in his throat.
Maybe there was a good reason they kept circling back to food, like the fact he never started a conversation so they were looking for common ground with him. But his past experience—of being barely tolerated, until he wasn’t any longer—made it hard for him to believe that.
As he watched them, Matt was grinning at Bryce, a smile lighting his face in a way Jason had never seen before Jesse came along. He was happy for Matt and Jesse. Really happy. It just awoke wistful feelings inside him when he saw them together.
At the bottom of the table, Karl’s place was empty. Tristan followed his gaze.
“He never takes a night off,” Tristan remarked. Clearly, with no half-chewed food evident. “Maybe one of us should offer to cover the graveyard shift more often.”
“For Karl to do what, exactly?” Bryce said.
Bryce didn’t mean it unkindly, but it was true Karl only left the ranch if he had an errand to run that couldn’t be avoided.
Dave and Christian often went to one of the bars in town, Tristan hung out with his college friends, and Bryce spent a lot of time in other people’s beds.
Karl, though, was like Jason—when he wasn’t working, he stayed quietly in his bunkhouse or, occasionally, joined the rest of the pack, where he kept his own counsel most of the time.
Jason glanced around once more at the gathered pack.
He was part of the pack. Sort of. He knew how everyone took their coffee, he’d learned which of Jesse’s insults were jokes and which meant Jesse was getting overwhelmed by something.
But when he was just him, when he wasn’t doing something for the pack, what was his place?
You’re pack, Matt had told him early on, more than once, as if realizing that Jason needed to hear it. But it still felt sometimes as if he were on the outside. Maybe it was all in his head, but he couldn’t shake the feeling.
“I, um, I’m going to take tomorrow off.”
Jason might as well have said he was going to turn into a unicorn from the stunned expressions that everyone turned on him. He couldn’t blame them. He’d surprised himself. Hadn’t known he was going to say it until he did.
He licked his lips nervously, waiting for someone to say something. The silence stretched out. Even Tristan had stopped eating.
“Everything okay, Jase?” Bryce asked quietly.
He nodded, denying whatever was filling his chest and making his throat ache. Maybe he needed to know once and for all if he really was only valued for his skill in the kitchen.
“Well, I’m not cooking,” Christian said. “Not unless I’m allowed to barbecue Betsy.”
The table devolved into, basically, a race to declare not it when it came to cooking, with Tristan digging out his phone to look up take-out places, and Dave, ever reasonable, pointing out that he could cook and it wouldn’t kill anyone to go vegan for one meal.
Amid all the noise, Jason was aware of Matt’s eyes on him. When he nervously looked at Matt, wondering if he’d be mad that Jason was taking time out, Matt’s gaze was penetrating. He looked away again without saying anything.
But later, when the meal was over and Tristan and Bryce were clearing away, Matt fell into step with him as he headed across the yard toward his bunkhouse.
“You know you’re more than entitled to time off,” he said. “But I’m wondering if there’s a reason for it.” He glanced sideways, studying Jason, who kept his eyes firmly on the ground in front of him. “If it’s gotten too much, cooking in the diner and up here as well, we can find another solution.”
Jason’s instant reaction was to protest that it wasn’t too much, that he loved it, but a cold, insidious thought was crawling around in the back of his mind. What if he said yes, he wanted to stop? What would that mean for his place here? If he said it, at least he’d know.
But that would be like testing Matt, and that felt all kinds of wrong.
“I just want a little break,” he said eventually.
“Like I said, you’re more than entitled to it.
If you simply want more time to yourself, that’s fine.
But if it’s something more, if you need a break from your job, or even need to switch it up completely, just let me know.
It’s your call, Jason,” Matt said, placing his hand on Jason’s back.
“Though I’d appreciate a bit of warning so the rest of us can master boiling an egg, at least.”
Jason snorted, but the laughter died stillborn. Your call. He should feel reassured. He was reassured. Matt hadn’t given him an ultimatum—if you won’t cook, you’re not part of the pack.
But somehow, he still didn’t quite have his answer. Because maybe the problem wasn’t what Matt had said. Maybe it was what Jason still believed, that being useful was what earned him a place. That if he wasn’t the one keeping everyone fed, he wasn’t… anything.
“Night, Jason,” Matt said, and turned to make his way toward the barn.
Jason continued down the path to his bunkhouse, swearing he could still feel the warmth of Matt’s hand. He liked that fact.
He just wished it was enough.