Chapter 32
Vee
I wake up wanting to bake.
Not because my brain is running too fast and I need my hands busy. Or because the anxiety has climbed past manageable and I need something to control. Today I just… want to. Because the morning is slow and golden, the kitchen smells like coffee and I want to make something good.
It takes me a moment to recognize the difference.
I lie there between the warmth of Malcolm on one side and Rhys on the other and let myself feel it—this unfamiliar lightness. The ease of a morning that isn't carrying anything heavier than itself. Eventually I get up and go downstairs to start pulling things out of the pantry.
Finn finds me twenty minutes later, his hair going in four directions, glasses slightly crooked.
"Are you stress-baking?" he asks immediately.
"No."
He looks at me with professional suspicion.
"I just want to bake," I say. "I like baking. Can I like baking without it being a symptom?"
He considers this. "Probably." He reaches past me for the coffee. "What are we making?"
"Banana bread. And maybe cookies if we have enough butter."
"We have enough butter. I bought three pounds at the grocery store because someone kept putting things in the cart and it required strategic restocking."
"That wasn't me."
"I know it wasn't you." He pours his coffee and leans against the counter like he intends to be helpful, which with Finn means he intends to be present and engaged, but only occasionally useful.
Malcolm comes down next, shirtless—what else is new—and already looking at the ingredients on the counter with an expression that means he's about to offer to help.
"You can help if you follow instructions," I say.
"I always follow instructions."
"You don't."
"I follow the spirit of instructions."
"That's not the same thing."
He grins and washes his hands.
Alex comes in while I'm measuring flour, takes one look at the operation, and starts making himself useful without being asked. He’s pulling out the mixing bowls I haven't gotten to yet, checking that we have vanilla, finding the loaf pan in the back of the cabinet where it's been hiding.
I notice he doesn't try to take over. He just fills in the gaps.
I like that about him.
Then Rhys appears in the doorway.
He takes up most of it. He stands there looking at the baking operation. Flour already on the counter, bananas being mashed, Malcolm failing to correctly fold something despite very clear instructions. Then he looks at me with a question in his expression.
"Come help," I say.
He comes in.
The kitchen is not designed for a man of Rhys's dimensions to participate in baking. This becomes apparent almost immediately. He reaches across me for the measuring cups and his elbow catches the flour container sending a small cloud across the counter. He freezes. Looks at the flour. Then at me.
"It's fine," I say.
He reaches for something else to help and bumps the bowl of mashed bananas with his forearm. The bowl slides six inches to the left. He catches it before it goes off the counter entirely.
"Maybe—" Malcolm starts.
"Don't," Rhys says. Without turning around.
I press my lips together very hard.
Finn has given up any pretense of not watching and is observing the whole situation from his stool with the focused attention of someone watching something they expect to get better.
Rhys, undeterred, attempts to measure the baking soda. He's being very careful. Very precise. He measures it out with the concentration of a man defusing something. He tips it into the bowl.
A small cloud of baking soda rises and settles across the front of his shirt. And his chin. And part of one scar.
I laugh.
I can't help it. It comes out full and genuine. I have to put the spoon down and press my hand over my mouth. He turns to look at me with the baking soda still on his face.
He looks down at himself. Back at me.
The corner of his mouth moves.
"Don't," he says.
"I'm not," I say, absolutely laughing.
The corner moves further. And then he's fighting the smile, losing to it, the full version appearing with its crooked warmth, scars pulling at the edges of it. I laugh harder and Finn makes a sound that means he's also laughing. Even Malcolm is grinning openly.
Alex, from the other side of the kitchen, says nothing. But when I look at him his expression is the satisfied one. Like he's glad this is happening.
Rhys reaches up and wipes the baking soda off his chin with a dignity that the situation does not entirely support.
"I'm helping," he says.
"You absolutely are," I say.
He hands me the measuring spoon. Our fingers touch. His thumb traces the back of my hand briefly before he lets go, and the warmth of it moves up my arm and into my chest.
We finish the banana bread. Rhys contributes without further incident, which requires significant spatial awareness from everyone in the kitchen, but we manage.
By the time the loaf goes in the oven we're all slightly flour-dusted and the kitchen smells incredible and the morning has settled, easy and unhurried.
We make cookies too.
The afternoon light comes through the living room windows in long amber slants and I'm sitting in the middle of the couch with my feet tucked under me, watching nothing in particular, thinking nothing specific, just existing in the warmth of it.
Malcolm appears beside me. He doesn't say anything. He just lifts his arm in invitation.
I tuck into his side.
His purr starts up, low and steady.
Rhys comes in a few minutes later and takes the other side.
He's changed his shirt, the flour one is presumably in the laundry.
He sits with the careful deliberateness he always has, making sure I have room, accounting for his size.
His arm goes along the back of the couch behind me and I feel bracketed in warmth.
Finn comes in.
He looks at the couch, then the armchair, then at the couch again.
He grabs the blanket off the armchair and drops it on the floor in front of us, shakes it out, and arranges himself on it with his back against the coffee table and his long legs stretched out.
I look down at him. "Finn. There's a perfectly good armchair right there. There's a bed upstairs."
"I know," he says. He opens his book.
"Then why are you on the floor?"
He glances up at me over his glasses. "I want to be near you lot."
He says it simply, like it's obvious, like the floor in front of the couch is an entirely reasonable place to be. Then he goes back to his book.
I look at Malcolm. He shrugs.
I glance at Rhys. He looks at Finn on the floor with an expression that might be fond, might be exasperated, might be both.
We watch something on the TV that nobody is particularly invested in.
The conversation drifts in and out—Malcolm and Finn resuming some argument from earlier in the day about something neither of them will remember by tomorrow.
Alex appears from the kitchen with sliced banana bread on a plate and sets it on the coffee table.
Rhys eats three pieces with no comment and Finn reaches up from the floor to take two.
At some point I stop watching the television.
I stop thinking too.
Malcolm's purr moves through me. Rhys's warmth is solid against my other side. Finn's presence on the floor is a comfortable weight, his hair visible just below the edge of the cushion.
I close my eyes.
Just for a second.
***
I wake up slowly.
The room is dim. The light has shifted. It’s later afternoon now, edging toward evening.
The television is still on, volume turned low.
Malcolm and Rhys are both asleep, Malcolm's head tipped back, Rhys entirely still in how he sleeps, like he learned not to move in his sleep a long time ago and never unlearned it.
Finn is asleep on the floor, curled on his side with the blanket pulled up, book face-down beside him.
I sit there taking all of them in.
Then I slip out from under the blanket, moving slowly, stepping over Finn's legs, and go to find Alex.
He's on the porch in one of the wooden chairs, facing the woods, forearms resting on his knees. He’s not scanning the surroundings for danger for once. He’s just… present. Like he’s finally allowing himself to inhabit this moment fully.
I take the chair next to him.
The woods are the deep green-gold of late afternoon, light coming through the canopy in broken pieces, something moving in the underbrush far off. It smells like pine and damp earth and the last of the day.
"How are you feeling?" I ask.
He's quiet. Then: "Hopeful."
"Me too," I say.
We sit with that for a while.
"I've been thinking," Alex says eventually. He sounds even but careful underneath, the kind of careful that means he's been sitting with it for a while and is only now deciding to say it. "About how long we waited. How long we watched what was happening to you and didn't move faster."
I look at him.
"You got hurt," he says. "Badly. And I know the reasons we waited… but I'm still having a hard time living with it."
"Alex—"
"You were right there,” he says. "Fifty feet from our door. And we watched your scent suppress and you got quieter and we didn't—" He stops.
"You didn't have a lot of choices," I say.
"Maybe."
"Not maybe. You couldn't have just taken me. Not with everything that could have gone wrong. It would have collapsed everything and I'd have ended up back with Ragon with no way out at all." I hold his gaze. "I know that. I've had time to think about it and I know that."
"I still should have—"
"You got me out," I say simply. "In the end.
You got me out and I'm here and I'm okay.
" I pause. "Better than okay." I let that sit.
"I've only been with you a few weeks but I'm already feeling happier than I have in a really long time.
I don't want you carrying guilt about this.
Not when what you've all given me here has been what it's been.
I don't want the shadow of the bad thing ruining the good thing. "
He looks at me.
I look back.
"I don't blame you," I say. "For any of it. Not even the parts that hurt."
He's quiet for a long time.
The woods do what they do in the late afternoon. The light shifts, a bird calls from deep in the trees, the whole world seems to slow down to the pace of itself.
"I've been thinking about something else too," I say.
"Yeah?"
I take a breath. "I've made a decision."
He turns his head slightly.
"I choose you," I say. "All of you. I've thought about it, really thought about it. Not just the feeling of it but the actual choice. What I want my life to look like, what I want to build." I look at him. "I want to build with this pack. With all of you as my forever pack."
Alex goes very still.
Then a sound starts in his chest.
Low and rumbling and clearly involuntary. His purr, starting up without his permission, and I watch his face go briefly mortified as he registers what's happening.
He clears his throat.
I press my lips together. I don't succeed at keeping the smile off my face.
"Don't," he says.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're smiling at me."
"You started purring."
He clears his throat again. The purr doesn't stop. If anything it deepens slightly, like it does when you try to suppress it and your body overrules you.
I laugh.
He looks at me with the appearance of a man who is both embarrassed and entirely unable to do anything about it.
"I've never—" He pauses. "That's never happened. Not without my consent."
"I know," I say, still smiling.
"It was involuntary."
"I know that too."
He runs a hand through his hair. The purr continues. He seems to have accepted that it's happening and is now simply existing alongside it with as much dignity as the situation allows.
He opens his arms.
I look at him. Cock my head. "I thought you wanted to maintain your distance. Until the flag is resolved."
He holds my gaze.
"Fuck the flag," he says. "I want to hold my omega."
I go to him, crawl into his lap and his arms come around me. The purr vibrates through his chest and mine, deep and warm and completely new. One hand strokes my hair—slow, steady, the same way he does everything, with that methodical care that means everything to me now.
I close my eyes.
"Hopeful," I say.
"Yeah," he says. "Hopeful."
The woods go golden in front of us, the light fades slowly toward dark. Inside the cabin I can hear the sounds of people waking up, Finn's voice, something falling, Malcolm's low curse, the ordinary music of a household coming back to itself.
My pack.
I let myself have it without flinching.
All of it. Every complicated, imperfect, hard-won piece of it.
Mine.