23. Daphne Let’s
twenty-three
Daphne: Let's
“What the hell happened to you last night?” Finn groaned, shoving aside several Doppler monitors and tossing items into his kit with a splat. He was wearing a white T-shirt that hung loosely over navy joggers, and a scowl that didn’t relent.
“Mmmh?” his eyes flashed wide as he stepped into me, crowding me against the industrial shelves that lined the stockroom of the birthing center.
I peered up at him through half-lidded irritation, the heat of his chest caging me in.
“Could you take a step back?” I snapped, pressing my open hand flat on his stomach in a clear warning, but it did not work. He didn’t move, just stared into me as if I owed him something.
“Who the hell crawls out of a bathroom window and ghosts their date in front of all their friends?” he asked, every bit of his ego pulsing around us in sharp pastel bursts.
“I was uncomfortable.” I shot him a look, twisting my arm from his grasp.
“So your first instinct was to James Bond yourself out of the bar window rather than, I don’t know, come tell me so we could leave?”
Of course it was.
I did not function logically.
When my nervous system told me to run, I ran. It was as easy as that.
“Yes,” was all I knew how to say.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” I rolled my neck until it popped. “Everything about last night was so goddamn suffocating. The lights. The music. The endless conversation about bikinis and Mexico.”
“Oh shit. Not bikinis. Anything but that,” he groaned, lifting his hands in mock surrender.
But it wasn’t the topic. It was the bodies that wore them. The people who saw their lives as something to be lived instead of survived! I did not know what to do with that. Any of it. Finn might have the luxury of normal cortisol levels, but we were not the same.
Maine was not the same.
In Seattle, I was a competent woman who delivered babies by day and snuggled monsters at night. But here? It felt like someone was shining a light directly into my eyes, reminding me at every turn that I was not enough.
“I could have talked you through it,” he grumbled. “Or we could have done literally anything else. I just wanted…” his shoulders relaxed. “To spend time with you. I didn’t care how.”
Finn’s words were sweet, dripping in a language my body never learned. I knew I differed from the shiny baubles he was used to, but whatever he was searching for, a window, a way out, something to make him feel alive, he would not find it in me.
My window only led to one person.
“Look.” I reached for his arm, sliding my hand up the curl of his biceps. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
“Well, you did, Daphne,” he said with a tight smirk, turning away. “But more than that, you embarrassed yourself.”
Embarrassed myself.
A salty tang hit my tongue at the way he branded me. All for the sake of what… optics?
“Did I?” My grip tightened into a shove. “Because I did not feel humiliated when I left, Finn. I felt relieved. Still, though, you may wish to step back.” I flung a roll of gauze into the kit. “Wouldn’t want my shame rubbing off on you.”
“Too late,” he glared, knocking several items onto the floor.
I eyed his toddler outburst and bolted for the door, wanting nothing more than to get the hell out of this penalty box I had somehow wandered into.
Sure, I’ll admit there had always been a small part of me that wondered if I could survive without Thayor Milo Gavros. I was happy to report that I could not.
And more importantly, I did not want to.
“That’s right, Daphne. Run. It is all you know how to do.”
Fuck this guy. He could shove his lobster-roll-eating, sports-bar-attending, golden-boy soul straight up his perfectly curated ass.
“You know, eventually you’re going to have to ask yourself if all those pretty little walls you throw at people are protecting you or preventing you from becoming the person you so desperately want to be.”
“Yeah?” I paused, scanning every clean line, every polished edge of his face.
“Well, sooner or later, you will have to admit to all these opinions how much you hate your fucking life. How you are just waiting for the right chance to strike a flame and watch it all burn to the ground! Being a midwife won’t redeem you for what happened with Xaden’s sister. ”
Finn stiffened, the gold of his perfection dulling to a sickly, pee-flavored yellow.
“I’m not that match,” I explained, drawing in a single breath. “But I can tell you from experience that you are.”
“Yeah, so,” a familiar voice slid through the crack in the door, and I stilled, “my partner and I are with child, and we’re looking for a midwife with a nice rack and a propensity for scrunching her nose whenever she thinks something is funny.”
“Wait,” I breathed, blinking into the way my blood began to move. Hot at first, then boiling.
Wolfe?
“What’s her name again? Oh, fuck. Danielle? Darcy?” he teased, charming the front desk clerk, who appeared frozen to her notepad. Imagine the devil walking into the Gap, promising the kind of pain that makes your thighs tingle.
“Danny?” he charmed, but she said nothing. He must have broken her in the way he broke everything else, with a smile.
“It’s Daphne,” a second voice corrected, carrying all kinds of rain.
I broke into a shiver. The heat of his tone twisted my insides until I could no longer breathe.
“Oh,” my mouth hung open, and Finn’s eyes relaxed, watching the way I began to puddle around myself. “Thay,” I mouthed, fumbling through the door, almost tripping over my feet when I burst through to the other side.
The crash sent the room into a heavy quiet when I looked up into four irises, all the air leaving my body as I leaped over the counter into Thay’s arms.
“Daphne!” He caught me mid-tremble, a gasp of my hair filling his lungs the second our bodies collided when he lifted me off the ground. I whimpered, wrapping myself around him until every inch of my skin melded into his.
“How are you here?” I asked, but he kept his jaw tight. Thay’s forearms locked, bracing the back of my skull as he buried his face in the crest of my neck and breathed me in.
I could tell by the way his lungs moved that he was not okay. More than that, he was angry. Breaking. A crumbling mess of infrastructure screaming in a landslide. It was a strange heat I knew all too well, and the burn was swallowing him whole.
“I am here,” I murmured, folding tighter into him, but that only made it worse.
“You left me,” he panted, digging his fingers into my spine.
“Daphne. Yes. That’s it.” Wolfe let out a laugh, but it fell short when more footsteps entered the room. The shift in the air told me it was Emma, my fellow intern, and Finn.
Wolfe inhaled slowly, the shine in his eyes turning from humor to threat.
“What the fuck are you looking at?” he all but stepped forward, the weight of him shifting the floorboards below.
Shit. I lifted my head from Thay’s chest and reached for Wolfe’s collar to reel him in.
“Is this why you didn’t text me back?” I asked, loving the way his pulse jumped beneath my fingers.
“Surprise,” he half-smirked, refusing to meet my eyes.
So I made him.
Still wrapped around Thay, I pulled Wolfe’s mouth into mine. It was smoky, drunk, the taste of him hitting something deep I hadn’t let myself touch. Finn was wrong. I wasn’t embarrassed. Between them, I was home.
Wolfe groaned low, the sound hitting behind my knees when his gaze snapped to Finn mid-kiss.
“Wait?” a small, mousy voice broke in. “Which one of them is she with?”
A fair question with no simple answer.
“I think,” Emma attempted to whisper through a giggle. “Both.”
“She is with me,” Thay growled, breaking the embrace with the flat of his palm and pushing Wolfe back. “But sometimes fucks him.”
“HA,” Wolfe smiled against my cheek in a nibble.
“More than sometimes!” I blushed, keeping one arm on each man.
“But keep telling yourself that. Whatever makes you hard, hot stuff.” Wolfe beamed, smacking Thay on the ass.
“To answer your question, mouse,” he arched a brow.
“She’s with both of us, and we’re going to need her for a couple of days.
Family shit is blowing up in Seattle, and Daphne will require time. ”
“What do you mean?” I blinked, my head flooding with rainwater and blood.
Wolfe swallowed, but kept his mouth closed.
“What happened? Nathem?” I panicked, raking at his shirt for answers, but Wolfe only stared directly into Finn’s orbit.
“He’s good.”
“Jessie? Blade?”
I ran through the list, and Wolfe paused, chewing his bottom lip.
“Jessie is fine.”
But not Blade.
“Wolfe?” I shivered, feeling Thay’s grip tighten to steady me. “What happened to Christopher?”
“We need to go,” Thay cut in, already turning for the door. “We’re not doing this here.”
“I did not get your name,” Wolfe said, taking a cigarette out of his pocket and pressing it between his lips. While the center prohibited smoking, Wolfe was only interested in the rules he enforced.
“That is because I did not give it to you,” Finn replied behind me.
He took a drag, glaring through the buzz of nicotine before the flavor of tobacco spiced the air.
“Wolfe,” I tugged on his shoulder, but he remained fixed. “Come on.”
“Did you yell at my girl?” he asked, staring through the smoke.
“Finn doesn’t shout,” Emma snorted, confessing his name for all to hear.
“Oh yes, he does, babe,” Wolfe placed the cigarette into Thay’s mouth. “I heard him.”
“Wolfe?” I winced, unsure what was about to be unleashed. “Please,” but he ignored me.
“Just like you, mouse!”
Emma blushed, the heat of her cheeks making my chest swell. And he smelled it on me. Wolfe turned, catching my wave of jealousy in a flirty kiss before adding, “Play nice, Kitty.”
How was Thay so still in this moment? How did he silence the terror within his bones enough to appear whole, when in reality he was locked in some room, scratching at the walls?
“Oh, and uh, you have a fine-fucking-tastic day, Finn. Do try not to embarrass yourself, or I might just have to embarrass you.”