Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bo
She’s slipping away from us.
Reese climbs into the back of my truck without a word and wedges herself against the door. Tyler takes the front seat and starts typing before he’s got the belt on. Eli drops into the bed, quiet the way he always is.
In the mirror I watch the rest of them scatter. Gray’s Range Rover goes first with Beckett and Zane in it. Cameron and Jackson take the bikes and are past us inside a hundred yards.
Reese doesn’t lean forward. Doesn’t touch the radio. She looks out the window with the blank face I’ve learned to be afraid of. I know what’s going on in there. I’ve spent three months learning her silences, and this one is loud.
They’re only doing this because they have to.
She’s wrong, and I don’t know how to say so without it sounding like exactly the thing she’s braced for.
The drive home takes twelve minutes. Tyler fills most of them with the soft tap of his keyboard and two calls he doesn’t answer. Eli sits behind us in the truck bed, one hand hooked over the side, staring at nothing I can see. Nobody tries to talk to Reese.
I almost do twice.
Both times I stop myself.
We’ve been talking at her since Kowalski walked into the boathouse. Legal options. Media strategy. Filing deadlines. Claims. Every one of us trying to build a wall around her while she’s standing in the middle wondering when she became another thing we needed to protect.
By the time we pull into the driveway, she’s out before I’ve cut the engine.
Cameron and Jackson are already there. Cameron gets his helmet off and watches the front door close behind her while Jackson kills his bike beside him.
“She’s going to think we did it because we had to,” I say.
Cameron doesn’t look at me. “She already does.”
Tyler gets out with his laptop tucked under his arm and heads inside. Eli follows, leaving the three of us in the driveway.
“You going up?” I ask Cameron.
His jaw works once. “No.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know how to make this better without making it worse.”
That’s more honesty than Cameron usually gives anybody without being cornered into it.
Jackson pulls off his helmet. “She shouldn’t be alone.”
“No,” Cameron says. “But that doesn’t mean she wants one of us in her room.”
Jackson looks toward the house. I know that look. He can feel her through the bond, probably better than I can read her from the outside, and everything in him is telling him to follow.
“Give her a minute,” I tell him.
His eyes cut to mine. “How many?”
I almost smile. “I don’t know, man. I’m making this up too.”
That seems to surprise him.
Maybe it shouldn’t. Somewhere along the way they all decided I’m good at this stuff.
I’m the one who makes food when somebody forgets to eat, remembers how everyone takes their coffee, knows when Zane needs to talk and when Gray needs everybody to leave him the hell alone.
Half the time I’m guessing like everybody else.
I just pay attention to whether the guess worked.
Cameron finally looks at me. “You do.”
“Do what?”
“Know what she needs.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You know better than I do.”
There’s something under that I don’t get a chance to ask about. Cameron turns toward the house, helmet hanging from two fingers, and Jackson follows him inside.
I stay beside the truck for another minute.
Reese doesn’t need somebody with the right answer. She’s had eight men throwing answers at her since the reporter walked into the boathouse.
Maybe she needs somebody who isn’t trying to fix anything.
Inside, everybody scatters the way we do after a bad day.
Gray takes the study and starts making calls.
Tyler sets up at the dining table, with Eli reading over his shoulder while Zane walks the length of the living room with nowhere to put himself.
Beckett is on the phone with Bennett in the kitchen.
Cameron disappears somewhere downstairs.
Jackson lasts about three minutes.
I watch him go up after her and get a closed door for his trouble. He stands in the hall with his hand up to knock, then lowers it and comes back down.
“She okay?” Zane asks.
Jackson gives him a look.
“Right. Stupid question.”
Jackson drops onto the end of the couch and leans forward with his elbows on his knees. His leg starts bouncing almost immediately.
Nobody else goes up.
That’s the part that gets me. Every man in this house wants to. I can see it every time somebody glances toward the stairs. But Gray told her in the boathouse that nothing happens unless she wants it, and apparently we’re all taking that seriously enough to sit down here and hate it.
I give her twenty minutes.
Long enough to breathe, not long enough to get anywhere bad.
Then I go to the kitchen and make sweet tea.
Zane watches me dump sugar into the pitcher. “That’s obscene.”
“You’re from New Jersey. Your opinion doesn’t count.”
“I’m from Pennsylvania.”
“Somehow worse.”
He opens his mouth, thinks better of it and looks toward the stairs instead.
“You going up?”
“Eventually.”
“Tell her I’m not freaking out.”
“You’ve walked about three miles without leaving the living room.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t freaking out. I said tell her.”
“I’ll pass it along.”
Her door’s still shut when I get there. I knock lightly.
“Reese? It’s Bo.”
Nothing.
I wait.
“I’m not here about strategy. I made sweet tea, the real kind, not that powder Zane keeps buying. Thought you might want some.”
The quiet goes on long enough that I’m about to leave it. Then I hear footsteps, and the door opens a few inches.
She looks wrecked. Eyes red, shoulders up around her ears, arms crossed over herself like she’s holding something in place.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.”
“Can I come in?”
She steps back, which I’ll take. Her room smells faintly like honeysuckle beneath the sharper edge of her stress.
I hand her the glass and she takes it without drinking, just holds it because her hands need a job.
“You don’t have to do this,” she says. “Any of you. I know you’re trying to protect the team.”
“Reese—”
“It’s fine. I get it. The legal side, the paperwork, all of it makes sense.” Her voice comes out flat and rehearsed, like she’s been running this since the boathouse. “I just need a minute to get used to it.”
I sit on the edge of the bed and leave room between us. “Can I tell you something?”
She shrugs at the floor, so I keep going.
“I knew you were mine your first week here.”
Her head comes up.
“You remember that first practice? Gray leaning on you to see where you’d crack.” I shake my head. “You matched him. Every dig, every test, straight back at him without raising your voice. Most people fold under Gray inside a week.”
The corner of her mouth moves. “He was such an ass.”
“He was.” I put my elbows on my knees. “But that’s not when I knew. It was after. You found Zane sitting on the ramp on his own, wound up about his grades, and you sat down next to him. Didn’t fix it. Didn’t give him a speech. Just kept him company until he could stand up again.”
She’s watching me now.
“That’s when. Not your scent, not your designation, none of the biology. You’re hard enough to go at Gray and soft enough to sit with Zane on a bad night. You look at people and actually see what’s there.”
The glass turns between her hands.
“I didn’t say anything because it wasn’t the moment. You were still finding your feet, and the last thing you needed was another Alpha showing up with intentions like you were something to be won. So I left it alone.”
I wait until she looks at me.
“But I’ve been waiting. Not for permission and not for a crisis. For you to look at me the way I look at you.”
“Bo.” Her voice catches on my name.
“The reporter, the photos, the filing. None of that is why I want to claim you. That’s just timing, and it’s rotten timing. I want you because of you. And because when you’re in that stern calling our strokes, the whole world lines up for about six minutes.”
She looks down at the tea again.
“I’m not asking you for anything tonight,” I say. “I’m not rushing you or pushing you or filling in a line on Tyler’s form. I just needed you to know this was never strategy for me.”
She sets the glass on the nightstand. Her hands aren’t steady.
“The others,” she starts. “Do they feel the same?”
“Every last one of them. Gray’s too proud to say it out loud.
Tyler could probably turn it into a spreadsheet before he’d find the words.
Cameron acts like wanting anything too much might kill him.
” I pause, thinking about Eli. “And Eli watches you and Jackson like the two of you are the answer to a question he hasn’t figured out how to ask yet. ”
Her eyes come back to mine.
“We’re eight idiots, Reese. None of us has ever been good at sharing anything, and somehow we’re all figuring out we’d rather make room for each other than ask you to choose. It’s a mess, but it’s real.”
“I don’t want to be passed around like a form to be signed.”
“I know.” I put my hand out slowly, giving her all the time in the world to move, and take hers when she lets me.
“So don’t let us do that. Tell us to slow down.
Tell us to back off. Tell us to get out of your room.
Just don’t shut us out because you’ve decided we don’t want you, because that’s the one thing in this house that isn’t true. ”
She doesn’t answer right away. I can feel her pulse going under my thumb.
“I don’t know what I need,” she says. “Everything happened so fast. One minute we’re having the best practice of the season and the next my face is on the internet and everyone’s talking about claiming timelines.”
“And you went missing somewhere in the middle of it.”
She nods, eyes shining.
“Then we start there.” I squeeze her hand. “You’re not a problem to be solved and you’re not a crisis to manage. You’re the woman I’ve been falling for since the week you turned up and refused to be scared of us, and I don’t much care who knows it.”
A tear gets loose and I catch it with my thumb.
“What do you want?” she whispers. “Right now. Not for the team or the paperwork. What do you want?”
I look at her, at all of it tangled up together in those blue-green eyes.
“To hold you. That’s the whole list. No pressure and no expectations, just the two of us being still for a while.”
She’s moving before I finish. She folds into me like the space was cut for her, and I get one hand behind her head and the other around her waist. She’s shaking, small tremors that go all the way through her.
“I’ve got you,” I say into her hair. “I’ve got you, sweetheart. I’m not going anywhere.”
We stay like that a long time. Tyler’s typing and Gray’s phone voice and Zane rattling around the kitchen all go to background noise, and none of it reaches us.
Eventually her breathing evens out and the shaking quits. She pulls back far enough to look at me. She isn’t fixed and she isn’t better, but she’s here with me in a way she wasn’t twenty minutes ago.
“Bo?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For seeing me.”
I press my mouth to her forehead. “Always.”
She leans back into me, and I sit there in the dark holding her and let myself believe we can still come out the other side of this.