15. The Long Road Home #2
His truck was parked on the far side of town, in the quiet lot past the Wishing Pier, a solid fifteen-minute walk from the meeting hall.
He didn't walk it. He surely sprinted it, threw himself behind the wheel, and raced the length of Honeybell Harbor to find one furious woman on a dark road.
He leans across the bench seat and shoves the passenger door open.
"Get in, Blooming Apricot."
I stand in the road and let the disappointment finish moving through me first, because it has earned its moment.
Once again, the men I am working so hard to pretend I still want are not here. They're back in a sealed room, or a truck cab, debating. Weighing. Running the reasonable numbers on the correct way to approach me.
This man — the one I met the day before yesterday — is here.
Present. Soaked through.
Reaching across a bench seat with the door already open.
Then the rest of it lands a half-second behind.
Blooming Apricot.
The name goes through me and stops in a place it has no business stopping.
Alphas don't hand out nicknames idly. We all know that; it's older than manners.
An Alpha names an Omega when he's decided to put a label on her, to fold her into the small private vocabulary he keeps for the things that are his.
Beckett had a name for me once. I made it a clause in a contract so I'd never have to hear it again.
This one is new.
It has never lived in a vow, or a wound, or a note left folded on an altar. Blooming. Not the sweet, closed bud I was at twenty-four. Something that opened anyway, after, on its own, without waiting for anyone's permission.
I hate that I notice.
"I can walk," I say, which is the single stupidest sentence available to me, and I say it anyway, because five years of never accepting a ride I didn't arrange myself does not switch off because a beautiful man is bleeding through his shirt.
"You can," Sawyer agrees, unbothered. "Eight miles by this road.
Three hours, if your feet hold, which in those shoes they won't. I'll drive it in twenty minutes.
" He doesn't lunge to close the gap. He just holds the door.
"Both are options. Only one of them ends with you home before midnight, and I'd like you off this road before the wrong truck finds you on it. "
He's right, which is infuriating.
He is annoyingly, consistently right, and he never once uses being right as a lever. He sets it on the seat between us and lets me decide whether to pick it up.
"I don't need rescuing," I tell him.
"I know you don't." He says it plainly, a fact he confirmed a while ago. "You've rescued yourself so many times you've forgotten it's allowed to run the other direction. This isn't a rescue, Boss. It's a ride. You're still the one deciding where we go."
"Why you?" It comes out sharper than I mean, an accusation with nowhere to land. "Why is it you’re on this road to begin with. You've known me two days."
Something crosses his face.
Not offense. Closer to sorrow.
"Because I'm the only one who ran," he says. "You get to decide later what that's worth. Tonight it only means the door's open. My legs still work. I'd rather you spend your anger sitting down."
You're still the one deciding.
I have spent an entire evening being decided for — by a government, by a father, by three men who once decided I was survivable to lose — and this near-stranger hands the wheel back to me before I've even climbed in.
I get in and close the door.
The cab smells like him.
Magnolia and cracked black pepper and that low aged-bourbon warmth, sharpened now with clean sweat and the leftover adrenaline of the run. Under my own bruised apricot it braids into something I don't have the composure to examine. I reach for the seatbelt.
"Hold on."
His voice drops.
He isn't looking at me anymore. He's looking past me, into the side mirror, and whatever he finds there pulls a frown down over the whole of his face. He goes very still — the way I imagine he goes still at the precise moment a wedding starts to fail, and he's the only one who knows it yet.
Then he looks at me.
Direct. No performance left in it.
"Do you want them to find you?"
The question is so simple it takes the wind clean out of me.
I make myself think about it, actually think, because he asked, and because a real answer is the only currency that man seems to accept.
I think about the sealed room.
About Cade going gray. About the exact arrangement of guilt and regret on three faces I once knew better than my own — the look of men who finally grasped the size of the thing they broke and still, still, waited to be told what to do about it.
I think about how it would feel, right now, to watch Beckett's truck come around that curve. To watch them climb out. To hear the careful, sorry, reasonable words begin.
I think about it long and hard.
"No," I whisper.
The word comes out small.
Weak, even for me, and I hate the sound of it, because I have spent five years making certain my voice never once did that in front of anyone. But it's true, and I'm apparently only telling the truth tonight.
Sawyer nods once, the way he'd confirm a delivery window.
Then he moves fast.
He reaches down and shoves his own seat back on its runners with a hard mechanical clunk, opening the footwell, and points at the dark space beneath the steering wheel.
"Hide. Now."
I arch a brow at him, because some reflex of dignity survives even this. Folding under a dashboard is not a thing Abercrombie Whitlock does. It is not in the brand.
He doesn't argue.
He holds my eyes. The mirror throws a wash of pale light across his jaw. There are headlights coming around the curve behind us, and no time at all to lose to my pride.
I fold.
I drop off the bench seat into the footwell and tuck myself into the dark under the wheel, knees to my chest, my cheek nearly against his knee. It should feel absurd.
A grown woman with a wedding empire in her name, curled under a steering column in a stranger's truck to hide from the men she was going to marry. It should feel ridiculous.
Instead it feels — God help me — like the safest I've been inside any room in five years, folded into the shadow of a man who ran eight blocks in the wrong shoes to reach me first.
He shifts forward.
Brings the seat up close behind him, curves his big frame over the wheel, and the shape of him closes over my little dark hiding place like a hand cupped over a candle.
From the road, he's a man alone in a truck, catching his breath.
I'm nothing. I'm nowhere. I'm gone.
"They'll be here in a minute," he murmurs down to me, barely a sound. "Maybe less. Stay still. Stay quiet. Let me handle the rest."
The engine noise behind us swells. Tires on dry dirt, slowing.
He looks down.
For a moment his eyes just lock on mine in the dark of the footwell, close enough that I can see the amber the day has burned into the brown of them, and whatever he finds down here softens every hard line the run put on his face.
His whole expression opens.
His hand comes off the wheel. Very gently, so gently it undoes something I'd nailed shut years ago, his thumb moves along my cheekbone.
It comes away wet.
I didn't know.
That's the thing that finally cuts the last cable in me.
I did not know I was crying.
I have cried maybe four times in five years, always scheduled, alone, and in the two-minute dark of a locked supply pantry. I did not feel these leave me.