18. Out Of Reach
Out Of Reach
~SAWYER~
Back in Charleston, my grandmother used to say you learn everything worth knowing about a person in the first ninety seconds after they've been surprised in their own home. Not the version they've rehearsed for the front porch.
The real one.
The one that leaks out sideways while they're kicking a stray shoe under the couch and praying you didn't clock it.
I've been standing inside Amber Whitlock's cottage for exactly ninety seconds. I am learning a great deal.
"Okay," she says. Not to me. She says it to a throw pillow, which she fluffs with the violence of a woman defusing a bomb. "Okay. This is fine. Everything is completely fine."
"You keep saying that," I note from the doorway, where I have been instructed — with a flat palm and zero eye contact — to remain. "In my experience, when a person says fine that many times, the building's usually on fire."
"The building is not on fire." She snatches a mug off the coffee table, then a second mug, then a folded blanket, and stands there clutching all three like she's forgotten which crime she meant to hide.
"The building is immaculate. The building is a magazine spread.
Sit down. No — don't sit down, that cushion has a broken spring, just — stand there. Look at the wall."
She is unraveling in real time, and it is the most charming thing I've witnessed in five years.
I look at the wall. The wall has a watercolor of the harbor and a small brass hook holding a single key.
I approve of the wall. I approve, if I'm honest, of the whole cottage — the low beams, the couch that's swallowed a decade of good evenings, the bookshelf organized by a system only its owner could love.
It smells like her. That's the emergency she's currently sprinting to solve.
Because Amber Whitlock, rattled, smells like a garden that's decided to bloom all at once and out of season.
Apricot first, sun-warm and a little sticky-sweet.
Then the roses — not the tidy florist kind but the overgrown ones climbing the trellis outside, gone slightly wild.
Under all of it, vanilla and a low amber warmth, like a lamp somebody left burning in a window.
Nerves have cranked the whole bouquet up to a volume I'd wager she can't stand.
I could stand in it for a week and call it a vacation.
She catches me not-not-noticing. Her whole face goes the color of the roses.
"God, I'm sorry," she blurts. "It's — I know. I know it's a lot. Give me one second, I have neutralizer, I just have to—" She's already gone, banging into the kitchen, yanking open a cabinet.
"You don't have to do anything," I say, following as far as the kitchen doorway. Permission first. Always. Especially in her house. "May I come in? Or is the kitchen also a look-at-the-wall situation?"
"The kitchen is—" A cabinet door thunks. "The kitchen is fine, come in, don't look at the sink."
I come in. I look directly at the sink. There is one clean bowl in it. The woman renegotiated a five-person federal pack declaration this afternoon without her pulse changing. A single bowl is the thing that undoes her.
She surfaces from the depths of the cabinet with a canister in each hand, holding them up to the light and squinting between them like she's defusing that bomb after all. One's a matte lavender. One's a clinical, pale green.
"Which—" She turns one to read the back. "I can never remember which of these is the — one's for the room and one's for skin, and if I get it backward I smell like a hospital ward for six hours, and—" She trails off. "Why are you looking at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like I'm funny."
"You're a little funny," I admit.
I cross the kitchen before she can pick a can and pull the trigger.
I take both of them out of her hands — gently, the way you take scissors off a kid — and set the whole matched set on the top shelf of her open cabinet.
It's a good shelf. It's an excellent shelf.
It is, by my estimate, a solid seven inches above anything Amber Whitlock is reaching without a stepstool and a running jump.
She stares up at the canisters. She stares at me.
"Put those back."
"No."
"Sawyer."
"That's rather the point of a high shelf," I tell her, and I have the nerve to wink. "Little far up, aren't they."
"I need those." She plants both hands on her hips. It would land harder if the top of her head cleared my chin. "I have a guest. You don't spray a guest in the face with your—" she gestures at herself, at all of it, the whole blooming catastrophe of her "—your everything."
"This guest," I say, "would like it entered into the record that you smell just fine."
"That's not—"
"In fact." I lean back against the counter and settle in, because this is a conversation I've decided we're having whether she scheduled it or not.
"I've been curious about it all week. Every single time I've been within ten feet of you, you're either scrubbed down to nothing or you're lunging for a can.
The store. The sidewalk. That federal office. Why? Who taught you to do that?"
The question lands in a tender place it wasn't invited. I watch it land. Her hands come off her hips. The bouquet in the room shifts under me — the apricot pulling thin, the roses folding inward, a green snapped-stem note threading through the sweetness like a bruise coming up under skin.
"It's just manners," she says, which is not an answer, and she knows it isn't. She busies herself with a dish towel that was already folded.
"My father used to say—" She stops. Starts over, lighter, like she can outrun the sentence if she takes it at a sprint.
"My father has opinions. Had. Has. He runs a whole hospitality empire, everything's about presentation, and he always said an Omega who can't manage her own aroma is an Omega who can't manage anything.
That mine was—" a small, well-practiced laugh "—loud.
Annoying, was his actual word. That it needed taming before it embarrassed somebody at a nice event. "
She reports it like a weather forecast. Like it cost her nothing. But the apricot's gone sad and thin at the edges, the snapped-stem green rising, and I know down to the decimal exactly what it cost.
There it is. Ninety seconds, my foot. Some people you don't read until hour six, standing in their kitchen, watching them fold a towel that was already folded twice.
"Your father," I say, keeping my voice very level, "is wrong."
She blinks. "You don't have to—"
"I'm not being nice. I'm being accurate.
There's a difference, and I traffic mostly in the second one.
" I count it off on my fingers, because she strikes me as a woman who trusts a list further than she'll ever trust a compliment.
"One. Your aroma is warm. It reads as safe — people go loose in a room you've been standing in, whether they clock why or not.
That's not nothing. That's the entire business you run.
Two. It's complex, which means it's interesting, which means nobody gets tired of it.
Three." I let this one land soft. "It's honest. I've known you three days, and I can read your whole day off the air in a room.
Right now the air's telling me a man, I would dearly love ten quiet minutes alone with, once said something to a small girl that she is still, decades later, folding towels about. "
Quiet. Just the kettle-tick of the old house settling on its bones.
"Those are the pros," she says finally, and her voice isn't quite level. "What are the cons."
"None."
"That's not how lists work."
"It's how this one works."
She narrows her eyes at me. Recovery incoming — I can see her reaching for solid ground, for the version of herself that runs seating charts and stares down federal agents, and I let her have it, because everyone's owed a way back up.
"You're very smooth," she says. "You know that?
This whole thing. The shelf. The speech.
The accent doing the thing the accent's doing.
This is a move. You're working an angle. You're trying to get in my pants."
I laugh before I can stop it. A real one, surprised right out of me.
"I promise you I am not," I say.
"Wow. Okay. Rude, but—"
"Not like that." I scrub a hand along my jaw.
How much to hand her. Give her the true thing.
She's had a whole lifetime of the managed ones.
"I'm on — call it a journey. Have been for a good while.
Abstinence, the entire grim discipline of it.
On purpose. I got very good at wanting nothing from anybody, because wanting things from people is precisely how I ended up—" Careful.
"—learning some hard lessons I'm still paying off.
So no. Your pants are safe. There is no angle.
There's no play." I look at her, then decide to be honest one degree past what's smart.
"Though I'll tell you, Blooming Apricot — you are making the discipline significantly harder tonight than it was last Tuesday. "
She goes pink again. A different pink this time. A pleased one she's clearly furious about.
"That's—" she says. "You can't just — you can't say a thing like that and then just—" She points at me, opens her mouth, shuts it, reboots entirely. "Are you hungry?"
Her stomach answers before I can. It growls — not a polite little gurgle but a long, indignant, deeply betrayed sound, enormous in the small kitchen. We both look down at it. When we look back up, she has achieved a shade of red I genuinely did not know the human face could produce.
"Don't," she warns.
"I didn't say a word."
"You were going to."
"When did you last eat?" is what I say instead, and I watch her actually try to answer the question. Watch her scroll back through the day — the office, the notice, the standoff on the road, the long drive home. Watch her come up empty-handed.