18. Out Of Reach #4
"Oh, no. No, no—" She wrenches the drawer back open, grabbing, fumbling. "The button's — it has a sensitive — it's on the extra-sensitive setting, the controls are on the side, they go off if you so much as look at them wrong—"
"Blooming Apricot."
"Don't."
"There is nothing wrong," I say, with the settled calm of a man who has decided to enjoy the entire rest of his life beginning this instant, "with owning a vibrator."
"I will die. I am going to genuinely die, in this room, tonight, and it will say so on the certificate."
"Omegas have needs. Alphas have needs. Everybody on God's earth has a drawer.
" The buzzing continues its cheerful, muffled industry against the wood.
"That said — you might want to switch it off before it walks itself clear out of the drawer and files for the last open spot on your federal declaration. "
She finds the button. The buzzing dies. The silence that rushes in afterward is somehow louder than the buzzing ever was.
She's got her back to me, both palms flat on the shut drawer, her forehead nearly touching the wall above it, radiating a mortification so pure and total I could warm my hands at it on a cold night.
"If you tell a single living soul," she says to the wall.
"I would never." I mean it, and I let her hear that I mean it, before I go ahead and ruin it.
"I will say — and I want to be very respectful of the timeline as we understand it — I'm now powerfully curious whether an item like that comes with a name.
A woman who keeps a framed hospitality philosophy in her front hall strikes me as a woman who names her things.
" I tip my head at her stiff, furious spine.
"Let's see how many dates it takes before I earn that particular piece of intel.
My money's on four. You strike me as a solid fourth-date-secret sort of woman. "
"Get out."
"It's my side of the bed now. I live here. Demilitarized zone." But I push off the doorframe and give her the room, ducking back into the hall so she can put the last of her dignity back up on the one high shelf in this house I can't reach.
When she comes out — teeth brushed, face scrubbed pink, swimming in an oversized sleep shirt I am being extraordinarily disciplined about — she's herself again.
Armor bolted back on, even if tonight the armor's made of soft flannel.
She climbs onto her half of the enormous bed, sits with her back to the headboard and her knees drawn up, and looks at me across the demilitarized zone like a woman resuming a meeting that was only ever recessed, never adjourned.
"You didn't answer my question," she says.
I settle onto my side, on top of the covers, boots off, hands laced behind my head, studying her ceiling. "I answered several of your questions. I cooked, even. There was a toast."
"The real one. The pack. How you're so sure you can get their consent by morning, when you left them five years ago.
" She won't be steered. "Everybody in this town knows you've got a pack you don't speak to.
Marlowe looked you up. You don't call them.
You don't visit. You left. Same as—" she stops short, because the same as is a live wire strung right through the middle of this particular house.
"You left. And now you need them to sign a federal form for me in—" she checks the clock "—seven and a half hours. So. How are you sure. Truly."
She isn't going to let it go. She negotiates for her living.
I've stalled her twice already. She's earned better than a third stall, lying there in her flannel with those tired, brave, stubborn eyes fixed on me.
I look at the ceiling a while longer. The old house ticks around us.
Down the hall, her wild rosebushes tap the window glass in the wind off the water.
"Because," I say, "I don't actually have to move the whole pack.
I only have to reach one person. There's an Omega on that registration.
If I call — really call, voice and everything, not a text — that Omega picks up.
No matter the hour. Hears me all the way out.
Is on the road to Honeybell Harbor inside twenty minutes flat, the form signed on the dash at every red light, standing on your lawn before your government so much as unlocks its doors at eight-seventeen.
" I say it flat and certain, because it happens to be the single thing in my whole tangled, bolted-shut life I have never once doubted.
"That, I'm sure of. I'd bet your rosebushes on it. "
"An Omega." She turns the word over in her hands. "You're that sure an Omega, from a pack you walked out on five years ago, drops everything at one in the morning and drives through the dark for you. No hesitation. No grudge. Why? Why would anybody on this earth still—"
I turn my head on the pillow and look at her. In her flannel and her lamplight, in the bed of the one other person in this entire town who left the exact same way I did, I decide to crack the bolted door one full inch wider than I've cracked it for a living soul in five years.
"Cause the omega of my ex-pack is my sister."