19. Show Me
Show Me
~AMBER~
There are only so many sentences a man can hand you at one in the morning that will make you forget you are holding a glass of wine.
The omega of my ex-pack is my sister has just vaulted straight to the top of that list.
I hear the words. I watch his mouth make them, that unhurried Charleston drawl folding around them like they cost him nothing at all.
My brain — which has spent this entire endless day staring down a federal officer, hiding under a man's steering wheel, and being fed pasta at midnight by someone I've known for the length of a bad head cold — quietly sets down its pen and declines to file the paperwork.
So I do the only sensible thing left available to me. I lift my mismatched glass and take a swallow of red big enough to horrify my mother from three towns over.
Sawyer watches me do it. The corner of his mouth tucks in, slow and knowing. "That's usually a valid reaction," he says.
I lower the glass. I stare at him across the demilitarized zone I so carefully surveyed not two hours ago — the invisible line running straight down the center of my bed like a border inked on a map — and the only thing my short-circuiting mind can assemble comes out whole.
"What in the Sweet Home Alabama, Mississippi of a combination is that."
The laugh that gets loose from him is immediate, low, and genuinely delighted.
He lifts a hand before I can spiral any deeper into the American South.
"No," he says, firm and clean, ticking it off like a man heading disaster off at the pass.
"I did not sleep with my sister. I did not mate my sister.
I have never done one single thing with my sister but hand her my blessing and mean every letter of it. "
Well. That is — good. That is a load-bearing clarification, and I am relieved he chose to lead with it.
He reaches over the edge of the bed for the wine bottle he'd left standing on my dresser, and he works the cork out with his thumb like a man who has opened a great many bottles in his life for other people.
He tops off my glass first. Then his own — barely a splash, the drink of a man who rarely drinks.
He settles back onto the far side, his side, the legal side, on top of my grandmother's quilt with his boots long since toed off.
He leans his shoulders against my headboard like there is nowhere else in the whole wide world he needs to be before dawn.
I fold my legs under me and turn to face him square. Spine straight. Hands folded around the bowl of the glass. I am, I realize with some dismay, sitting the exact way I sit across a conference table from a difficult vendor. Attentive. Braced. Prepared to take minutes.
It makes him laugh all over again. "You clocked in?" he asks.
"Fully clocked in," I vow. "Badge scanned, time card stamped, coffee in hand. Do not short me a single detail, Devereaux. I will know."
"Wouldn't dream of it." He takes one small sip, considers me over the rim, then leans and sets the glass down on the nightstand with a soft, deliberate click — a man clearing his hands so he can give a thing his whole attention.
He does that. Sets things down to look at you properly.
My own three used to check their phones in the middle of my sentences. "All right, then. From the top."
"From the top."
"We were five." He says it plainly, watching it land. "Not three. Not four. Five grown men on one registration, down in Charleston. You want the whole roster, and I'll give it to you, because you strike me as a woman who won't hear a word of any story until she's got every name in it straight."
"I absolutely am that woman. Names and occupations. Go."
"Silas Thorne led us. On paper, anyhow." A muscle ticks in his jaw when he says the name — the first crack in all that easy calm.
"Stonemason. Restoration work, the real old kind.
The man could take a crumbling three-hundred-year-old Charleston facade and coax it back so clean you'd swear it had grown that way out of the ground. "
"A leader who rebuilds old houses for a living," I say. "That's practically poetry."
"It's poetry right up until you notice he could rebuild any house standing except the one he lived inside.
" He lets that sit a beat, then moves on.
"Then Ezra. Luthier — builds violins, cellos, the occasional stubborn mandolin nobody ordered.
Hands like a surgeon, patience like a saint.
On wood, at least. On people, a good deal less. "
"Noted. The violin man is emotionally unavailable."
"You're quick." His eyes glint. "Next, Cass.
Cassius, but you'll get yourself thrown clean off the pier for calling him that.
Marine biologist. Spent his days elbow-deep in tide pools, counting the things the rest of us step on.
Could recite the courtship habits of every living creature in the Lowcountry. "
"Except his own, I'm guessing."
"Sharp as a tack tonight." He tips his head at me, pleased. "And last, Dash. Dashiell. Landscape architect — designed gardens for people richer than the good Lord. Made whole hillsides bloom exactly on schedule, for money."
I cannot help myself. I tally them on my fingers, because a list is the only life raft I've got. "So a stonemason, a violin-maker, a marine biologist, a garden designer, and a wedding planner all walk into one pack."
"Sounds like the front half of a joke, doesn't it," he agrees. "Turned out to be one. I was just slow to reach the punchline."
Five men who all work with their hands. Who all build slow, careful, beautiful things that take years to finish. I file it away, because it tells me something about the shape of him before he's finished telling me himself.
"Here's the part nobody warns you about," he goes on, and the humor banks down low.
"I loved those men. Best friends I ever had in my life, bar none.
We built furniture on weekends. We argued about barbecue like it was scripture.
We once drove eleven hours straight to watch Ezra's baby cousin walk at her graduation.
I'd have opened a vein for any one of the four, no questions asked. "
"But," I say, because I can hear it coming.
"But every time we met an Omega — and I mean every single time — the four of them would light up like somebody threw a switch.
Same pull. Same jolt. That helpless her, it's her look, all four faces at once.
" His mouth flattens. "And I'd stand there in the middle of it, polite as a churchgoer at a wedding, waiting on my own switch to flip. Feeling absolutely nothing."
"Nothing," I echo.
"Not a flicker. Not a spark. The first couple times, I told myself it was timing.
Wrong week, wrong woman, bad angle of the light.
" He laces his fingers together over his stomach.
"Then it happened again. And again. The exact same way, every time, until it stopped being coincidence and started being a pattern with a hole cut out of the middle of it, and the hole was shaped like me. "
Oh, I know that particular arithmetic. The one where you're the single variable that won't fit the equation, so the problem must obviously, quietly, be you. I've done that long division on myself a thousand nights.
"You spend enough years being the one man in the room who doesn't feel the thing every other man feels," he says, "and you start to wonder whether they forgot to install the part in you at the factory."
"So what did you do about it," I ask, softer now.
"I found the exit ramp." A rueful tilt of his head.
"I'd been circling the idea of building weddings for a living — it was the only work that ever lit me up the way an Omega lit up the rest of them.
There was a course. Event design, old-world style, taught on the Amalfi Coast. Six weeks on paper.
" The grin turns crooked. "You ladies would call what it became a Euro summer.
Lemons the size of my fist. A little blue town stacked straight up a cliff into the sky.
I learned to plan a wedding in three languages, drank wine that ruined me for anything since, and I did not come home in six weeks. " He pauses. "I came home in a year."
"A year." I'm scandalized on general principle. "You Eat-Pray-Love'd your way straight out of a pack crisis."
"I Eat-Pray-Love'd my way into the best year of my life, thank you kindly." He says it without a scrap of shame, and I have to bite down on a smile. "Best thing I ever did for myself, running off to that cliff."
"And your pack just — let you? Vanish across an ocean for a year?"
"They weren't thrilled." He shrugs one shoulder.
"Then partway through my lemons, the call came.
Silas, on a bad line, near midnight my time.
Said they'd found her. Maybe. The realest maybe they'd ever had.
And they wanted to know if I was going to pack up my whole new life and fly home for an Omega I had never once laid eyes on. "
"Were you?"
"No." Simple, clean, no apology in it. "We talked about doing the modern thing — video calls, photographs, courting a woman through a phone screen.
But you cannot scent a person through glass, Amber.
There's no spark on a screen. No chemistry, nothing real to plant your feet on.
So I told them to go on ahead without me.
Court her properly, do it right, take their time.
And when I finally came home, we'd all sit down together and seal it as a pack.
" He tips his head. "Generous of me, I thought at the time. Real team player."
I hold up a finger, because a horrible suspicion is forming. "Hang on. Back the truck up. Did you know? When they told you they'd found her — did you have the first inkling it was your own sister? Did she not once mention she happened to be courting an entire pack of Charleston craftsmen?"
He looks at me. He lets it hang exactly long enough that I know the answer is about to break my brain a second time tonight.