19. Show Me #2
"Blooming Apricot," he says, gentle as anything. "I didn't know I had a sister."
The wine nearly goes down the wrong pipe. "You — what?"
"Didn't know she existed on this earth." He lifts that one shoulder again, the picture of a man who made his peace with a wild, thorny thing a long time ago.
"My people are complicated. My father was a complicated man in particular, with a whole complicated life filed in a drawer none of us got to open until later.
Family drama." He spreads his hands. "It's wild out there, sweetheart. "
"That is not drama," I sputter. "That is a season finale. That is the episode they hold back for May—"
"You're not wrong."
He waits me out, because he's already learned — in one single day, the infuriating man — that I have to get the noise out of my system before I'm any use at hearing the next part. I subside, barely, gesturing at him with my glass to continue.
"By the time the year ran out, I had a real choice on my hands," he says.
"My last semester came bundled with a co-op placement back home in Charleston.
A good one — the kind that puts a client roster in your hand on the first morning.
Brides already booked. Weddings on the calendar.
A time-limited door, the sort that does not politely hold itself open while you dither on a cliff in Italy eating stone fruit.
" He talks about opportunity the way I do.
Doors. Windows. Timing. We're both people who count the exits in every room we enter.
"So I came home. And the pack threw a proper dinner to introduce me, at long last, to her.
The Omega. The one they'd spent my whole year away courting. "
He goes quiet a moment. The lamplight catches the threads of gold in his stubble, the tired lines fanning from his eyes.
"And I walked in," he says, "and I looked right at her, and I felt nothing.
Again. Except worse this time — because this was meant to be the one.
The one they were sure of, dead sure, ready to bond.
And still, not one flicker. No pull, no 'oh,' no hum under the breastbone.
Just a nice-looking young woman smiling at me polite across a dinner table.
" His mouth twists. "I remember thinking, well.
That settles it, then. It's official. Something's broke clean through in me, and now they're all about to find out live, over the good china. "
"But," I breathe.
"But Silas kept looking between the two of us.
All night long. Couldn't leave it be. Finally says it right out loud, in front of God and everybody — 'you two have got the same eyes.
'" A dry, disbelieving huff of breath. "And we did.
Same eyes. Same left hand on the fork. Same exact way of tipping our heads a half-inch when we're chewing on a thought.
So we took a test, because you do not build a lifelong pack bond on a maybe.
And—" he spreads his hands wide, a rueful showman taking his bow "—voilà.
My pack had spent a year and a half of their lives falling for my baby sister. "
I set my wine down on the nightstand before I drop it into the sheets. "No. No fu—no way."
"Way."
"Sawyer. You could be a whole limited series on Netflix. Six episodes. A moody one-sheet poster with everybody looking off in different directions. Somebody's weeping aunt at the paternity reveal—"
"I'd audition for the lead." He tips me a wink that ought to be against the law this close to two in the morning. "Play my own self. How hard could it possibly be."
I laugh — I can't not — but it fades fast, because I can feel the two of us wading out past the funny part now, into water that's suddenly got no bottom. "So what did you do?" I ask, quiet. "After the test. After you knew. What did you actually do."
"I left." He says it without a flinch. Then, softer, like he's still turning the stone of it over in the dark even now: "Truthfully?
I stood there in that dining room and I watched all four of them figure out, in real time, how to look at her like a little sister instead of a bride.
I watched her fold herself right into the middle of them like she'd always had a seat there waiting.
They were happy, Amber. God, they were happy.
Thriving, even, once the shock wore off.
So I did the math the way I always do." A slow breath.
"Five men on a registration, and one of them's nothing but the odd piece rattling loose in the box.
I felt like collateral damage. Like something they'd be building careful little detours around for the rest of their lives.
There was no need to put that on any of them.
So I took my name off the paper. I gave them my blessing, and I stepped clean out of the frame. "
"Did you love them, though." It's not quite a question. "Truly. Or is that just the noble story you tell so the leaving sounds like a gift instead of a wound."
The look he gives me is warm and approving, like I've passed some small quiet test by refusing to let him off the hook easy.
"Loved them more than I've got the words to carry," he says.
"Every single day of the near-decade they were mine.
I grew all the way up inside that pack. Every decent thing about the man sitting on your quilt right now — some root of it got planted by one of those four.
That part's real, and I won't prettify it and I won't take a word of it back.
" He pauses, and his voice hardens a degree.
"But were they good Alphas? The right kind?
The kind a woman actually deserves to build a life on? "
He shakes his head, slow.
"No. They were toxic as hell, if I'm being honest with you tonight. Each in his own private, particular flavor of it. Which is the whole reason I can sit here on your bed and tell you, flat out, that your three men genuinely love you."
I frown. That's a hard left turn and I do not enjoy being lost inside my own bedroom.
"How does your toxic pack tell you a single thing about mine?
How do you get from your sister's DNA test all the way to my—" I gesture vaguely out toward the dark road, the sleeping town, the three men who are meant to be standing on that road by 8:17 whether the sun cooperates or not. "—to them."
"Because I watched the whole thing happen in reverse, right in front of me.
" He shifts to face me fuller, warming to it, one knee drawing up on the quilt.
"My four could not find and keep an Omega to save their entire lives.
Years of trying. And it was never bad luck.
It's that not one of the four had the first earthly idea how to love a person, or — worse — how to let himself be loved back.
You cannot hold what you were never taught to carry.
They'd have quietly wrecked any good woman fool enough to walk in early.
Some nights I half thank God none of the early ones stuck around long enough to get hurt. "
"And then you left."
"And then I left. Gone a full year. In that one year, with my sister, the exact thing I could not make happen in nine years of trying just — happened.
All on its own. They learned it." His voice gentles right down.
"All four of them. Learned how to love a person properly.
Learned to look their own ugliest parts dead in the face and call each one by its right name. "
"So she fixed them." I can't quite keep the old bitterness from fraying the edge of it. The right Omega glides in, and lo, the men become men. I've heard that fairy tale. I wore it to an altar once. It doesn't end the way the poster promises.
"No." He catches the edge instantly — he catches everything, it's maddening — and shakes his head, firm and certain.
"That's the exact part the whole world gets wrong, and I need you to hear me get it right, because you specifically have been sold cheap redemption before and I won't be another man who does it.
She did not fix them. Nobody on God's earth gets fixed by being loved.
That is simply not how the repair works.
" He leans in a degree, and the mattress dips.
"What happened is there came a moment — I got it secondhand, but I believe it down into my boots — where my sister decided to walk away. "
"Walk away," I repeat.
"Walk away. As in: another pack came sniffing around her.
A good one, from everything I heard. Better than mine ever was, on paper and off it both.
Slid right into her rearview mirror at the precise moment my four had gotten comfortable enough to start taking her for granted.
" He spreads his hands. "And it made every last one of them realize, all at the very same instant, that the best thing that ever wandered into their sorry lives was already halfway out the door with her coat on. "
Oh. Something cold and clarifying trickles down the back of my neck, because I am not stupid, and I can see exactly where this map is leading.