23. Witnessed #2
"You've been bent over this desk the better part of an hour, signing your entire life away one box at a time.
It's bad for your back." He says it like it's the most self-evident fact in the world — like a woman's spine is simply a thing a considerate person keeps track of.
"Sit. Sign the rest of it sitting down."
It's such a small thing.
It's such an absurdly small, simple, reasonable thing, and it knocks the breath clean out of me, because in five years and one entire collapsed wedding, not one single Alpha ever once thought about my back.
I feel the heat climb up my throat and into my face.
"Thank you," I murmur, and I sink into the chair.
Relief floods up my spine the instant I do — real, physical relief, my overworked muscles going loose all at once, because after the night Sawyer and I shared, my body has a great many strong opinions about being folded over a desk for an hour.
I bite the inside of my cheek so that not one of those opinions makes it onto my face in a government building.
He doesn't step away. He stays, one hand still resting warm at my shoulder, leaning over me to track the pages.
"You need any help?"
"Just—" I flip back a sheet, squinting. "Just tell me I actually signed everything. My eyes have officially crossed."
"Let's find out." He gets to work.
We move through the whole monster of a document together, the two of us, like a tag team that's run this play a hundred times before.
He reads a line; I sign it. He turns a page; I initial the bottom.
His finger lands on a little box I skipped straight over — "Here" — and I fill it in.
He catches three separate sections I missed entirely, tiny initial-boxes buried down in the legalese like landmines, and he taps each one, patient, until it's done and dated.
"Breathe," he murmurs, so low it doesn't carry past the two of us, his thumb moving once against my shoulder. "You're strangling that pen like it owes you money."
"It does," I whisper back. "It owes me an hour of my life and the feeling in three of my fingers."
His quiet huff of a laugh stirs the hair at my temple. "Sign four more. Then I'll buy the pen off you, and we'll press charges together."
It's such a stupid little thing to say.
It undoes the knot between my shoulder blades better than any breathing exercise ever could.
The whole time, his scent is doing something deliberate to the air around me.
Mine has been going haywire for the better part of an hour — I can smell it on my own skin, the spiced-citrus tang of nerves and swallowed anger threading through my apricot, gone sharp and sour with every single thing I'm not allowed to say out loud.
But Sawyer leans in close over my shoulder, and his scent rolls in over mine like a tide coming home.
Magnolia opening warm, black pepper, aged bourbon gone soft and steady, settling down over me thick and unhurried. It isn't an accident.
I understand that now, understand it all the way down. He's doing it on purpose — blanketing me in himself — and it works exactly like a shield.
The councilman's voice goes tinny and far away.
My galloping pulse gentles. My hand stops its fine tremble on the pen.
I breathe him in, deep, and the panic simply drains out through the soles of my feet.
I sign the rest of my name across the rest of the pages while he makes one last unhurried pass through the stack, thorough as a man defusing something, leaving the government not one loose thread left to yank.
The councilman clears his throat twice, loud, plainly trying to wrestle the room's attention back onto his own importance.
"This is all very touching," he says, to no one, to the air above our heads.
"It changes precisely nothing about the standard of scrutiny this office intends to—" Nobody is listening to him.
Not the clerk, not the three men, not me.
His voice thins and dies partway through its own sentence, starved of the fear it runs on, and he retreats, sulking, back to his stamp.
By the time we reach the final page, the final signature, the last initialed box, the room has gone quiet.
I don't notice at first.
I'm too busy capping the pen and flexing feeling back into my cramped-up hand.
Then I feel it — that particular prickling weight of being looked at — and I glance up to find the entire room watching the two of us.
The councilman, his script forgotten. His silent clerk, who has spent the last hour stamping pages with the enthusiasm of a man counting ceiling tiles, now openly staring.
The three men along the wall, their fury gone strange and tangled and complicated on their faces. Marshall, cigarette halfway to his mouth, held there, forgotten.
I sit up straighter in my new chair.
"...What?"
Marshall smirks.
He pushes off the side of the desk and rises to his full height, gesturing at the pair of us, me settled in my chair, Sawyer still leaned protective over my shoulder, with the glowing end of his cigarette.
"An Alpha who can make his Omega feel safe in any room, under any circumstance," he announces to the assembly at large, "is an Alpha who can unify a whole group of people determined to love with intention.
" He takes one final, contemplative drag.
"Everyone makes mistakes. Most of them, if you trace the thing back far enough, get made out of fear. "
He pauses.
His dark eyes travel to Sawyer, and the two of them hold a long look between them, five years of shared history folded quiet into it.