24. The Power Seat
The Power Seat
~AMBER~
"YOU'RE MOVING?!"
Marlowe and Juniper shriek it in perfect, appalling unison, at a volume that could strip the barnacles clean off a boat hull, both of them frozen in the middle of my living room and staring at me like I've just announced I'm running off to join a cult that worships the county tax office.
I roll my eyes so hard I nearly sprain something behind them.
"I am not moving."
"You have a box." Juniper points at the box. She points at it the way a prosecutor points at a murder weapon. "You have several boxes, Amber. Those are moving boxes. That is a whole moving-shaped situation unfolding on your rug."
"It's temporary."
I go back to folding a stack of sweaters into the offending box, because if I stop moving my hands, I'll have to sit in the full weight of what I'm actually doing this morning.
"It's to prove to the government I'm not faking a single thing, and it's temporary. I am absolutely not getting rid of my place. I would sooner get rid of the two of you."
They exchange one of their looks — the kind they've been perfecting since the ninth grade, the kind that carries an entire silent conversation I'm not invited to.
Marlowe's got a smear of dried blue paint along one forearm and her dark hair shoved up in a claw clip that is losing its war, still in her work clothes from the salvage yard, smelling the way she always smells: warm cedar, sea salt, a bright curl of orange peel underneath it all, like a workshop with the doors thrown open to the sun.
Juniper's perched on the arm of my couch in a sundress the exact green of a Granny Smith apple, her honeysuckle-and-green-tea scent going soft at the edges with worry even as she grins, because Juniper feels absolutely everything at maximum volume and always has.
They blew up my phone all morning.
Thirty-one texts between the two of them by the time I finally surfaced out of the town hall and called them back — a rising tide of are you okay and did it go through and do we need to bring the van and a crowbar.
They waited, though.
That's the thing about these two.
They know me well enough to understand that if the town hall deadline came and went with nothing but radio silence on my end, something had gone sideways — and they gave me room to surface on my own before they came descending.
I love them for it.
I'd also lob a sock at either of their heads without a flicker of remorse, which is, I think, the truest measure of a friendship that's lasted this long.
"Okay. Back all the way up. Start from the top.
" Marlowe drops onto the couch beside Juniper and folds her arms, settling in like a woman preparing to hear a deposition.
"Because the last we heard from you, it was dawn and you were being hauled in front of the federal government. Now there are boxes. Talk."
So I talk.
I tell them about the arrangement — the part where Sawyer and I sat down and did the cold math and worked out that the cleanest possible way to prove to a suspicious compliance office that five people are a real, functioning pack is to, inconveniently, actually live like one.
I tell them about August agreeing it would make the whole thing far easier to sell.
About Beckett — of all the men on this earth, Beckett — being the one who turned out to have a connection to a house a little way outside Honeybell Harbor.
A place that sits like a fair midpoint between everybody's work and everybody's lives.
Neutral ground. Nobody's turf, and so, somehow, everybody's.
"And Cade?" Juniper asks, because she has never once in her life missed a name.
I pause with a sweater folded halfway.
"That," I say slowly, "is the strange part."
"Strange how?"
"Cade didn't say a word." I frown down at the wool in my hands.
"You have to understand how bizarre that is.
The second Sawyer walked into the picture, Cade had opinions.
Loud ones. He bristled at every single thing that man did — the drinks, the rescue, the whole of it.
But when it came to all five of us actually moving in under one roof together?
" I shake my head. "Nothing. He just watched.
Went quiet in a way I couldn't read at all. "
"Huh," says Marlowe, and I watch her file it away in the exact spot I've filed it myself.
"And then there was the ordeal of just getting home," I go on, layering rolled socks into the corners of the box.
"Sawyer's truck is still dead as a doornail in that parking lot.
His—" I hesitate over the word, because there's no clean one for it "—his old packmate.
Marshall. The one who drove in to sign off on the whole mess.
He just left. Took off the second the ink was dry.
Didn't fix the truck like he swore he would, didn't linger for so much as a coffee. "
Juniper's eyebrows climb toward her hairline.
"So how'd you get home?"
"August offered to drive Sawyer and me. And he gave the truck a jump on top of it." I let the small, disbelieving smile out at last. "August. Jump-started Sawyer's truck. With his own two hands. Voluntarily."
"No," Marlowe breathes, delighted.
"And here's the thing I keep chewing on.
" I sit back on my heels. "I'm fairly certain Marshall vanished on purpose.
Left specifically so the four of them would have no smooth-talking buffer left — so they'd have no choice but to figure out how to work together right there in a town hall parking lot, over a dead engine, like adults.
" I shrug. "I should be annoyed at being handled that neatly. I'm not. It was kind of brilliant."
"Okay, but the actual meeting." Juniper leans forward, chin dropping into her cupped hands. "How did the council thing go? I want all of it. Every horrible detail."
I blow out a long breath and sink down onto the floor beside my box, my spine against the couch.
"It was a nightmare, Junie. A slow, fluorescent, paper-cut nightmare.
" I press the heels of my hands into my eyes.
"There was this pinched little councilman who clearly has not been hugged since the Ford administration, and he made me sit there and read my whole abandonment out loud like a bedtime story for the room.
And the signatures. I have signed my own name so many times it stopped looking like a name and started looking like a bird a child drew.
I was spiraling…this cold, quiet you are signing your entire life away on a dotted line spiral… and then—"
I stop, because the next part does something complicated behind my ribs.
"Sawyer noticed. He saw I was going under, and he just stepped in. Bought me a chair so I wasn't bent over the desk. Went through every page with me like a tag team. It still sucked. But he made it survivable."
The two of them go very still and very alert, like a pair of cats who've spotted the identical bird. Marlowe pounces, because Marlowe always pounces.
"So." She draws the word out, sugar-sweet, examining her paint-stained nails with performed disinterest. "You and Sawyer. Official, then, huh?"
Heat rushes up my throat before I can slam a lid on it.
"N—no." I fumble the word, and it trips over itself on the way out. "N-not yet. We're just — trialing things. Feeling it out."
Juniper cackles.
"Sure. Sure you are. 'Trialing things.'" She throws up air quotes big enough to be seen from orbit.
"Says Miss Hickey Central over here. Amber, sweetheart, the two of us have been very graciously pretending we don't see your neck.
Or your shoulders. Or — honestly, at this point I'm just assuming your knees and your toes and the backs of both your ears are in on it too.
" She tilts her head, wicked as a cat. "Did the man want the whole entire town to know you're his territory now?
Did he stake his little flags all the way down your—"
"Juniper."
"I'm merely observing! It's very thorough work. Very committed craftsmanship. A tradesman would be proud."
"Fuck," I groan, dropping my burning face into both hands, going molten to the very tips of my ears. "Do not…do not say it like that. It's mortifying."
They dissolve, the pair of them, howling and clutching at each other on my couch like this is the single funniest thing to happen in the history of the harbor.
For them, it might be.
"This is a novel," Marlowe wheezes, wiping at her eyes. "This is a whole omegaverse novel and you are the main character. The scorned Omega. The mysterious new Alpha who shows up out of the fog. The three exes crawling back on their knees—"
"We'd call it—" Juniper can barely force it out, she's laughing so hard she's gone silent for a full second first "—we'd call it Knot in the Wedding Cards!"
"Ugh, stop!" I dig a rolled pair of socks out of the box and hurl them clean across the room.
They catch Juniper square in the forehead, which only makes the situation worse, both of them collapsing into a fresh heap of giggles while I try to recover a single shred of dignity from the floor of my own living room.
"Okay. Okay, but truly." Marlowe swipes under her eyes, sobering by careful degrees. "Sawyer might genuinely be the best thing to ever waltz into Honeybell Harbor."
I blink at her.
"...Why do you say that?"
The two of them trade a look.
This time it's Juniper who answers, the teasing all drained out of her voice, leaving it gentle.
"Because, Amber…a man like that, falling for you this hard and this fast?
It proves something. It proves you're desirable.
That you're not damaged goods, not some sad cautionary tale the town whispers about.
That you can be wanted…completely, entirely wanted…
inside the span of a single weekend." She lifts one shoulder.
"And it lights a fire under those three.
It's competition. And those men need to feel every last inch of it, so they finally, finally understand how staggeringly lucky they are to have even been handed a second shot at you. "