26. The Final Blossom
The Final Blossom
~AUGUST~
There's a particular kind of tired that only comes from spending an entire day arranging other people's happiness.
My hands smell like cut stems and floral preservative.
There's a smudge of pollen under my thumbnail I'll never fully get out. Twelve hours on my feet at Bellamy Blooms, coaxing three hundred blooms into something a bride will one day weep over, and all I want now is my own quiet house and a shower hot enough to hurt.
The road out of town runs long and gold at this hour, the sun sinking behind the marsh grass, everything washed in that honeyed light that makes even the potholes look intentional. I'm halfway home, half-asleep behind the wheel, when I see the truck pulled onto the shoulder up ahead.
I'd know that truck anywhere.
Vintage. Cream-and-rust in a shade no factory ever mixed on purpose.
Sawyer's.
Sawyer himself is standing in front of it, shirtless, scowling down into the open hood like the engine has personally insulted his grandmother.
I could keep driving...
The thought arrives unbidden, a little ugly, and I sit with it exactly as long as it takes to feel ashamed of it. Because that man is, by every reasonable measure, my competition — the Alpha currently winning the woman I spent five years failing.
He's probably stranded on this shoulder on his way to her right now…daring to look like a damn snack too…
Ugh…
I pull over anyway.
I flick on my hazards and roll to a stop behind him, because whatever else Sawyer Devereaux is, he's stuck out here, and I wasn't raised to drive past a stranded man. Even this one.
Especially, some tired, honest part of me murmurs, this one.
"Car trouble?" I call, climbing out.
Sawyer glances back, and something in his face actually eases when he sees it's me — which is its own small surprise.
"August." He wipes his hands down the front of his jeans, leaving grease streaks across the denim. "Welp. She's giving me trouble again. That's the diplomatic word for it."
"Have you considered," I say, crossing to peer into the engine bay beside him, "the radical modern innovation of a vehicle that runs?"
"Don't you start with me." He points a wrench in my direction. "I could buy new. I've got the means to buy new. But a new truck's got no soul. This one's got character."
"This one's got a character flaw," I say. "There's a difference."
That earns me a surprised bark of a laugh, and I feel absurdly, disproportionately pleased with myself for having caused it.
Sawyer Devereaux has one of those laughs that seems to cost him something to give — I noticed it the very first night I met him, the way it gets surprised out of him rather than offered.
I've made a small, private study of collecting them since, the way I collect anything rare and worth the keeping.
A dangerous hobby, that. I'd do well to remember which side of this whole thing I'm meant to be standing on.
I study the engine a moment. It isn't complicated — I can see the trouble from here, a corroded connection and a couple of wires shaken loose from years of exactly this stubbornness.
My father's voice surfaces, unwelcome, in the back of my skull: a man ought to be able to fix his own things.
One of the very few useful things he ever handed me.
"I can fix this," I say. "Give me ten minutes." I start on my shirt buttons. "But you have to swear you won't tell a living soul."
Sawyer's eyebrows climb.
"Why's that, exactly?"
I shrug out of my shirt and drape it over his side mirror, careful, because it's a good shirt and I'm not about to sacrifice it to his truck's bad habits.
When I glance back, Sawyer is looking at me.
Not at the engine.
At me — a slow, unhurried pass from my shoulders down, the kind of look a man doesn't quite intend to let show.
His scent shifts, subtle, a warm thread moving through the magnolia and black pepper and aged bourbon of him. Well. Isn't that interesting. I file it away with the pollen and the light and all the other things I notice and don't mention.
"Because I'm a florist," I say, leaning into the engine. "I have a reputation to protect. If it gets around that I'm any good with an engine, Hollis down at the garage will never leave me in peace. He's been trying to recruit me for years."
I work the corroded bolt loose.
"He tried the same thing with Cade. Cornered him at the Driftglass, wouldn't quit, but Cade's spoken for, one way or another, so I'm the next target. I like my flowers. I'd like to keep my quiet Tuesdays."
The wildflowers have taken over the ditch behind us — chicory gone that impossible blue, Queen Anne's lace nodding on its stems, a few late black-eyed Susans still holding on.
Nobody planted them. Nobody tends them. They are the most honest garden in the county, and they'll outlast every arrangement I've ever charged three hundred dollars for.
I let that thought settle while I work another wire loose, the warm asphalt ticking as it cools, Sawyer's bourbon-and-pepper scent drifting over to me on the evening air.
"Fair enough." Sawyer leans a hip against the truck, crossing his arms over that bare chest, entirely too comfortable with himself. "Still doesn't explain why you took your shirt off, though."
"It's a good shirt. I'm not grinding engine grease into good cotton for a truck that doesn't deserve me.
" I twist a wire free. "The better question, Devereaux, is why you're the one standing shirtless on the side of a state highway.
You didn't know I was coming. You've just been out here, half-dressed, waving at traffic like a very handsome cautionary tale. "
He has the grace to look briefly caught out.
"I've got a date," he admits. "With Amber.
Tonight, at the Driftglass." He rubs the back of his neck.
"I'm meeting her there. She's driving in from that vendor thing over in Cutter's Bay, already had the work truck, so it made more sense than doubling back.
I didn't want to walk in smelling like an engine and looking like I lost a fight with one.
So." He gestures down at his own bare torso. "Preventative measures."
Something goes tight and quiet in the middle of my chest.
So this is what I'm doing with my evening. Kneeling in the roadside dirt, fixing the truck that will carry another man to the woman I love, so that he won't be late to her.
I let the feeling move all the way through me. I look at it honestly.
Then I set it down, because it's mine to carry, and I earned every ounce of it.
"Well," I say, and I'm proud of how even it comes out. "Good on you. For taking the initiative."
Sawyer studies me a long moment, head tilted, wearing that unnervingly perceptive look of his.
"You're something else, you know that? Most Alphas in your shoes would've driven right on past and let me rust out here for the crows." A beat. "You're really not jealous."
I think about it, because he's earned a real answer instead of a reflexive one.
I sit back on my heels and wipe my hands on the rag from his toolbox.
"I want Amber happy," I say finally. "That's the whole of it, once you strip away everything else.
That's my priority — her, happy — whether or not I'm the man who gets to make her that way.
" I turn back to the wires. "Do I hate that you're already standing where I'm still trying to get to?
That you can walk into a bar tonight and simply be with her, easy as breathing, while I'm out here relearning how to earn the right to buy her a coffee?
" A dry breath. "God, yes. I hate it. It sits in me like a swallowed stone. "
"But?"
"But it's the bill coming due." I meet his eyes over the engine.
"I didn't give her my all the first time.
I had the most precious thing anyone ever placed in my hands, and the moment it got hard, I let go of it to save other people their trouble.
So this—" I gesture at the truck, the dirt, the whole humbling shape of the evening "—this is the consequence.
I don't get to be bitter about the natural consequence of my own cowardice.
I get to suck it up, try again, and do it right this time. If she ever lets me."
Sawyer's quiet a moment, just watching me work.
Then…
"Can I ask you something, and you can tell me to mind my business?" I nod. "Why is it only you? Out here in the dirt, doing the actual work of it. Beckett, Cade…I don't see them breaking a sweat over what they did. Do they even feel it?"
I don't answer straight off.
I ease the corroded connector loose, scrape it clean with my thumbnail, and consider how much of my packmates' hearts are mine to hand a near-stranger.
Not much, is the honest answer.
But some things are true enough to say out loud.
"Beckett feels it," I say. "Don't let all that granite fool you.
He carries it like a stone in his boot, every single step, and he'd sooner die than admit as much.
But you heard him yourself, that night out on the road.
" I glance up. "When he stopped fighting you.
When he said he'd follow whoever actually knew how to lead this pack, even if it turned out to be you.
That was Beckett confessing. That is the loudest that man will ever be about being wrong in his life.
" I fit the connector back into place. "He wants to fix it.
He just hasn't the first idea how, because nobody ever taught him a feeling was a thing you could act on instead of only endure. "
Sawyer nods slowly.
"That, I understand. I spent nine years in a pack full of men who could build anything you put in front of their hands and couldn't say one tender word to save their own lives.
" He picks at a fleck of rust on the hood.
"Feeling the thing was never the hard part.
Doing something with the feeling — that's the whole mountain. "
"You'd know," I say, and I mean it as the compliment it is.
He glances at me, and something passes between us in the cooling air that I decide not to examine too closely.
"And Cade?"