29. The Last Twinkie #2
I nod, slow, against her lips. "Yeah. No one else. No one ever came close." I stop, then say it plain, because she's drunk and honest and maybe by the fire I can be too. "Nobody but you has been able to do a single thing to me in five years, Apricot. Just you."
She grins, wide and delighted, and tilts in until her lips barely brush mine — not a kiss, just the promise of one — and I have to grip the edge of the bench with my free hand and remind myself, firmly, that she is three whiskies past the point of being able to say yes to anything my body's currently suggesting.
I make myself lean back an inch, putting good air between us before I do something we'd both need to be sober to survive. I pick up the half-eaten Twinkie. "My turn," I say. "One more question. For a piece."
She lights right up. "Okay!"
"Would you take us back?" I keep it light, like her answer isn't the only thing I've wanted all night. "The three of us. Would you?"
She hums, tapping one finger against her bottom lip — a deeply unfair thing to be doing right now, in my lap, that red lipstick mostly kissed and eaten away — and weighs it with the enormous seriousness of the very drunk. Then she shrugs, easy as breathing.
"Only you," she says, poking a slightly unsteady finger square into my chest. "And August."
I go still.
Not — not Cade. I can't keep it off my face, the shock of it, because five minutes ago she said she wanted us to be a pack again, and again has meant three men since we were boys.
She watches me take it in — and then, like she's driving a nail home, like she needs me to be certain she means it, she takes a slow, deliberate bite of the Twinkie.
"Oh," I manage. "Uh. Really?"
She leans back in my lap, holds up the very last bite of the Twinkie between two fingers, and looks at me with eyes that are drunk but suddenly, startlingly clear. "If I said," she murmurs, "that I only want it to be us four. You. August. And Sawyer." She tilts her head. "Would you support me?"
The last bite hovers there between us, waiting on my answer, and my whole chest pulls tight.
Sawyer's voice comes back to me out of the dark, from that road, from the standoff where he took me apart with nothing but the plain truth.
You didn't spare her a choice. You stole one.
He was right that night, and he's righter now in a way he doesn't even know: if I don't fight for this woman — if I sit here and let old loyalty and old habit pick my path for me one more time — I will lose her.
For good, this time. No aisle left to be late to. Just gone.
I finally understand, sitting here, why she drank herself sideways tonight. It wasn't the bar-hop. It wasn't us. It's that three of us walked off our own night to chase her down a street — and the fourth stayed behind his bar.
Cade stayed. That's the whole ache sitting underneath all her giggling.
He'll tell himself the bar needed him, that he couldn't just abandon his shift — but that's a story, and every man here knows it's a story.
The Driftglass is Renzo's, not his. He picks up shifts there as a favor, an excuse, a way to keep his restless hands busy.
His real work — his whole career, same as mine — is the wedding, and we're all of us off tomorrow, every last one.
There was staff enough tonight that Cade could have walked out that door the exact same way I did, if he'd wanted to.
He didn't want to. Or he wanted to and couldn't make his own feet obey, which — knowing Cade — is the sadder and likelier truth of it.
Either way, she felt it. She felt him choose the bar over her, again.
She drowned the feeling in whisky and a snack cake, and she'd never once admit it to a single one of us sober.
But she's admitting it now. She's telling me, right here, in the only language a woman this proud will ever let herself use it in — drunk, joking, hiding the whole of her heart inside a Twinkie.
Signals. She's been throwing them all night long, and five years ago I'd have missed every last one, too busy managing my pack to actually hear the Omega standing in the middle of it.
Not this time. Unlike Cade — unlike the man still hiding behind a bar he doesn't even own — I am, for once in my sorry life, going to listen to what my Omega is telling me she wants.
"Yes," I say. Earnest, plain, no joke to duck behind and no apology folded up small inside it. Just the word. "Yes. Whatever you want, Amber. If that's the shape you want it, I'm in. I'll back you the whole way."
She stares into my eyes, long and hard, searching me for the lie — and doesn't find one, because there isn't one to find.
So I lean in and take that last bite of Twinkie from her fingers.
But I make it a risk. I make it a promise — my mouth closing warm and slow over her fingertips, drawing the sweetness clean off each one, my eyes locked on hers the entire time so she can see all the way down into me.
So she can see I mean every word. Every action. All of it.
I can't fight this one for Cade. That's the hard truth sitting in my chest, heavy and warm as the woman in my lap.
I love that man like a brother — have loved him since we were boys skipping stones off the town dock — but I cannot reach inside him and make him choose her.
I can't drag him across the finish line by the collar.
I can't fight his battles for him. Not this one.
Not the only one that has ever truly mattered.
Because that's the exact mistake I already made, isn't it.
Five years ago, I was the one meant to lead this pack.
Me. On the single most important morning of all our lives, I stood at the front of that chapel and I listened to Cade — to his fear, to his bone-deep certainty that leaving was the only way to keep everyone safe — instead of planting my feet and standing up for the woman I loved.
I followed him out that door. I let his panic be my compass.
I have regretted it every single day of the five years since.
I will not do it again. I will not set myself on fire one more time to keep Cade Mercer warm.
If he can't find his own road back to her — if he keeps on choosing the safe dark corner behind his bar over the woman coming apart in front of him — then that is his choice to make, same as the leaving was mine to make once.
If that means he's the one left behind this time, then so be it.
So be it.
I look down at the woman glowing gold in my lap — drunk and honest and finally, finally telling me the plain truth of what she wants — and I make her a promise over the top of her curls.
The silent kind. The iron kind.
The kind I should have made her five years ago at the front of that chapel, and didn't.
Because I’m never losing my grasp on Amber ever again.