30. On His Knees #2
"Wouldn't that just be worth the plot, though?" I grin down at him, drunk and thoroughly delighted with my own self. "The big, bad, granite Beckett Shaw, brought all the way down onto his knees, begging me to take him back." I hum, savoring the picture of it. "Now that's a story worth telling."
"A story." He repeats it flatly, though the corner of his mouth is fighting a hard, losing battle against a smile. "You want a whole story out of me now, Apricot?"
"I want the entire saga," I inform him primly. "Groveling and all. Especially the groveling."
He arches an eyebrow, and something dangerous kindles to life behind it.
"Is that what’s going to get me forgiven?" His voice drops low. "Me. On my knees."
The question sends a bolt of something hot straight down my spine, because he doesn't ask it the way a man plays along. He asks it the way a man takes notes.
Like I've just handed him a specification, and he fully intends to meet it to the letter.
I loop my arms around his neck and lean in close — close enough to feel the warmth radiating off the line of his jaw, close enough that my nose brushes his.
"Beckett Shaw does not go down on his knees for a living soul," I inform him, matter-of-fact, because it is simply a fixed law of my universe. "That's an August thing…or hell, a Sawyer thing."
I can picture the two of them easy — August folding down like devotion is a language he was born already fluent in, Sawyer dropping with that wicked grin like kneeling is just a dare he's decided to win.
"But not you. You're granite and tradition and old-school Alpha straight down to the marrow. You don't bend. You're not built to." I pat his broad chest, fond. "It's one of the handful of things I know for absolute certain about you."
He goes quiet at that.
Studies me a long, unreadable moment, the fire snapping and shifting between us.
"Is that right," he says at last, low, and there's something moving behind his eyes I can't quite put a name to — something that looks an awful lot like a man being handed a challenge he has already, privately, decided to win.
So when he kisses me again — hard, sudden, hungry, one hand fisting lightly in my curls — and then rises, scooping me clean up off his lap like I weigh less than the whisky bottle, I know exactly what comes next.
He's going to carry me straight into that house, up the stairs, and take me apart in a proper bed, the direct and certain and ceremony-free way Beckett Shaw does absolutely everything under the sun.
That is not what happens.
He carries me three whole steps…and sets me down.
On the wide, flat stone bench we've been perched on all night, the fire crackling warm and gold at my side.
Then Beckett Shaw — granite and tradition and old-school clean down to the bone, the man I'd have bet the entire harbor and my own cottage besides would never once bend for a living soul…
— gets down onto his knees in the grass in front of me.
My eyes go wide.
My whole brain stalls out mid-thought.
I'm dreaming. I've had too much whisky, I've dozed off against the warm stone, and this is a very lovely, very drunk dream.
Because that cannot possibly be Beckett kneeling in the wet grass at my feet, tipping that ridiculous, wonderful cowboy hat back off his brow to look up at me.
But it is.
It's him. On his knees.
For me.
The firelight catches the sharp planes of his face and tips his dark eyes to warm amber, and he looks up at me from down there in the grass with no shame in it whatsoever — no performance, no awareness of the two other men gone dead silent across the yard.
Just me.
Like I am the only thing in the whole wide dark world worth getting down on his knees for.
"I'd do anything for you, Sweet Apricot," he says, low, rough, and dead serious, both of his big warm hands settling over my knees. "And if that means getting down here in the dirt and begging you, then I'll beg. I'll beg all night if that's what it takes."
His thumbs stroke slow, steady circles over my kneecaps.
"I'm tipsy as all hell right now. I'll grant you that much freely. But I am not one bit stupid enough to lose you a second time. So forgive me, baby. I mean every word of it. I am never sinning again when it comes to you. Not once. Not ever."
Every word of it lands in a place I haven't let a single living person touch in five years.
Here's the thing I understand, kneeling-drunk man and all: this is not the whisky talking.
Whisky-induced talks are different. I've been swimming in it all night — it slurs, rambles, or forgets its own name halfway through a sentence.
This is the clean opposite of that.
This is a man who thought every one of these words through stone-cold sober, hours ago, days ago, and is only now finding, at the bottom of a bottle, the nerve to say them out loud, in the dirt, in front of everyone he knows.
I'm speechless.
Completely, catastrophically speechless — which, you can ask anyone who's ever met me, is not a common condition I find myself in.
A low, appreciative whistle cuts clean through the dark from the direction of the far bench.
"Well, damn," Sawyer says, pure delight soaking every letter of it.
"Hold on. Hold on, I need to document this for posterity.
" August's voice, bright and wicked. "I'm getting this on a recording.
For the archives. So that the very next time Beckett Shaw stands there insisting he 'doesn't do grand gestures,' I can produce hard, timestamped evidence in a court of law. "
Beckett doesn't so much as glance away from me.
"Fuck off, ‘flower boy’," he says, pleasant as a Sunday. I guess the nickname has to go with August which is kinda of amusing to acknowledge. "Or better yet — go fuck Sawyer. Put all that energy toward something useful for once in your life."
There's a beat of pure, ringing, stunned silence — and then August makes a strangled little noise, and even by firelight I can watch the blush go tearing straight up his neck to the very tips of his ears.
Sawyer loses it.
He laughs so hard he nearly tips off the back of the bench, the warm rolling sound of it carrying clean across the whole yard, and August shoves at his shoulder, which does precisely nothing to help either of their cases.
"You're both children," Beckett informs the fire, still not looking away from me.
"And you're the one down in the mud on his knees, cowboy," Sawyer calls back, wiping at his eyes. "People in glass houses."
"It's grass. And I'd do it again tomorrow." He says the last part quiet, just to me, and it lands square in the middle of my chest.
"God, they really are going to be insufferable about this," August murmurs — but he's smiling, soft and undefended, watching Beckett watch me.
I catch the exact moment Sawyer notices him smiling like that — the laughter draining right out of him, something far warmer settling in to take its place.
I look back down at the man kneeling in front of me — this stubborn, traditional, granite-hearted man who just bent all the way down for me in front of God and his packmates and the wide indifferent night — and I let myself smile.
Really smile, the whole of it, no armor left on it anywhere.
"I forgive you, Beckett," I say softly.
The words cost me more than I braced for.