34. Pancakes For Four #3
Cade comes into the kitchen doorway looking rumpled and easy, hair mussed, a day's worth of bar on him. He rubs the back of his neck and gives us all a loose, unbothered smile — the reading-the-room grin, except this once it's misreading the room entirely.
"Yeah, sorry." He yawns. "Bar got slammed after close, so I stuck around to help Renzo break it all down.
Then Iris' car wouldn't turn over in the lot — dead as a doornail.
I tried to jump it off mine, but the battery's just gone, so I ran her home instead.
" He shrugs, wandering toward the coffee pot like this is any other morning.
"By then I was dead on my feet. Didn't want to drive all the way back out here half-asleep.
She said crash on her couch, so I crashed on her couch. Got a couple hours in and headed back."
He says it the way you'd report the weather.
I stop drying the plate in my hands.
Down the counter, Sawyer goes still with a clean plate held halfway to the shelf, the muscle in his jaw ticking once.
By the window, August's thumbs stop moving. He lifts his head slowly, phone forgotten, and there's a careful blankness settling over his face that I've learned to recognize as the most dangerous thing August does.
"Wait." August's voice is very even. "What?"
Cade turns, the coffee pot in his hand, and blinks at us like we're the ones being strange. His forehead creases. He genuinely doesn't understand, and that — that's the part that lands like a stone in my stomach.
"I said Iris' car broke down," he repeats, slower, as if we've all simply failed to hear him the first time. "So I slept on her couch and came back this morning. It's not a big—"
Beckett sets the cloth down on the table.
He does it quietly, folding it once, and somehow the softness of the gesture is louder than a slam. He lifts one hand and points, past all of us, at the door Cade just walked through.
"Out."
Cade laughs, short and confused.
"Huh?"
"Out." Beckett's voice doesn't rise. It goes the other direction, down into bedrock. "Go stay at your mother's for the day. Sit with what you just told us. And when you've actually understood it…every word of it…you can come back."
Cade's eyes cut to August.
It's instinct, I think, muscle memory, the old pack reflex — August is the smoother, the one who steps between and translates everyone down into softer versions of themselves, the one who makes the hard things survivable.
Cade looks to him now like a man reaching for a rope he's always found waiting.
August looks back at him and says nothing at all.
The silence stretches.
My hand has started to shake around the plate, a fine tremor I can't seem to stop, and there's a heat climbing the back of my throat that I recognize as the ugly cousin of tears.
The pit in my stomach isn't sadness yet.
Right now it's pure, white anger, and it's screaming so loud in my head I'm half afraid they can hear it.
You stayed the night at a woman's place…a coworker, a pretty one, one who smells like she's still on your collar…to "nap," and you came home and told us over coffee like it's nothing. Like there's nothing here to break.
I feel the spike coming, the sharp spiced-citrus edge my scent takes on when I'm furious, and I clamp down on it with everything I've got.
I will not give him that.
I reach for another plate off the rack and make myself dry it, slow circles, an anchor for my hands.
Warm fingers close gently over mine and lift the plate away before I can crack it.
Sawyer.
He doesn't say a word. He just takes it, sets it down, and stays close at my shoulder, a wall of magnolia and quiet fury I could lean into if my knees gave.
Then August's hand appears in my line of sight, resting light on the counter beside me. His voice, when it comes, is pitched soft and only for me.
"Didn't you have a phone call to make, Amber?"
I look up at him.
His eyes meet mine and hold, steady and warm and deliberate, and I understand exactly what he's doing. He's handing me the door. He's giving me the exit before I have to admit out loud that I need one — the same courtesy I've watched him extend to a hundred cornered people, turned now on me.
He knows. He always does…
"Ah." My voice comes out thinner than I'd like. I clear it. "Yes. I do. I'll…go take care of that."
I set the towel down.
I keep my chin level and my steps even, and I walk out of that kitchen like a woman with a genuine appointment, not a woman fleeing before she says something that can't be unsaid. I make it to the stairs.
I make it up the first several, one hand on the smooth old banister.
I'm halfway up when Cade's voice cuts through the house behind me, sharp with disbelief.
"Okay, seriously…what the fuck is the problem here? I've crashed at Iris' place a couple times before. Slept it off on her couch. Nobody said a damn word about it then."
My foot stops on the stair.
I know I should keep climbing. I know the merciful thing, the dignified thing, is to shut myself in a room and let the men handle their own.
My legs won't cooperate.
I make it to the top of the staircase, and I stop there, pressed against the wall of the upstairs hall where they can't see me, and I listen. I've never been good at not knowing. Fine print is a compulsion.
I hunt the terms of everything, even the terms of my own heartbreak.
I sink down until I'm sitting on the top step, out of sight, knees drawn up, the old floorboards cool through the thin robe. My pulse knocks in my ears.
Below me the kitchen has gone silent in that held-breath way a room takes on right before it breaks.
For a moment there's only the low rumble of Beckett saying something I can't make out, the words too quiet to carry.
Then a sound I feel in my own teeth — a sharp, flat crack of impact, skin on skin, and a stumble.
The silence after it is enormous.
"Did you—" Cade's voice, gone high and stunned. "Did you just punch me?"
"And I'll do it the fuck again." Beckett. Low, level, absolutely certain. "You want to test me on that, keep talking."
"Beckett—"