35. Run Toward Home
Run Toward Home
~CADE~
"You got kicked out?"
My mother says it the way she used to ask whether I'd tracked mud across her clean floor — quiet, level, already knowing the answer and just waiting for me to be man enough to admit it.
She's standing at the stove with a spatula in one hand and a dish towel thrown over her shoulder, her silver-threaded hair pinned back off her face, an apron dusted white at the hip where she wiped her fingers.
Behind her, a pan of batter is going gold at the edges, filling the whole kitchen with the warm, buttery smell of pancakes.
Pancakes. Naturally.
The universe has a sense of humor, and it is not a kind one.
I didn't decide to come here.
Beckett decided it for me — pointed at the door with that flat, granite calm of his and told me to go sit at my mother's table until I understood what I'd done.
Like a kid sent to his room.
I drove the back roads out to the house I grew up in with my jaw clenched the whole way, rehearsing all the reasons I was right, and every one of them evaporated the second I caught the smell of my mother's kitchen through the screen door.
This house does that. It strips the armor off a man before he's cleared the threshold.
I shift in the hard wooden chair I've sat in for thirty years of Sunday mornings and try to hold onto the last scrap of my certainty.
"I wasn't kicked out. I was asked to take a day. There's a difference."
"Is there?" She flips a pancake without looking at it.
Nutmeg and browned butter and the faint salt-brine that clings to everything in this house drift off her, her scent as steady as she is, and it makes the sour, jangling mess of my own — spiced rum gone sharp, blood orange curdling at the edges — feel loud and childish by comparison.
Across the table, Theo snorts into his coffee.
My little brother is folded into the chair opposite me like he's been poured there, all long limbs and bedhead, a faded college hoodie swallowing his frame.
He's got Mom's dark eyes and somebody else's jaw, and right now both are aimed at me with the particular delight of a younger sibling watching an older one squirm.
Bergamot and cut cedar roll off him, bright and green and irritatingly clean.
The kitchen hasn't changed since I was small.
Same yellowed clock, same chipped blue tile, same crowded gallery of photos climbing the wall beside the door — Theo's graduations, my mother behind the Tide Table counter, the two of us as gap-toothed kids out on the dock.
There's a gap in the arrangement up near the top, a rectangle where the paint sits a shade brighter than the rest, where a picture used to hang and doesn't anymore.
Nobody has ever mentioned taking it down.
Nobody has ever mentioned the man who used to be in it, either.
"Oh, this is good," he says. "This is so good.
Why do I have a feeling you fucked up, because you just signed some temporary contract, didn't you?
" He sets his mug down and spreads his hands.
"How'd you manage to get booted this fast?
You're like one of those little penguins that waddles up to the wrong huddle and gets shoved back out onto the ice. Rejected by your own colony."
"I'm not a penguin."
"You're absolutely a penguin right now."
I'm supposed to be good at this.
Reading a room, I mean — it's the one thing I've always done better than anybody: walk into a space and take its temperature before a word gets said, know which grin to hand over, which joke will land, which wall to lean against. It's how I make my living.
Right now the entire room is reading me, and every instrument I own has gone dead in my hands.
Mayday.
"Can you not?"
"Explain it, then." He leans back, arms crossing over his chest. "Walk me through how a grown man with a house and a pack and a signature on a federal document ends up back at his mama's table before noon."
I drag a hand down my face.
The stubble rasps against my palm. I haven't slept right, haven't showered, still smell like twelve hours of spilled beer and other people's cigarettes under the citrus turning rancid in my own skin.
"I worked a double," I say. "That's the whole crime.
The bar got slammed after last call. Packed like sardines, every stool full, Renzo down two people.
I stayed to help break it all down. Then the pack showed up, weirdly enough.
Amber first, then Sawyer and August drifting in behind her.
Beckett was already there, working the floor, since he's got the experience and Renzo always calls him when it's a mess.
" I spread my own hands now, mirroring Theo without meaning to.
"They hung around a while. Then they left.
I stayed behind. That's it. That's the story. "
"Renzo called me too, you know," my mother says mildly, sliding another pancake onto the stack.
She has run the Tide Table long enough to keep every bartender and line cook in this town on speed dial, and she trades gossip like currency.
"Said the place cleared out by two. Said Beckett hung up his apron and walked out with your Omega a good hour before you decided the mop couldn't live without you.
" She still doesn't look up from the griddle. "Funny, the details a man leaves out."
Theo arches one eyebrow, slow, and I already hate whatever's coming.
"Did you have to stay?"
"I was working."
"Yeah." He drags the word out. "You'd already been working, what, six, eight hours by the time they rolled in? You could've clocked out and walked out the door with them. Since when do you pull twelve-hour shifts like some broke teenager scraping together chump change for a used dirt bike?"
I open my mouth.
Nothing useful comes out.
I close it again.
My mother sighs. It's a small sound, but it lands like a dropped plate.
"So." She turns from the stove, spatula still in hand, and fixes me with the full weight of her attention.
"Your whole pack came to the bar. Including Beckett, who was also working.
And in the end every one of them left…including Beckett, who'd been on his feet just as long as you.
So no one held a gun to your head. You weren't forced to stay behind. "
She lets that sit.
"You chose to stay behind."
"I—" The rebuttal dies in my throat, because she's right, and we both hear how right she is.
She arches an eyebrow in a mirror of Theo's, or maybe he learned it from her.
"And that's not even why you're in the doghouse."
I groan and pinch the bridge of my nose.
"No. That's not why."
"Then?" Theo props both elbows on the table and leans in, all mock-patience. "Come on, spit it out. Clock's ticking, and the sooner we know what you did, the sooner we can maybe scrape together some kind of redemption arc for your dumb ass."
"I don't need a redemption arc." My voice comes out harder than I mean it to. I plant it there anyway, because it's the only ground I've got left. "I'm confident in what I did. There's nothing to redeem."
The two of them go quiet in a way that should warn me.
It doesn't.
The truth is I don't fully understand it myself — why I keep finding reasons to be the last one left in a room, why the sight of that clean, happy table this morning made me want to turn on my heel and walk straight back out.
Leaving first is easier. It has always been easier. You can't get left behind if you're already halfway out the door with your keys in your fist. I am not going to say a word of that to the two people staring me down over a stack of pancakes, so I give them the safe version instead.
"Iris needed a ride," I say. "Her car wouldn't turn over in the lot.
Dead battery, or the starter, I don't know.
I tried to jump it off my truck, and it wouldn't take.
So I drove her home. By the time I got her there, I was running on fumes, and she could see it, said she didn't want me getting back behind the wheel half-asleep and wrapping my truck around a tree.
So she told me to crash for a couple hours.
I took the opportunity. Slept on her couch. Drove home this morning."
I sit back, satisfied, waiting for the tension to break, for someone to say oh, is that all.
Instead, they both stare at me like I've sprouted a second head right there over the syrup.
Mayday. Mayday.
The quiet stretches long enough that I can hear the batter bubbling on the griddle, the tick of that old wall clock, the distant fuss of the hens out back.
My grin — the one that's talked me out of a hundred speeding tickets and into a fair few beds — climbs onto my face out of pure reflex and finds nothing at all to hold onto.
"We didn't do anything," I add, quicker now, because the silence is starting to itch.
"I'm not into her like that. Iris knows I'm not into her like that.
It was a couch and a couple hours of sleep.
Then I came straight home, and they were all sitting around the table already, forks down, plates clean, like a done deal.
Like a real pack. And I'm standing there in the doorway like some stranger who wandered in off the road. "
"And whose fault is that?"
Theo isn't laughing anymore.
That's the thing that snags me.
The teasing's gone clean out of his voice, and underneath it is something I don't have a name for on my little brother — heat, real heat, his jaw tight and his scent gone sharp and peppery with it.
I frown at him.
"Why are you angry? You're actually angry."
"Because are you stupid?" He says it flat, no cushion. "Cade. That's cheating. What you just described is cheating."
"That is not cheating!" The chair scrapes as I shove back from the table. "Nothing happened!"