Chapter 8
Eight
Rhett
I make it two blocks before my legs remember what they’re for.
I keep the walk easy the whole way down Main, hands in my pockets, loose, in case she’s watching through the glass. A man who does this all the time and thinks about it none. That’s the performance, and I nail it, because performing is the one thing I have never once failed at.
Then I turn the corner, out of sight of the shop, and put my back against the cold brick of the hardware store, because my knees have quietly stopped holding me up.
That was not supposed to happen.
It was supposed to be a bit of fun. A week of good flirting cashed in, an itch scratched, both of us grinning, no harm done to anyone. I’ve done it a hundred times. I’m a little famous for it around here. Rhett Maddox, good time, no follow-up questions.
Instead, I’m around the side of a building with my heart going like a fist on a door, and every part of me that isn’t my brain is trying to walk me back to that door.
It’s the knot that did it. Not even a real one.
Just the small one, the everyday one, the one I’ve given and forgotten a dozen times without a second thought.
Except I have never once given it to her.
And the second I felt her clamp down around it, felt her come apart on the end of it with my name in her mouth and her whole body begging for more, the animal in me that’s been asleep for six years stood straight up and howled.
Mine. Ours. Keep her.
That’s the alpha talking. The alpha is an idiot. The alpha is also, I’m terrified to notice, completely correct.
I can still smell her all over me. Sugar, warm bread, that clean orange peel, and under it the part that’s just her, and it’s turning my mouth to water on a public street like a stray.
My cock’s still half hard in my jeans over the memory.
I want to go back. I want to climb through that window, put her up on the counter again, and not leave until neither of us can stand.
I want to feed her. That’s the part that scares the shit clean out of me.
Not the wanting to knot her, any alpha with a pulse would want that.
The wanting to feed her. You don’t feel that over a good time. You feel that over your omega.
My hands won’t quit remembering her. The weight of her thighs.
The little hitch in her breath right before she broke.
How she grabbed my shirt first, before I could get to her, like she’d decided about me a while back and only just owned up to it.
I’ve had plenty of women decide about me.
Not one of them ever looked at me afterward like Wren did in that last quiet minute, tied to me, seeing clean through the act to whatever’s hiding behind it.
Nobody looks behind it. I don’t let them. She didn’t ask my permission.
She’s not mine. She’s not ours. She presented three weeks ago. She doesn’t know the first thing about any of this. And I went and made her first knot ever a quick one on a bakery counter, from a man who walked out ten seconds later cracking jokes about the wiring.
Which brings me to the jokes.
There’s a thing about me the other two have never fully worked out, and I’ve bent over backward to keep it that way.
The jokes aren’t the wrapping paper. The jokes are the whole gift.
Under them there’s a guy nobody ordered, a loud kid who figured out early that funny gets you kept and quiet gets you left.
I grew up in a house that was always one wrong word from a fight, and somewhere around six I learned that if I could get everybody laughing, the wrong word didn’t come.
So I got everybody laughing. Every day. It was a job, and I was good at it, the best, and the lesson sank all the way to the bone.
You are worth exactly as much as the room is enjoying you.
Stop being fun, and watch how fast the warmth goes out of a place.
New school, new town, new house, whatever the year handed me, the drill never changed.
Walk in. Find the laugh. Get kept. It’s worked my whole life.
What it’s never once gotten me is a single person who wanted the part that isn’t funny, because I’ve never let anybody near it long enough to find out.
So I’m the good time. I’m always the good time. And ten minutes ago, tied to a woman who looked at me like she could see the actual person under the act, I felt the whole thing crack down the middle, and I did what I always do when it cracks.
I put the grin back on, and I left light.
Made a crack about the panel. Winked. Told my knees to hold and strolled out like she was any old day.
Handed her every reason to file it where it costs me the least. Under nothing.
Under Rhett being Rhett. Because if she thinks it meant nothing, then later, when she doesn’t want the loud one, when she picks Cal’s easy sunshine or Eli’s steady quiet and leaves me on the outside looking in, I’ll have already sworn it was a joke.
You can’t break a man’s heart over a thing he swore was a laugh.
I made sure of the exit before I even walked in.
I always do. I’ve had a lot of practice getting gone before the door shuts on me.
The truly stupid part is the pack.
Because I didn’t just tumble the new baker.
I tumbled the first omega to walk into our lives in six years.
The one all three of us have been circling like it’s nothing.
The one who could actually be it, the missing piece, the reason the house has felt cold for so long we quit mentioning it.
And I got there first, alone, without a single word to my prime, which is not how a pack does this.
Eli leads. Eli always leads, and he should have led here.
Instead, the clown jumped the gun on a bakery counter because he couldn’t keep his hands in his pockets, and now she probably thinks the whole pack’s just three guys chasing a good afternoon.
And even if I haven’t wrecked it, even if she gives us all a shot, I know exactly how that math runs.
Cal will make her laugh and mean every word.
Eli will make her feel safe, the thing he does for all of us without seeming to try.
And I’ll be the one she has fun with. The seasoning.
Nice to have, easy to do without. That’s the role.
I’ve played it in every group I’ve ever stood in.
There’s no reason on earth a woman that sharp would write me any different.
I might have wrecked it. For all of us. That’s a fresh low, even by my standards.
I push off the wall. Legs work again. Good for them.
I should tell them. Walk into the house tonight and tell Eli straight, take whatever he gives me, because he won’t shout, he’ll just look, and Eli’s looks land like a verdict where mine only ever land like weather.
I’m not going to tell them tonight. I already know it.
I’ll get home, and Cal will ask how the alarm went, and I’ll say fine.
Eli will hold his eyes on me one beat too long, like he does, and I’ll make a joke to slide out from under it.
Then I’ll carry my wrecked heart up to my room and sit on it in the dark.
Because there’s a truth I can’t say out loud to anybody, least of all the two men who’d actually get it.
I don’t want to share this one and go back to being the funny one on the edge of the frame.
I want her to want me. Me. The person, not the party.
And there has never in my life been a version of Rhett Maddox that got wanted for the quiet part, so I’ll take the counter, the joke, the light exit, and I’ll call it plenty, because it’s already more than I ever really expected to hold.
I catch my own scent on the air as I go, and it’s slipped, the thing I keep chained down under the smoke and the pepper.
That sweet note. The one I’ve spent my entire life making sure nobody gets close enough to catch.
It’s leaking off me like I’ve been split open, and if Eli’s home when I walk in, he’ll smell it in a heartbeat.
So I stop on the corner. I breathe it back in. I bank it down and lock it up where it lives, behind the noise. Safe. Useless. Mine.
Then I put my hands in my pockets, fix the grin back on my face, and walk home to my pack like a man who had a perfectly ordinary afternoon.