Chapter 9
Nine
Wren
I wake up Friday feeling incredible, which is how I know I’m in trouble.
Every part of me is loose and warm and quietly smug.
My body had a very good night, and it would like me to know it.
I lie there a minute in the gray early light, letting myself remember.
All of it. The counter. His hands. The shocking new fact of a knot, a thing I didn’t know my body could do until it did it.
Then the rest of my brain comes online and ruins the whole mood.
Because the rest of my brain has questions.
Like: he didn’t call. Not that we swapped numbers.
Not that there was anything to call about.
But he didn’t come back either. Didn’t leave a note.
Didn’t do one single thing a person does when a thing meant something to them.
He fixed his grin, made a joke about the panel, and walked out into the evening like I was a nice way to spend forty minutes.
Which I was. Obviously. That’s the entire point of Rhett Maddox. Anyone in town could have told me. Della more or less did.
I get up. I shower. And in the shower, in a very calm and reasonable voice, I tell myself I wanted it exactly that way too.
Casual. Simple. A grown woman scratching an itch and getting on with her nice, quiet life.
It’s a good story. It has the bonus feature of being the version where I don’t feel like the biggest fool in three counties.
I almost believe it. I get all the way to the bottom of the stairs almost believing it.
Then I walk into the shop, and it’s full of them.
Not them, them. It’s barely six, and I’m alone down here.
But the smell is everywhere now, soaked into the walls, and my new and unwelcome nose sorts it out for me without being asked.
Smoke and pepper first. That’s last night.
That’s Rhett, and my whole traitor body goes warm just standing in it.
Fine. I slept with the man twelve hours ago. My body’s allowed a little riot.
Then I catch the other two.
Cedar, low and sunny, over by the shelf he crouched down and fixed without a word about it.
Cal. And by the back door, faint now, coffee and rain and worn leather, where a sack of good flour sat one morning from nobody.
Eli. And my ridiculous six-weeks-an-omega body does the exact same warm and stupid thing for both of them that it just did for the man who put me on the counter.
I stand in the middle of my own kitchen and go cold all over.
Oh, I think. Oh, no.
This is the thing I have been so carefully not looking at all week, and now it’s in the room with me, and it will not be talked out of.
It isn’t just Rhett. I truly wish it were just Rhett.
Rhett I could file under bad decision, learn my lesson, move along.
But I breathe in cedar, and I’m thinking about Cal setting my shelf straight and not keeping score.
I catch coffee and rain, and I’m thinking about Eli putting the cream by my hand before I reached for it, about flour on my step from no one, about how he looked at me over the top of a rescued cat like I was the thing worth watching in a crowd of fifty.
I want all three of them.
Not a little. Not in passing. My body has taken one good look at three enormous firemen and decided that, offered the chance, it would take the complete set and say thank you.
I have to sit down on my own floured floor for a minute.
The part that actually stings isn’t the wanting. It’s what the wanting turns me into.
My whole life I’ve been the sensible one.
The friend who holds everyone’s coats. The girl who wants so little and asks for even less that people genuinely forget to wave her into the photo.
I built a whole self out of not needing things, because not needing things is safe, and needing things is how you wind up wanting a man who walks out of your shop cracking jokes about the wiring.
I was good at it. Twenty-eight years, reliably the least trouble in any room, and I told myself I preferred it that way. Mostly I even did.
There was a man in the city once, for two years, long enough that I’d left a toothbrush at his place.
He ended it over a coffee he didn’t finish, told me I was lovely and easy and no trouble at all, like those were complaints.
I’ve thought about that word a lot since.
Trouble. How it turned out to be the one thing I most wasn’t, and, it’s dawning on me lately, most wanted to be.
I came out here for the quiet. I got it, too.
Right up until a dark-haired fireman started calling me exactly that across my own counter, like he’d read my file.
And now, three weeks into the one clean quiet life I finally built for myself, I’m a brand-new omega sitting on a bakery floor wanting three men at once.
Which is either the greediest I have ever been or the most honest, and I genuinely cannot tell which, and both are a lot to be before I’ve even had coffee.
I get up, because sitting on the floor solves nothing, and I bake, because baking is the last thing in my life that still does what it’s told.
Diner scones. The pumpkin loaves Marigold’s note swears I’ll cry over.
One practice tart that comes out closer than all the others and still not right, still short whatever secret she never wrote on the card.
By seven, I’ve almost got myself back into one piece. Then I have to carry the diner order two doors down, which means walking the whole open face of the firehouse across the street, which is where the morning finishes me off.
They’re out front with the truck, hoses run across the apron, some Friday chore.
Cal spots me first and lights up like it’s the best thing that’s happened to him all week.
“Sugar.” Warm and open, not one single thing about him different, because for him nothing is.
He doesn’t know about the counter. Rhett didn’t tell them. Of course Rhett didn’t tell them.
“Morning,” I manage, and it comes out almost normal.
It costs me more than good morning should cost a person.
Standing on a sidewalk being pleasant to a man whose best friend I had on a counter twelve hours ago, while a second one winds a hose and looks at me like he’d wind it slower if it kept me here longer.
My blood has no idea where it’s supposed to go. It settles on everywhere.
Eli goes still when my scent reaches him, just a second. His eyes lift and find me, the same as they did over that cat, quiet and sure. My knees do a thing I’d rather they didn’t.
And Rhett, off to one side with a coffee. When he sees me, he grins, big, bright, easy, and lifts the cup an inch. A little hello.
Like it was nothing.
Exactly like it was nothing.
And the awful part, the thing that tells me how far gone I already am, is that it works.
He hands me nothing, and I take it, and I file it right where my whole life has trained me to file it.
Of course it meant nothing. Of course he’s fine, why the hell wouldn’t he be.
You had a nice time with the new baker, and now it’s Friday and there’s a truck to hose down.
I’m the only one carrying anything here, which is at least a familiar way to walk down a street.
I lift my hand back. I keep walking. I make it all the way to the diner before my face does what it’s been wanting to do, which is crumple, just a little, just at the corners.
“Okay.” Della takes the scone box out of my hands and one long look at my face along with it. “Who died. Sit down.”
“Nobody died. I’m fine.” I am not fine. “Early morning. I didn’t sleep.”
She looks at me a second too long, the same beat too long the whole town keeps giving me, like they can all read a thing on me that I can’t read on myself. Then she decides not to push, this once, and pours me a coffee I didn’t ask for.
“You settling in all right?” she asks, light, except she’s reading my face too close when she asks it. “Town treating you okay?”
“The town won’t leave me alone,” I say.
She laughs like that’s exactly the right answer. “That’s how you know it likes you.” She wipes down a stretch of counter that’s already clean. “Give it time. It grows on you. Or it grows into you. I always forget which.”
I don’t know what that means. I’m starting to suspect I’m going to find out.
I hold the coffee and don’t drink it and think, very clearly: I need to understand what is happening to me. Three weeks ago, I was a beta with a quiet life and a locked door. Now I’m a woman who wants three of a thing, and nobody handed me a manual on the way out of presenting.
Somebody in this town knows how this works. Somebody could tell me whether this is my own poor character or just biology being loud, whether wanting three is a disaster or just a regular day.
I look at Della, topping off the sugar jars, humming, completely at home in whatever she is.
Maybe I’ll ask her. Not today. Today I’m going home to bake until my hands stop shaking, and to practice, one more time, the thing I’m apparently best at in the whole world.
Pretending I’ve got a single part of this under control.
I only wish it worked on me like it does on everybody else.