Chapter 12
Twelve
Cal
We get back to the firehouse a little after two, still smelling of her smoke, and I can’t sleep for the life of me.
Eli’s down, or doing a decent impression of it.
Rhett’s in his bunk with his back to the room, too still to be actually asleep, but Rhett’s got his own weather tonight, and I know better than to walk into it.
So it’s just me, the dark bay, the tick of the engine cooling, and my whole body still lit up like I put a fork in an outlet.
The fire itself was nothing. Fifteen seconds, a bad wire, an oven that had it coming for years. I’ve run a thousand of those. That is not what’s got me flat on my back and wide awake at two in the morning.
It’s her.
Standing in the middle of that flour-bombed disaster in a sleep shirt three sizes too big, one sock on and one sock gone, waving a spent extinguisher around like a woman who has never once been rescued in her life and does not intend to start enjoying it now.
And then the laugh. God help me, that laugh.
She’s been holding herself together so tight since the day she rolled into town, quiet and careful and braced for a hit.
Then her whole shop nearly goes up, and instead of falling apart, she just cracks wide open and laughs until she’s crying.
I swear I would set a hundred goddamn kitchens on fire with my own two hands to hear it one more time.
That’s my whole problem, right there in one sentence.
Because there was something else in that kitchen tonight, under the smoke, the char, the scorched sugar, and all three of us caught it in the same half-second.
Her scent’s turning. Going deep and warm and sweet, a ripe note blooming up underneath that only ever means one thing.
She’s coming up on a heat. Her first, from the smell of her, and she hasn’t got the first clue it’s happening.
It went through me like current down a wet rope.
I had to take a step back and catch the doorframe.
Had to physically remind myself I’m a grown man and not an animal, because every instinct I own stood straight up at once and started roaring the same word.
Mine. Hers. Get her somewhere safe and warm and keep her there.
Feed her. Empty my closet of every soft thing I own, pile it in her arms, watch her build a nest out of it and climb in.
My whole body wanted to provide so hard my hands shook with it.
Six years a pack with no omega, you forget you’ve even got that gear.
Then a woman across the street starts to turn, and the engine kicks over like it was never off.
I’ve never had it land on me like that. I’ve been around omegas in heat plenty, at the station, in town, always kept my head, always been a gentleman about it.
This wasn’t that. This was my whole body picking her out of every scent in the world and filing the rest under noise.
This was me standing in her smoke at one in the morning, half hard and disgusted with myself over it, while she flailed at a fire, wanting so badly to scoop her up out of the whole mess and carry her somewhere she’d never have to flail at anything on her own again.
The part that ought to eat me alive somehow doesn’t.
I can smell Rhett on the memory of her.
I’ve been able to for a week. The night he came home from her shop light and wrong, all jokes and his eyes parked somewhere else, I knew.
You don’t run a pack six years and miss a thing like that.
Rhett got there first. Rhett always gets there first, it’s half his gift and the whole of his curse, and by any normal reading of the world I ought to be sick with jealousy about it.
I’m not. That’s the piece I keep turning over.
When I caught her on him, the very first thing that moved in me, before my head could get a hand on the wheel, was hope.
Big and dumb and painful as a cracked rib.
Because Rhett does not go quiet and strange over a good time.
He’s had a hundred good times and floated out the far side of every one of them whistling.
He went strange over this one. He’s still strange over it, lying two bunks down pretending to sleep with his back to all of us.
Part of me wants to cross the room and shake him.
Tell him whatever went down on that counter, whatever cool exit he pulled after, I saw his face when he came home that night, and it was not a man who’d had a laugh and forgotten it.
It was a man who’d been hit by something and didn’t have a joke ready for it.
But you don’t push Rhett. Push Rhett and he only gets funnier and further away.
So I leave him his back and his silence, and I hope for him too, because that’s the whole deal with a pack.
You don’t only want the girl for yourself.
You want her for your brothers just as bad, and it’s Rhett I’m lying here wanting it for hardest, which tells me something I’m not going to say out loud even in my own head.
An omega tipping into heat a stone’s throw from our door.
An omega that one of us already couldn’t walk away from.
An omega who stood in the middle of the three of us tonight in a burning kitchen and fit there like she was cut to the shape of the gap we’ve carried around for six years.
Maybe. Maybe, after all the empty bunks and all of Dot’s doomed matchmaking and that cold dead spot in the center of this pack we’ve all agreed to stop naming.
Maybe she’s the one. Maybe this is the thing finally showing up.
I let myself want it, flat on my back in the dark, just for a minute, where not one soul can see me do it.
And then the other thing arrives, like it’s arrived every day this week, quieter and a good deal meaner. What if she wants the pack, but not me.
I’ve never once had to think a thought like that in my life. Things come to me. They always have. Girls, friends, this crew, this whole town. I smile, I mean it, people smile back. I never questioned it any more than you question the sun coming up.
Wren Bailey looked at me on day one like I was a stray she was too polite to shoo off her step, and I have spent weeks now chasing that woman’s good opinion with the only tool I own, my big open grin, and it isn’t landing.
She likes me. Fine. Fine is exactly the problem.
Fine is what you feel about the nice enough fella who comes and straightens your shelf.
What she goes soft and careful over is Eli.
What she can’t stop sneaking looks at is Rhett.
And I am getting truly, cold-sweat afraid that when this whole thing lands, she’ll take the pack and I’ll be the friendly one hanging off the end of it.
Easy to have around. Easier to do without.
I don’t know what you do about that. Honest to God.
There’s no move I own for it, and it’s two in the morning, and I keep coming up empty.
Something about it scares me worse than the fire did, and I can’t even get the shape of it into words.
Rhett would have a joke ready. Eli would have a plan.
I’ve just got the dark and a want the size of a house.
Down the row, Eli shifts, and I know without looking that he’s awake, because Eli’s always awake when one of his is bleeding quiet in the dark.
He won’t say anything. That’s not him. Nobody moves until Eli moves, and he won’t move until she’s had a fair, uncrowded shot at choosing.
It’s the correct call. It’s still going to be the longest week of my entire life.
Because there’s no charming this one. All I can do is the one thing I’ve never once had to do before. Wait. Hold steady. And live with whatever she lands on, because she gets to land on it, and that’s the only piece of this whole mess I’m dead certain is right.
I roll onto my back and stare a hole in the ceiling and try to coax my heart back down out of my throat where it’s taken up residence.
A woman I have fallen for like a felled tree is asleep over her shop, building toward the hardest days her body will ever hand her, and there is not one single thing I’m allowed to do about it tonight but lie here in the dark and hope, with everything I’ve got, that when the time comes she picks all of us.
Me included.
Please. Me included.