Chapter 18
Eighteen
Wren
The tally I can’t stop counting: two. In one week, I have been with two-thirds of a bonded pack, and I’ve lived in this town for six.
I lie in my nest at dawn with that number sitting on my chest like a cat, and I make myself look at it straight.
Rhett on the counter. Cal on the counter.
Two men who belong to a third, who belong to each other.
I’ve had my hands on both of them. And there’s a part of me, the loud new part, the part that built this nest out of stolen tea towels, that isn’t sorry in the slightest and wants the whole set finished.
That’s the part that scares me sober.
Because in the version of me I’ve spent twenty-eight years assembling, I am not this woman.
I’m the sensible one. The background one.
The one who keeps her wants small and her expectations lower, so the floor’s never far when she falls.
And in seven days, that woman has come completely undone, replaced by somebody who lets firemen have her on countertops and builds shrines to them in the corner of her bed.
I don’t recognize her. I can’t say I entirely disapprove of her either, which is the alarming part.
Her judgment is shot, her hands make their own plans, and she is having, frankly, a considerably better week than I am.
So I make a decision at dawn, and for once it’s one my sensible self would sign off on.
It stops. Today. No more. Whatever’s been happening this week ends before it reaches the last of them, because Eli is the one I could actually fall for, and falling is the exact thing I moved to a quiet town to avoid.
I’ve thought about it enough to be sure.
Cal, I could walk away from eventually, with a limp.
Rhett more or less walked away from me first, so we’re square.
But Eli, quiet and steady, reading me like I’m the only page in the room worth the trouble, Eli’s the one who’d get all the way in before I noticed the door was open, and then I’d be a goner, no take-backs.
So I will not hand a man like that the keys two days before my own body picks the lock.
I’ll ride the heat out solo, like I planned.
I’ll keep my hands to myself. I’ll get through it like I get through everything, with a to-do list and a stubborn streak the size of a barn.
I strap the plan on like armor and go downstairs to enforce the hell out of it.
I close early again. Lock the door. Flip the sign.
I do not look at the firehouse, not once, a discipline that costs me roughly everything I own.
And I bury myself in the festival binder, because it’s the last thing in my life with edges I can control.
Vendors. Table counts. Gus and his terrible memory.
The dessert auction Marigold ran for twenty-two years, that I now have to somehow run while running a fever that isn’t a fever and losing whole thoughts halfway through.
I make lists. I make lists of my lists. I hold the whole frayed afternoon together with paperwork and pure spite.
Every hour or so the pull toward the firehouse gets bad enough that I have to stand up, walk to the front, and press my forehead to the cool glass of the door until it passes.
I can see the firehouse from there. Lit up, warm, a whole life going on inside it without me.
Twice I catch a shape at the bay window that might be one of them, might be my own wanting drawing pictures on the dark.
Both times I make myself walk back to the binder and write down a number I don’t need.
Control is a muscle. I’ve got a lifetime of reps on it.
It has just never once been tested by anything like this.
And it works. For four hours, it genuinely works. I’m almost proud.
Then it goes dusk, and there’s a knock at the back door. Soft. Just once.
I know before I move. My whole body knows, goes warm and certain and treacherous, because only one of them knocks like that. Like he’s sorry to be a bother. Like he’d turn and go the instant you asked him to.
Eli.
I open the door, because not opening it is past me tonight.
He’s on the step with a paper sack in one hand, and the first thing he does is not come in. He stays out there in the cooling dark, leaving me the whole width of the doorway, careful as a man walking up on something that might bolt.
“Dot said you’ve stopped eating.” Low. No lead-up. “Pre-heat does that. You forget the world exists.” He holds the sack out, not stepping closer to do it. “It’s soup. And the sourdough you like. You don’t have to let me in. I just didn’t want you going into it on an empty stomach.”
That’s all. No charm. No jokes. Not one degree of heat in it, just a man who noticed I’d quit eating and quietly did something about it, already half-turned to give me back my privacy.
And that, it turns out, is the exact thing I have no armor for.
I built my whole day around holding a line against wanting.
I can do wanting. I white-knuckled wanting for four hours over a festival binder.
But this isn’t wanting he’s holding out on my back step in a paper sack.
This is being noticed. Being tended. A man showing up in the dark with soup and no agenda, ready to hand it over and vanish, asking for nothing, nothing at all.
And it goes through the armor like it was never there, faster than Cal’s warmth, faster than Rhett’s mouth, straight to the oldest, most undefended part of me.
The part that has been waiting my whole life for one single person to notice what I need without keeping a receipt.
I’ve been wanted before, here and there, enough to know the shape of it.
But wanting and paying attention turn out to be two entirely different sports, and nobody ever thought to cross-train.
Nobody learned how I take my coffee, or which bread I like, or that I skip meals when I’m wound up.
Eli’s done the lot in under a month without once letting me catch him at it, same as he fixed the oven and left the flour on my step from nobody.
And I’m working out, far too late and at the worst possible moment, that quiet is not the same thing as small.
Quiet is just what devotion looks like on a man nobody ever taught to shout.
“Eli.”
“You should eat while it’s hot.” He sets the sack down on the step when I don’t take it, because he won’t press it into my hands, won’t use even that to shrink the distance between us.
“I mean it. I’ll go. You don’t need me in your space right now, you need rest and food and quiet.
I can give you all of that from the other side of a door. ”
He turns to leave.
He’d do it, too. That’s the part that gets me.
Cal would have found a reason to linger.
Rhett would have turned it into a bit. Eli genuinely means to hand me a paper sack, walk back to the firehouse, and let me suffer in the privacy I asked for, because he decided somewhere along the line that my comfort mattered more than his own want.
Then he built his whole evening around it.
The soup. The exact bread. The single soft knock.
A man doesn’t do that for a woman he’s playing.
A man does that for a woman he’d quietly wreck himself over and never once bring it up.
And every careful thing I built today, the plan, the armor, the sensible woman I swore I’d be by morning, all of it goes out of me at once, because I cannot stand here and watch this particular man walk away from me being gentle and asking for nothing.
It’s worse than the counter. Worse than the knot.
Worse than any of it, because there’s nothing in it for him and he’s doing it anyway.
“Don’t.” I hear myself say it for the third time in a week, to the third of them, and it comes out in pieces. “Eli. Don’t go.”
He goes still on my step, back half-turned, and the whole of what I’m asking lands on him where I can see it. He weighs it. The prime. The careful one. The one who has done every single thing right while the other two didn’t.
“Wren.” His voice is low and rough. “You’re pre-heat. I won’t be a thing you regret when your head clears. Say the word, and I’m gone, and I will never hold one second of it against you.”
“I’m not saying the word.” The want is all the way up my throat now, past the guilt, past the plan, past every year of hard-won sense I own. “I’m asking you to stay. As clear as I know how to be. It’s me. It’s me asking. Please.”
For a long moment he doesn’t move at all.
Then he steps over the threshold, into my shop, into my space, and closes the door behind him with the softest click I’ve ever heard a door make. And he looks at me, finally, like a man who has just set down a weight he’s been carrying so long he forgot it wasn’t part of him.
Like he’s stopped holding the line.