Chapter 21
Twenty-One
Wren
I wake the next morning having completed the set, and my first coherent thought is that I’ve comprehensively lost the plot, and it is not returning my calls.
Eli’s gone. He stayed until I slept, exactly like he said, and at some point in the night, he eased out from under me, tucked the quilt tighter, and let himself out so quietly I never stirred.
The soup bowl’s washed and drying in the rack.
There’s a note on the counter in careful block capitals.
EAT SOMETHING. LOCK THE BACK DOOR. No signature, because it’s Eli, and Eli signs things by the fact that they got done.
I lie in my nest, which now smells of all three of them so thoroughly it might as well have their names on the lease, and I take an honest inventory of my situation.
In one week, I have slept with an entire bonded pack.
Individually. On my own counter, mostly.
I have a note from one of them telling me to eat, a flannel from another I never gave back, and a third I keep catching a burnt-sugar sweetness off that I still can’t name.
I moved to this town a month ago to become nobody’s anything, and I have overachieved so completely in the opposite direction that I’ve become, apparently, everybody’s.
My body has, in one month, gone from beta-quiet to this.
A thing that runs a fever, builds nests, and points itself at a firehouse like a compass with strong opinions.
I decline to discuss what it’s been doing to my laundry.
Nobody warns you that presenting late is less like flipping a switch and more like getting a rowdy new roommate who moves in overnight, rearranges all your furniture, and starts making decisions about your love life without so much as a damn vote.
I don’t recognize half of what I want anymore.
The other half I recognize perfectly well and would rather not discuss.
My whole body has become an argument I’m losing.
It wants toward the firehouse like water wants downhill, constant, patient, impossible to reason with.
Twice now I’ve caught myself with my hand flat on the back door, no memory of walking to it.
Once with my phone open to nothing, thumb hovering over a call I hadn’t decided to make.
My skin’s too tight. My own clothes feel like a personal insult.
And under all of it, steady as a drumbeat, there’s one clear demand my body keeps making, and my head keeps vetoing, back and forth, a standoff I am going to lose the exact second the heat proper lands.
It should worry me. It doesn’t. I don’t feel wrecked about it, and I keep waiting to.
I keep poking the bruise, expecting the good sharp shame that’s kept me sensible all my life.
Instead, I mostly feel warm, and terrified, and like a woman at the top of a very tall diving board she doesn’t remember climbing.
Because it’s today. I know it in my bones, in the fever that isn’t a fever, in the pull toward that shared wall that’s quit being a hum or a shout and become a hand around my whole spine.
Dot said two days. Dot was generous. It’s coming today, maybe within the hour, and when it lands, I won’t have a single sensible thought left to my name.
You can feel it building, if you’ve never had one, like standing under a sky that’s made up its mind to storm.
The air gets heavy. Your skin gets loud.
Every alpha scent for a mile lights up like a landing strip.
There are three of them, and my body has helpfully memorized the route.
It’s taking every scrap of the sensible woman I’ve got left to point myself the other way.
So I do the only thing a woman with no sensible thoughts left can do. I make a plan, quickly, while I’ve still got the wiring for it.
The plan is this. I ride it out alone.
I know how it sounds. I’ve had the whole speech from Dot, the warm version and the practical one.
I know there are three men forty feet away who would come at a text, who would, from the sound of the last week, come at a whisper.
I know that white-knuckling a first heat by yourself is the hard way, the lonely way, and the entirely unnecessary way.
I’m doing it anyway, and not because I’ve suddenly gone brave.
The opposite. I’m doing it because I’m a coward about exactly one thing, and it’s this.
The heat itself, I can handle. What I’m shaky on is three days of needing them down to the marrow, out loud, no armor, and then having to find out afterward whether any of it was real.
If I keep the door shut, I never have to know.
I stay a woman who could have had it and chose not to risk it, which is a much more comfortable woman to be than one who reached for the whole beautiful thing and came up short.
That’s the shape of me, if you hold it to the light.
I’d rather want a thing forever from behind glass than risk holding it and being told to hand it back.
It’s not caution, whatever I call it to be able to live with it.
But knowing that changes precisely nothing, which Dot warned me about and I didn’t listen to, which is fast becoming a pattern where Dot’s concerned.
It’s a bad plan. I’m aware. It’s mine, and I’m committing to it with the whole of my rapidly dwindling reason.
I get up, which takes a truly humiliating amount of effort, and I provision like I’m expecting a siege.
Water, cases of it, up the stairs two at a time until two at a time stops being possible.
Crackers, because Dot said I’d forget to eat and then be furious about it.
I stack it all by the bed like sandbags against a flood.
I charge my phone, per Dot, set it where I can reach it.
Then I stare at it a while, because a charged phone within reach is only useful if you’re a woman who’d actually pick it up, and I’m specifically engineering myself not to be.
I text Della, keeping the shop shut a few days, family thing.
She texts back a single line, take care of yourself, honey, and a heart.
That little heart makes my eyes sting, which is new, and which I blame entirely on the hormones and not at all on the fact that a woman I’ve known a month is the nearest thing to family I’ve had in years.
I do not text the firehouse. I look at the phone for a long, weak minute, my thumb actually hovering, my whole traitor body leaning toward it, and then I put it face down and step away like it’s hot.
Then I go up, and I look at the nest one more time.
It’s enormous now. It’s spilled out of the corner and taken over half the bed, every soft thing I own plus a collection of stolen fireman I’ll be returning by mail from a great distance once I’ve relocated to a new identity.
It smells like the best thing I’ve ever made.
Cedar and sun. Coffee and rain. Smoke and pepper and that sweet note underneath.
It smells like home. I’m too worn down tonight to pretend it doesn’t.
I’ve made a lot of things in this bakery in four short weeks.
Bread that made grown men close their eyes.
Marigold’s cinnamon rolls, close enough to hers to make Della go quiet.
But this nest, this shameful, honest heap of stolen laundry, is the truest thing I’ve built since I got here, and it took my body doing it behind my own back to manage it.
My hands knew what I wanted before I’d let my head say it out loud.
They usually do. It’s why I bake. The dough has never once lied to me, and it turns out neither has whatever it is that built this.
I’ve spent a month calling this town a nice place to disappear.
It has, at no point, cooperated. It fed me when my shop caught fire.
It fixed my oven, ran my festival, refused, cheerfully, to let me be nobody at all.
And somewhere in there, without asking me first, it quit being a place I was hiding and started being a place I live.
The nest is just my body admitting it out loud, in the only language it’s got, with a pile of alpha-scented tea towels.
I could just not do this the hard way. The thought arrives, quiet and reasonable, in Dot’s voice.
I could send one text. I could open the door instead of locking it.
I could let three men who have, all evidence suggests, been waiting six years for me specifically see me through the worst and best days my body will ever hand me, and find out, maybe, that being wanted a lot doesn’t actually kill a person.
The heat chooses that exact moment to roll through me hard enough that I have to sit down on the edge of the bed and hold on. It takes the reasonable thought, the diving board, and most of my remaining vocabulary with it.
When it passes, I’m shaking, slick, and completely certain of exactly one thing. It isn’t the sensible one.
I want them. All three. So badly, it has stopped being a feeling and started being a fact of the weather.
Which is precisely why I get up, on legs that barely work, and go downstairs, and turn the deadbolt on the back door with a hand that will not stay steady.
Lock the door, Eli’s note says, face up where I left it.
“I’m working on it,” I tell the note, and lock myself in with a body that has already made a decision my head is still, stubbornly, stupidly, refusing to sign.
Two days. Maybe less.
Alone.
It’s going to be the dumbest brave thing I’ve ever done.