Chapter 24
Twenty-Four
Wren
By hour four, I understand my mistake completely, and it is far too damn late to do anything about it.
The heat isn’t a fever. Calling it a fever was optimistic.
A fever you sweat out under a blanket with a bad TV show.
This is my whole body turned into one long demand, a want so total there’s no corner of me left over to want anything else with.
My skin hurts. Not aches. Hurts, like the air’s gone too rough for it.
I’m slick, shaking, empty with no polite word for it, a deep physical emptiness that keeps telling me, over and over, exactly what would fill it.
Three exact things, if we’re counting. My body has a very specific shopping list, and it is not subtle about the brands.
It comes in waves, and they’re getting closer together.
Between them, I get a minute, maybe two, where I’m almost a person again, where I can breathe and drink some of the water I hauled up the stairs and hate myself in complete sentences.
Then the next one builds low in my spine, breaks over me, and I stop being a person.
I become a single furious want with a woman wrapped loosely around it.
Nothing I ever read about heats used small enough words.
Nobody warned me it would feel less like desire and more like drowning very politely.
I’m in the nest because it’s the only place that helps, and it barely does.
I’ve got my face buried in Cal’s flannel, Eli’s gloves fisted against my chest, a tea towel that still smells of Rhett pressed to my mouth.
Their scents take the edge off for about ninety seconds at a stretch.
Then my body works out it’s been handed a photograph of water and starts screaming for the real thing again.
I have tried everything a woman alone can try.
I’ll spare us both the details. It’s like scratching an itch through a cast. It gets me nowhere.
It makes it worse. And somewhere around the third attempt I actually laugh, because of course this is how it goes.
I built a nest out of three men, locked the door on all three, and now I’m stuck in it like a cautionary tale.
The stubbornness is the last thing to go.
For four hours, it holds the line for me. I do not text. I do not open the door. I lie in my ridiculous shrine and grit my teeth and tell myself this is fine, this is what I chose, I am a strong independent omega who does not need three firemen to survive a day.
It’s a good speech. I’ve given myself worse ones and believed them for years.
It works right up until it doesn’t, because the body doesn’t argue with your speeches.
It just waits, patient as weather, for you to run out of them.
Then it takes the wheel, and there is not one proud word in the whole English language that outvotes what mine wants right now.
And then, somewhere in the fifth hour, when the ache rolls through me hard enough that I curl around it and make a sound I’ve never made before, the stubbornness just quietly sets down its sign and goes home.
Because I can’t argue with it anymore, however sensible I’ve tried to be. It isn’t only that my body wants them. My body’s an animal, my body would take any warm alpha with a pulse, and it wouldn’t mean a thing.
But I don’t want any alpha. I want them.
Cal’s dumb warm laugh. Eli’s quiet that lands on a room like a hand.
Rhett’s mouth. I want to be looked after by the three specific idiots who fixed my oven, rescued a cat, and called my scorched shop ours.
And I locked them out to prove I didn’t need them, and all I’ve proved, curled up sobbing into a stolen flannel at four in the afternoon, is that I’m a coward with excellent taste.
The shame I was so scared of, the whole reason for the locked door, turns out to be nothing next to this.
I was so sure that needing them out loud would cost me.
Shaking, fevered, slick-soaked in a nest that smells like all three of them, I finally do the math the right way round.
Not needing them is what’s costing me. It’s cost me a whole afternoon of hell, alone, for nothing, to protect a pride that has never once, in twenty-eight years, kept me warm.
I reach for my phone.
I’ve kept it charged, per Dot, kept it right where I could get to it, because some smarter, kinder part of me apparently didn’t trust the plan any more than she should have.
My hand’s shaking so hard I nearly drop the damn thing.
I don’t even have their number. I’ve slept with an entire fire department, and I don’t have a single one of their numbers, which is the most on-brand fact of my entire life.
A month in this town, three men through my bed, a nest the size of a twin mattress, and I can’t dial one of them, because dialing would’ve meant admitting, at some point, that I planned to.
I laugh. It comes out more like a sob. The two have been running together for the last hour anyway.
I could text Della. I could text Dot. I could call the non-emergency line and tell them I’m having, technically, a personal emergency involving three of their staff.
I get as far as opening the messages. My thumb hovers. Every scrap of pride I own is screaming that asking is the dangerous thing, that if I ask and they come and it’s just biology, just three good men doing the decent thing for the new girl, I’ll have handed over the last card I was holding.
And under the pride, quieter, in a voice that sounds unnervingly like Dot’s, one true thing. Being brave and being alone are not the same thing. You’ve had them confused your whole life.
“Okay,” I say, to nobody, to the nest, to the empty room, my voice wrecked. “Okay. Fine. You win.”
I don’t know who I’m talking to. My body. Dot. The stubborn woman finally leaving the building.
I start to type a message to Della that I already know is going to be humiliating and necessary. Please. I need. Can you…
I don’t finish it.
Because that’s the exact second somebody knocks on my back door.
Not loud. Not a pounding. Three raps, even and unhurried, patient as anything, from a hand I would know in the dark, at the bottom of a well, at the end of the world.
I go completely still.
Then, low and steady through the wood, pitched for me alone, the quiet one who never says a word more than he has to, says the only three that matter.
“Wren. It’s us.”