Chapter 30
Thirty
Wren
The guys left an hour ago. Not gone gone.
Back on shift, which I keep informing myself is a completely different thing, in a firm inner voice nobody’s buying.
Eli left coffee and a note in block capitals propped against the sugar jar, DRINK THIS.
EAT. Cal kissed me dumb in the doorway until Rhett hauled him out by the collar, announcing to the whole street that some of us have a town to protect and Cal could pine on the clock like a professional.
My apartment still smells like the three of them.
So does my hair. So does the quilt. So does every soft surface my body hauled them across for three days running.
I’ve been drifting around up here since they left like a woman inside her own good dream, half afraid to breathe too hard in case it pops.
The nest is still a wreck in the corner.
There’s a coffee ring on Marigold’s recipe cards where Cal set his mug down without looking.
I keep catching myself smiling at nothing at all, grinning like a fool at my own kitchen because three men slept over and one of them tore my toast into pieces small enough for my shaking hands.
So naturally I sit down with the good coffee and open my email, because I’ve never once known what the hell’s good for me. And the dream pops right on schedule.
Two messages near the top. Both from a life I packed into a moving truck five weeks ago and drove away from before the sun came up.
The first is from Diane. My old boss, back at the patisserie downtown, the glass-and-steel place where I spent six years turning out two hundred identical croissants a day for people who never once learned my name.
Subject line: THINKING OF YOU! Exclamation point included, which is a whole lot of warmth from a woman who once made a grown line cook cry over an under-proofed brioche.
She’s heard about my aunt. She’s so sorry for my loss.
Then, no pressure, the real reason. The head baker spot’s come open.
She thought of me first. The pay is a number I’d have wept over a year ago.
She can hold it a week — no longer, there’s a list of names under mine, she’s sorry, that’s the business.
Come home, is the gist of it. Your real job’s waiting.
The second is from my old landlord. The apartment on the third floor, the one with the radiator that banged all night like a ghost trying to get out, the sublet’s fallen through, and the lease is mine again if I want it.
First refusal, for old times’ sake, so long as the deposit lands inside the week.
Sentiment’s sentiment, but his mortgage is due on the first.
I look at the two of them sitting side by side, my whole old life reassembled into a tidy stack in my inbox at nine in the morning, and the floor tilts a couple of degrees under my chair.
My body’s known since it woke up warm what my head’s been outrunning ever since.
That was a heat. Three days of one. A heat is a fever, a chemical event my own biology cooked up and aimed at the nearest three alphas like a missile with strong opinions.
Of course they came. Of course they were sweet about it.
That’s what decent men do for an omega in trouble, they don’t leave her to claw through it alone in the dark.
It doesn’t mean any of them lay there picturing a future.
It means they’re good men. I was in a bad way.
Now it’s passed, and they get to go back to their lives.
I let that thought in, and it settles fast, because it’s an old lodger and it knows where the light switches are.
They’re a pack. A settled six-year pack, complete on their own long before I fell off a moving truck into the middle of them.
What they did was fold a scared new girl in for a few days because she needed folding.
Kind. Generous. Not remotely the same as wanting to keep her.
Cal charms everybody, it’s his native language, I’ve seen him do it to Mrs. Alder over a parking ticket she richly deserved.
Eli looks after people like other men breathe, he’d leave soup on a stranger’s step and lie awake worrying they hadn’t eaten it.
And Rhett.
God help me, Rhett.
Rhett told me in the dark that the counter wrecked him.
That there’s a real him under all the jokes and it’s my favorite part.
And I believed every word, because I was feverish and half out of my skull with my face buried in the sweetest smell I’ve ever caught in my life.
In the flat gray light, fever gone, head bolted back on, I know precisely what Rhett is.
Rhett’s a man who can make a woman feel like the only girl in the world right up until the second he strolls out whistling.
He did it to me once already, right here, in daylight, buttoning his shirt.
Believing the three-in-the-morning version over the broad-daylight one would be the dumbest move I’ve made since I signed for a bakery next door to a firehouse.
So that’s the shape of it, all laid out neat.
The heat was real. The feelings were fever.
The men were kind. It’s over now. Any minute they’ll start being gently, horribly normal with me, a wave across the street, a how’s-the-festival-coming, and I’ll stand behind my counter and be normal right back while it quietly guts me.
And how convenient. The door’s already open.
Diane’s holding a job with my actual name on it at last. A landlord’s holding an apartment that never once expected a single thing from me and never once let me down, because you can’t be let down by a radiator.
My old life. Small enough to disappear into, safe because nothing in it could reach me.
The one where nobody looks at me like Cal looked at me in that doorway this morning, which means nobody’s ever in a position to stop.
You can’t lose what you were smart enough not to pick up.
My phone buzzes in my hand and I damn near launch it across the kitchen.
Della. You alive up there? Family thing go okay?
Coffee on me when you surface. xx I look at it a second too long.
A woman I’ve known five weeks, checking I’m still breathing.
I type back all good, surfacing tomorrow, coffee yes please and I don’t say one true word of the mess I’m actually sitting in, because that’s the other thing I’m world-class at.
I keep the worry off other people. Coat by the door, smile on, nobody the wiser.
I could reply to Diane right now. Two lines. I’d love to, when can I start. I could be packed by Sunday. I’ve done it before, more than once. Leaving before the leaving gets done to me is basically my only skill that doesn’t involve butter.
My thumb hovers over her name.
And my body, the traitor, the same one that built a nest out of stolen laundry and knew the truth weeks before I’d say it out loud, plants both feet and flat refuses to move.
Because that apartment was quiet like a switched-off room is quiet.
Nothing in it. Safe as a locked box and about as warm.
I can picture the whole of that old life from here, clean as a photograph.
The train at six. The badge that beeped me through a steel door.
The head baker who called me “hey, you” for two years before he quit.
A city of a million people, not one of whom would have looked up if I’d simply stopped showing up, which was exactly why I chose it.
You can’t be a disappointment to people who never registered you were there.
Because six years of two hundred croissants a day, and Diane never learned my name until she needed something proofed.
Because downstairs there’s a shop that stopped being mine and started being ours somewhere in the last month without anyone asking my permission, a festival binder on the counter and a whole town leaning on it.
And forty feet past that there’s a firehouse with three men in it who took shifts making sure I drank water.
Even if it was only kindness. Even if it was only the heat. It was still the best three days of my life, and here I sit trying to talk myself into running before lunch, because good things make me twitchy and a banging radiator never asked me for a thing.
I put the phone face down on the table.
I don’t reply.
I don’t delete either email either. I notice myself not doing it. I not-do-it anyway, and I leave them both sitting there in my inbox, unanswered, unrefused, a little back door propped open a crack in case this whole warm impossible life goes exactly how I’m already braced for it to.
It’s not a plan. I’m not leaving. I’m just not not leaving. I’m keeping my coat by the door. There’s a difference, and it’s the only thing letting me get a full breath right now, so I’m choosing not to look straight at it.
“You’re being an idiot,” I tell the coffee.
The coffee, being Eli’s and therefore better than I deserve, declines to comment.
So I get up. I go downstairs. I tie on Marigold’s apron and flip the sign.
The town’s got a festival a little under three weeks off and a bake tent that won’t run itself, and that counter is the one thing that’s kept me upright since the day I landed here.
I bury the whole mess under a double batch of cinnamon rolls, which is where I put everything I’m not ready to feel yet.
It works. It works right up until the firehouse doors bang open across the street a little after noon, and my entire stupid body turns toward the sound like a sunflower with no self-respect, coat by the door clean forgotten.
Then I remember. I turn back to my dough and start laying bricks.
I’m good at this part. A lifetime of practice.
Doesn’t make me hate it any less.