Epilogue
The peanut butter chocolate chip cookies are still warm when I carry them out to the patio, which means I cut it close, which means I spent too long in the kitchen saying goodbye to the nest this morning, and Jude intercepts the tray before I make it three steps past the door.
"Are these the peanut butter chocolate chip?"
"Those are for everyone."
"I am everyone." He grabs two and shoves one into Rhys's hand without looking, the way you pass something to a person whose exact location you always know without checking.
Rhys takes it, takes a bite, nods at me once — his version of applause — and goes back to whatever he was saying to Marco near the grill.
The patio is full. Not crammed — full in the good way, the lived-in way, where every chair has a person and every person has a drink and the noise is the layered kind that means nobody's performing.
Declan strung the lights up this morning and they're not on yet because it's still afternoon, the sun on the mismatched tables and the brick wall that separates Byrne's back patio from the parking lot.
Someone put a speaker in the window and whatever playlist is running has the energy of a Sunday that knows it doesn't have anywhere to be.
I set the tray down on the long table and Callum appears behind me to take the second tray — the heavier one, the one with the empanadas — out of my hands before I have to ask.
He's in an apron that says GRILL SERGEANT across the front, which Marco bought him as a joke and which he now wears without irony, and he presses his mouth to the side of my head as he passes because that's what he does — touches me in small, automatic ways that don't require thought or permission, just the muscle memory of a man who knows where I am in every room.
"Empanadas are going fast," I tell him.
"I'll guard them."
"You'll eat them."
"I'll eat two and guard the rest." He sets the tray down at the grill station and Marco immediately reaches for one and Callum doesn't stop him because Marco is family and family gets empanadas, that's just the rule.
I lean against the patio railing and take it in.
Benji is at the corner table with his phone propped against a bottle, scrolling with the expression of a man who is both at the party and reviewing it from the outside simultaneously.
Shay is at the bar — he's always at the bar — talking to Declan through the service window about something that has Declan shaking his head with a half-smile, patient and fond, because he's heard this opinion before and he'll hear it again next week.
Soren is cross-legged on the bench near the wall with a notebook open on his knee, a pen tucked behind his ear, watching everything with that soft, absorbing attention that means he's filing it away for something he'll sketch later.
Ava drops into the chair next to Benji and steals a chip off his plate and he doesn't even look up, just moves the plate closer to her, which is the most affection Benji shows anyone who isn't blood-related or holding a drink he wants.
Jude is standing on the bench seat of the main booth with a beer in his hand, looking like he's about to do something unnecessary.
"EXCUSE ME," he announces, and Rhys, seated below him with an arm resting along the back of the booth, doesn't even flinch. He's seen this before. He's chosen to love it anyway. "I would like to propose a toast."
"You proposed a toast twenty minutes ago," Benji says.
"That was a DIFFERENT toast. That was to Milo's empanadas. This one is to love."
"I'm leaving."
"You're not leaving, you're holding a full drink and you just sat down.
THIS toast—" Jude climbs higher on the bench and Rhys puts a hand on his calf, not pulling him down, just making sure he doesn't fall, the way you'd spot someone at the gym if the gym were a dive bar and the exercise were being Jude.
"This toast is to KnotMe, which has now — against ALL odds and its own garbage algorithm — produced TWO lasting relationships. "
"Lasting is generous," Shay calls from the bar. "Give it six months."
"Shay, you are cordially invited to shut the fuck up." Jude raises his beer. "To the app. To the accidental matches. To Rhys, who swiped right on my anonymous bio—"
"It was your BIO, not a—"
"—and to Callum, who swiped right on Milo's sweater photo and then panicked about it in a firehouse bunk like a fifteen-year-old. You're WELCOME, both of you, because I built Milo's profile and I picked that sweater and I am basically the ARCHITECT of—"
"Drink your beer, Jude," Callum says from the grill, and he's smiling — the real one, the one with the crinkles — and Jude drinks his beer and everyone raises whatever they're holding and the toast happens the way toasts happen with this group: loudly, with at least one person heckling and someone else spilling.
Benji taps his bottle against Ava's glass without getting up. "At least your brother had the decency to show up the next day," he says, and his voice is light and funny and aimed at no one in particular.
He takes a drink. Ava laughs because the delivery was good, and it was — Benji's always good — but I catch the half-second where his eyes go flat before the joke lands, the beat where the funny hasn't quite covered the real thing underneath.
I've known Benji long enough to know which jokes are armor and which ones are just jokes, and that one had a lining.
Nobody else catches it. The conversation moves on — Jude is now interrogating Callum about whether he's going to burn the bratwurst and Callum is pointing out that they're not burgers, they're bratwurst, and Jude is insisting that anything cylindrical on a grill is a burger and Rhys is watching this exchange with his chin on his hand, his expression nothing but fond.
He accepted a long time ago that his omega will never stop being the loudest person in any venue.
Rhys catches Callum's eye across the grill. Callum lifts his tongs in a gesture that might be a greeting or might be a surrender.
"You get used to it," Rhys says.
"Do you?"
Rhys considers this. "No," he says. "But you stop minding."
Callum laughs — low, genuine — and flips a bratwurst, and the two of them stand there in the comfortable silence of two alphas who ended up in the same pack by falling in love with the same friend group's omegas and have no complaints about it.
Soren looks up from his notebook. His eyes find mine across the patio and he smiles — something in it a little wistful, the way Soren is always a little wistful, like he's watching something beautiful and hoping he'll get his own version someday.
I smile back. He will. I don't know how I know that, but I do.
Ava finds me at the railing when I'm refilling the chip bowl. She leans next to me and we watch the patio together for a second — the noise, the people, the golden light starting to go amber as the afternoon tilts.
"He ironed his apron," she says.
"I know."
"The GRILL SERGEANT apron. He pressed it flat like it was a dress shirt."
"He takes grilling very seriously."
"He takes wrinkles very seriously. You know what you signed up for."
"I do." And I'm smiling, and she's smiling, and neither of us has to explain the other one to ourselves anymore, and that's the whole thing — that's the upgrade. The friendship without the filter.
The afternoon softens. The lights come on — golden, the kind that make everything look like a memory even while it's happening.
Declan switches the music to something slower and Shay says something about it being "old man music" and Declan doesn't respond, just slides a fresh drink across the bar with the efficiency of a man who has been remembering orders for a decade and doesn't plan to stop.
I'm on Callum's lap. I don't remember deciding to sit here — I think I sat down next to him and then his hand was on my thigh and then I was just..
. closer, and then closer, until I was sideways across his legs with his arm around my waist and my head near his shoulder and neither of us commented on the migration because this is just where I end up.
The shirt I'm wearing — his shirt, our shirt — has slipped off one shoulder and the bite mark at my collar is visible and nobody looks at it because it's been there for weeks and it's old news and old news is the best kind of news.
The table is a mess — plates, bottles, crumbs, a stack of napkins Jude folded into the shape of something obscene that Rhys has declined to identify.
Benji has his feet up on the bench across from him.
Soren is still writing. Shay is back from the bar with a fresh drink and an opinion about the bratwurst. Ava is showing Jude something on her phone that's making him cackle.
Rhys is leaned back with his arm along the booth behind Jude, his thumb moving in a slow, absent circle on Jude's shoulder, not looking at anything in particular, just settled.
Callum's hand is on my stomach. Heavy, his fingers spread wide. His chest rises and falls against my back and his breath is slow and his heartbeat is steady through the fabric of his shirt, and the patio is loud and full of people I love being exactly who they are.
The lights sway. Someone laughs. Callum's thumb moves once against my skin, a small, idle stroke that means nothing and everything, and I close my eyes and I breathe.
***