Chapter 19 Remi
Nobody said it again after Sunday morning, and the book I picked up stayed picked up. Crew made lunch and Steele suggested a documentary and the rest of the day we moved around in a careful, ordinary way.
But I asked for it, and neither of them answered. I've been carrying that for two days.
Would you choose her?
Steele didn't even try to answer. He reached for his coffee and put it down and I watched something cross his face that might have been painful if he'd let it finish arriving, but he didn't. He held it at the threshold and then looked at the window and said nothing.
Crew said a generous thing. I hope she'll pick us both.
Which is the best Crew answer in the world, and it's also not the thing I asked.
I kissed Crew in front of Steele.
Steele never reacted.
In my head, I've replayed that seventeen times in two days, which is not a healthy number. His jaw under my hand. The way he exhaled into it. The way Steele was very carefully looking at his coffee when I pulled back. He wasn’t jealous, nor uncomfortable, but he was something else.
Something closer to longing, except pointed at the wrong target.
Like he wanted what Crew had but didn't know how to put his hand up for it.
None of them have said they want me.
Maybe they don’t.
Maybe I hoped living with them, that they would.
Maybe I am the same as Sloane, incompatible. Not enough.
That's the thing when I strip it down.
Steele kissed me in the dark of my bedroom, making me think he wanted me. But his words, in daylight, say precisely nothing.
Crew held me but he said “I hope she'd pick us both.”
Since, neither of them has looked me in the eye and told me they want me. Just Me and not as an arrangement, not as a biological stopgap, not as the omega they need to function.
Me.
Maybe that's because they don't.
I am River’s sister, after all.
I manage to walk to The Stave without crutches today, which is either progress or stubbornness, and I don't care which. My knee complains on the slope near the corner. The pain travels up through the brace and settles somewhere behind the kneecap, but I make it to the cafe.
The barista who didn't help me before, doesn't help me again, and I sit at the corner table with a coffee and the privacy of being a single omega in a coffee shop with nowhere better to be.
I take a sip of my coffee and glance at the ceiling.
I've loved Steele since I was seventeen.
When River first brought him home.
That's the fact I haven't said to anyone, and I'm saying it now, to myself, in a coffee shop in Nashville. I loved him when he was River's teammate in Boston and came to our apartment for dinner and said three words to me per visit, each more devastating than the last.
I loved him when he transferred to Nashville and the phone calls with River had his voice in the background and I'd find reasons to stay in the room.
I loved him when I was seventeen and didn't know what it meant, and I loved him when I was twenty and knew what it meant and couldn't do anything about it.
And Crew.
Crew who is the other half of whatever Steele is.
Crew who arrived in my awareness later but deeper.
Crew who makes food and doesn't ask questions, knows which side of the bed to take, and presses his mouth to the top of my head when he thinks I’m asleep.
And he does it with a gentleness that I will not recover from in this lifetime if they don’t choose me.
I love them both.
But unrequited love is stealing any joy I have from living with them.
I hate that they still see me as River's sister.
Even now, even with the kisses, even with the bed, even with the scent math I laid out on the table like evidence, some part of them is still standing at the door of my brother's apartment saying nice to meet you, Remi and looking right through me.
That is the thing I'm sitting with in a coffee shop at two in the afternoon, and it's not a good thing to sit with, and the coffee isn't helping.
The chair pulls out and someone sits across from me. I stare ahead at the space which is now occupied by a man.
He sets something on the table between us. A salted caramel chocolate. Dark chocolate. Sea salt on top.
I stare at it.
The same ones from the glass jar by the register. The same ones I took from that jar the first time I came here, with Isabella, weeks ago. The same ones I've been taking every time since.
The barista doesn't even ask anymore. She just slides one onto my saucer.
I look up.
Gray eyes. Dark hair, precisely cut. He's in a dark jacket.
He’s the man from the window, from the game, the one who sat two rows behind me in New York when the Scorpions scored and twenty thousand people stood and I didn't and he didn't and we were the only two sitting people in a building full of noise.
His right hand rests on the table, relaxed, and the phoenix is there.
My heart is doing something erratic, probably trying to flee.
I’m glancing at the phoenix on his hand. At the way it is spanning his thumb and index finger, the same clean lines, the same design, the same everything.
The same tattoo that Steele has.
The one I traced in the dark of the maze and traced again in my bedroom and have been looking at on Steele's hand for weeks, except this is not Steele's hand.
I swallow.
"You're his brother," I say. "Aren't you? Steele's."
He looks at me with those gray eyes and says, "I am."
His voice. I've heard that voice. I've heard it in the dark, in the hospital, in the space between sleep and the thing I kept telling myself was a dream. Lower than Steele's, quieter, measured, like he thinks about every word before releasing it.
My coffee is getting cold.
"I've always been in love with him," I say.
I don't know why I said it. I don't know what part of me decided that this stranger, this not-stranger, this man whose scent I've been wearing for weeks without knowing it.
Because it is his scent. The slick running down my thighs is my body telling me before I’m ready to tell him.
Our eyes lock.
"With Steele. And Crew." I look from his eyes to my hands. "They just don't see me the same way. Even now. Even with the arrangement—" I stop. "They still see me as the sister of their best friend."
He doesn't respond.
The coffee shop moves around us. The barista runs the espresso machine. A couple gets up from the window table and leaves. The light shifts.
"Why are you telling me?" he asks.
"I don't know." And that's the truth. I genuinely don't know why I'm sitting in a coffee shop confessing my love for two men to this man, except that this man brought me a chocolate he shouldn't know I wanted and has a tattoo that matches my almost-lover's and has been sitting in the rows behind me watching me the way I watch the ice, looking for the pattern in the movement, the thing that's giving itself away.
"You were at the game," I say.
"Yes."
"And the hospital."
Something shifts behind his eyes. Not quite guilt, not quite exposure. Something closer to the expression of a man who has been carrying a weight for a very long time and has just been asked to set it down.
"Yes," he says.
"Every night?"
"Every night."
My hand is on the table. His phoenix is too.
Not Steele's. And the air between us is not like the air between me and Steele.
It's not like the air between me and Crew.
It's something else. Something with a different depth, the same way a single cello note is different from a violin even when they're playing the same chord.
He reaches down beside his chair and lifts a bag onto the table. A soft canvas tote.
He pulls out a blanket first. Cashmere. Cream-colored, folded with a precision that says something about the man who folded it.
I stare at it.
"The blanket at the hospital," I say. "The white one. Was that you?"
"Yes."
Our eyes meet, and something in my chest restructures itself around that single word.
I've spent weeks pressing that blanket against my mouth in the dark. Weeks of breathing it in without knowing I was breathing him in. The one comfort I reached for every night was something he left me.
Then he sets a t-shirt on the table. Dark gray, soft-worn cotton, folded once.
"I wore this yesterday," he says.
A pillowcase. White. Same quality as the blanket.
And last: a silk green scarf. He sets it on the pile with careful placement as if he is waiting for a reaction.
"To help you nest," he says. "With me in mind."
I look at the pile on the table between us.
The blanket. The t-shirt that smells of him.
The pillowcase he probably slept with his head on.
The scarf. Each one designed to carry his scent into a room he hasn't entered, an apartment he doesn't live in, a bed he doesn't share.
He's building himself into my space without stepping through the door.
I told Steele I didn't know how to nest. I said I felt like an omega fraud.
This man just handed me the beginning of one.
He reaches across the table and takes my hand.
Not gently, not the way Crew touches, which always gives me the chance to pull away.
Not the way Steele touches, which is barely restrained.
He takes my hand like it's already his. His fingers close around mine and the contact sends something through my nervous system that doesn't have a name in any language I know.
"You're scared," he says.
"Yeah."
"I know."
His thumb moves once on the back of my hand.
"So am I," he says.
It's the last thing I expected from him. But he admitted it in the same controlled, measured voice, but underneath it something fractured just slightly.
We sit there.
His hand around mine. The chocolate on the table between us, untouched. The coffee shop with its afternoon light and its brick walls and its chalkboard menu and the barista who is very carefully not looking at us.
"I can't give up on them yet," I say.
Our eyes meet.
His expression doesn't close, doesn't harden, doesn't do any of the things I braced for. He just looks at me with those gray eyes.
"I don't share."
His thumb moves on my hand again. Then he lets go.
He stands, and buttons his jacket, and he walks out of The Stave without looking back, and the bell above the door chimes once, and the air where he was sitting still smells of bourbon and chocolate and orange, all three notes, full, complete, nothing missing, and I sit very still with my cold coffee and my untouched chocolate and I want him to come back.