27. Calder
Calder
Bo came back at dusk, his cheeks red from the cold, his eyes alive in a way I’d been seeing more of every week since the bonding.
I was on the porch when he came up out of the trees, the old binoculars in my hand. I’d been watching the lower switchback because Shepherd had said the county graders were probably going to make it that far before they turned around, and I’d wanted to see them with my own eyes.
Bo crossed the last stretch of yard. He stopped at the steps. He didn’t say anything for a second. He just looked at me, and the bond whispered all the things he felt.
“Road’s open,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Plowed clean down to the lower switchback. They didn’t come all the way up. But the truck could make it from here to the county road tomorrow if we wanted.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Yep.”
I lowered the binoculars, and let myself sit with it for a moment.
The cold air sharp in my lungs. The sun on the snow at the angle that meant the day was running out.
The dripping of the gutters that had been the soundtrack of the past week beginning to slow as the temperature dropped again into night.
“Has she heard you yet?” I said.
“Probably. Bond’s loud right now.”
“Yeah.”
I looked back at the cabin. Through the front window I could see her at the table with Shepherd, working through something on the notebook, her hair pulled up in the messy way she did it when she was concentrating.
She was beautiful in the firelight. She was beautiful in any light.
The marks at her throat had started to set into proper scars, three crescents that I would never stop being able to find with my mouth in the dark.
She looked up. Felt me looking at her. Smiled.
Then her smile dimmed. The bond carried what Bo had just told me to her without my having to say a word. I watched her face change. Then she pushed her chair back, careful of the ankle that was still tender but mostly healed now, and came to the door.
“Road’s clear,” she said when she opened it.
“Down to the lower switchback,” Bo said. “Could leave tomorrow.”
Shepherd came up behind her, his hand at the small of her back, his face doing the still-and-listening thing he did when something important was happening. I watched his eyes track over the three of us, processing.
“OK,” Noa said.
“OK,” I echoed.
“Come inside. Both of you. It’s freezing out here.”
I shut the door behind us. The cabin was warm in the way it had been getting warmer week by week as we’d worked on the things on Shepherd’s list, finished projects, moved furniture, talked through the things we’d been avoiding for years.
The reading nook had been cleared out and the loft had been swept and re-floored, waiting for the bookshelves Bo and I were going to build.
We had spent the week getting ready for the rest of our lives.
There shouldn’t have been a rush but this felt like a significant moment.
Now the road was open.
The bubble was popping.
Noa went to the chair by the fire and sat down. Her chair. The one we’d all started calling hers without anybody having voted on it. She tucked her bad foot up under her, the way she did when she was about to be serious about something.
“OK,” she said. “We should talk.”
“We should,” I said.
“All of us.”
Shepherd took the chair beside her. Bo settled onto the rug at her feet.
I stood in front of the fire because I didn’t know how else to do this.
My body wouldn’t let me sit down. The leader part of me, the part that had been more or less retired since the pack fight, had come back online and was buzzing softly at the back of my skull.
“I’ve been thinking,” Noa said. “About what I want.”
“I think it’s been on all of our minds.”
“I’ve done the work. The thing about my apartment. The thing about my job. The thing about Wes.”
“Yeah.”
“I want to come home.”
The bond pulsed bright. All three of us at once. I felt the answering bloom in Bo and Shepherd, three pulses syncing into one, and I felt the way Noa took it in, the way her face changed, the small breath she let out as she felt us all answer her.
“But,” she said.
I had been waiting for the but.
I had not been dreading it. I had been waiting for it the way you wait for the last piece of a thing to fall into place. Because she was Noa, and Noa was going to ask the hard question before she let any of this be real. That was part of why I loved her.
“But,” she repeated.
She looked at me. Then Shepherd. Then Bo.
“I need to know this isn’t just storm chemistry,” she said. “I need to know you want me here for real. For keeps. Not because we were trapped together and biology made the decisions for us. I know that’s a hard question to ask. I’m asking it anyway because I have to live with the answer.”
The cabin went still.
I took a breath.
“Sweetheart.” My heart ached that she needed to ask, that we hadn’t made it abundantly clear to her already. “You crashed onto my porch half-dead. And I haven’t wanted you to leave since the second I caught you.”
“Calder…”
“No. Listen. I’m going to do this properly. You asked the hard question. I’m going to give you the answer.”
She nodded.
“I’ve known for three weeks. Maybe longer.
The thing I felt when I picked you up off that porch was not biology.
The thing I felt when you told me your name in the dark while you were half-conscious in my arms was not biology.
I have been with biology before. I know what biology feels like.
This was not that. This was something else. ”
“What was it?”
“It was recognition. It was looking at you and knowing the shape of the hole in the cabin had been the shape of you all along. We just hadn’t known what we were missing because we’d never met you.”
“Calder.”
“I’m not done. I want to say one more thing.
I have loved you for the way you glare at me when I hover.
I have loved you for the way you tell me to shove my alpha protectiveness up an unpleasant place.
I have loved you for the way you refused to need help even when you very much needed it.
I have loved you for the way you took a disagreement and made it a place we could all stand in afterward.
I have loved you for the woman you have been every day since you arrived.
I would have loved you with or without the heat.
I love you with or without the bond. If you came down off this ridge tomorrow and never came back, I would love you for the rest of my life.
I just very much do not want you to come down off this ridge and never come back. ”
She was crying.
But she was crying the good kind. Her face was wet and her shoulders were shaking softly and the bond was bright as a struck bell.
“OK,” she whispered.
“OK,” I echoed.
“Shepherd.” I turned to my friend, my brother and saw him ready to speak his truth.
Shepherd took her hand. He turned her palm up. He pressed his mouth to it for a long moment, kissed the soft warm center of it. Then he looked up at her.
“I was the one who almost wasn’t here,” he said.
“I came up to the cabin seven years ago by accident. I took a wrong turn looking for a trailhead. Calder fed me dinner and let me sleep on the floor and somehow I stayed. I told myself for years that I’d stayed because it was useful.
Because the two of them needed someone. I had stayed because I had never expected to be seen by anyone again, and Calder had looked at me at the dinner table that first night and said you can stay if you want.
That had been the most generous thing anyone had said to me in a decade. I hadn’t been able to leave it.”
She squeezed his hand.
“I have been waiting for you my entire life,” Shepherd said.
“I didn’t know it. I thought I was waiting for a particular shape of nothing.
Then you came up out of a snowstorm and put your hands on my face and told me to take my glasses off, and I understood that I had been waiting for someone to look at me with the patience to see past my fortifications, and that someone was you.
You are the first person who has ever seen through my walls instead of just seeing the me I hid behind.
I want a lifetime of being seen like that.
I want a lifetime of being made to. I want a lifetime of the list I made on the day of the thaw, and every list after it.
I love you. I will love you whether you stay or you go.
I would just rather very much that you stay. ”
She nodded. She brought his hand to her mouth and kissed his knuckles.
“Bo,” she said.
He didn’t speak right away.
Bo had to find his words the way Bo always found his words. He didn’t hurry. He didn’t look at me or Shepherd for help. He just sat there at her feet on the rug and looked up at her and let the bond carry what he was getting ready to say.
“Noa…”
“Yeah?”
“You smell like home.”
She made a small sound.
“That was the first thing I noticed,” he said. “The night you collapsed on the porch. Through all the cold and the hypothermia and the wet. Underneath all that. You smelled like home and I didn’t even know I knew what home smelled like.”
“Bo…”
“I’m not done. I’m doing what Calder did. I’m doing it properly.”
“OK.”
“You smell like home. But that’s just smell.
Smell would have just been biology. The thing that wasn’t biology was that you felt like home too.
You walked into the cabin and the cabin became a place I wanted to be in.
I had been planning to leave. I had been planning to go to the loft and stay there until I stopped.
You walked in and the loft became the place where your books are going to live.
Not the place where I’m going to die. You did that. Just by being here. Just by being you.”
He took a breath.
“The last omega I was with used the bond against me. I’ve told you that.
I went into it with the wrong person and I came out of it broken.
I thought broken was the rest of my life.
Then I met you. I didn’t know I’d met you the right way for a long time.
But the bond told me before my brain did.
I’ve been bonded to you since the night you crashed on the porch.
The teeth and the marks just made it official. ”
“Bo,” she whispered.
“I love you. I’m going to love you whether you stay or you go.
But if you go, I’m going to ask Calder to drive me down with you.
Because I’m not letting you go without a fight.
I’m not letting you go at all if I can help it.
You’re the first thing that’s felt like home since Ellis broke me.
I won’t live the rest of my life trying to remember what that felt like. ”
She was crying harder now. So was Shepherd. So was I.
“OK,” she said. “OK. OK. I’m staying. I’m staying. I’m staying.”
The bond exploded.
I had felt it pulse before. It bloomed outward all at once, a wave of warmth and pack and yes that rolled through all four of us at the same moment.
Bo made a small low sound that was almost a laugh.
Shepherd dropped his face into her hand and breathed.
I crossed the cabin in three strides and dropped to my knees in front of her and pressed my forehead to her belly, and she put her hand in my hair, and I felt my whole life resettle around me.
“I’m not going,” she said. Her voice was wet. Her hand was in my hair. “I’m not going. Not because I’m trapped. Not because I’m scared to leave. Because I’m choosing this. Because I’m choosing you.”
“Yeah,” Bo said, very quiet.
“All three of you.”
“Yeah, sweetheart,” I said into her belly.
“This is home.”
“Yes.”
“I love you. I’m saying that to all of you. In the daylight. With my whole chest.”
“I love you,” Shepherd said.
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you,” Bo said.
We stayed like that for a long time. The fire crackled.
The cabin held us. The road outside was open and the world below it was waking up and somewhere down in town Wes was probably already gossiping about us, and none of it mattered.
None of it mattered because she was staying, and we were staying, and the bond between us was a thing nobody could take away from any of us now.
Eventually I lifted my head. I kissed her belly. I kissed her ribs through her sweater. I sat back on my heels and looked up at her.
“So,” I said. “Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.”
“We go down. All four of us. We collect your things. We talk to whoever you want to talk to. We come back up before dark.”
“Yes.”
“We do it together.”
“Yes.”
“You ready for the town to see you? To see us?”
She touched her throat. Her fingers found Bo’s mark at the front pulse. Then mine. Then Shepherd’s.
“I’m ready,” she said. “I want them to see.”
“OK.”
“I want them to know whose I am.”
The bond pulsed warm. Bo’s hand at her ankle squeezed once. Shepherd’s thumb stroked across her knuckles. My hand on her knee tightened.
“OK, sweetheart,” I said. “Then they’ll see.”
She smiled. Tired. Tear-streaked. Mine.
“Pack,” she said.
“Pack,” I agreed.
Outside, the last light of the day caught the icicles on the gutters and lit them gold. Inside, the four of us stayed where we were while the fire burned down and the cabin settled around us, and I thought, for the first time in thirty-six years, that I knew exactly what came next.