Chapter 10 #4
Atlas pulls me across his lap—sideways, my legs over one of his thighs, my head against his chest. The blanket is around both of us now, damp where it touches his soaked shirt, warm where it doesn't. Bane settles behind me, one hand moving slow up and down my spine through the fabric.
He doesn't say anything. Neither does Atlas.
They just hold me between them on the rough boards with the water underneath us and the flickering light doing its thing overhead, and I let them.
My breathing evens out. My hands stop shaking. The chattering slows, then stops, then starts once more and stops for good. The bond hums—low, steady, three threads pulled tight and holding.
Zero is a dark shape at the end of the dock. He hasn't come closer. He's sitting with his back to us, looking out at the water, and I know he's listening to every breath I take because the thread between us is raw and open and full of something he doesn't have a name for yet.
After a while—ten minutes, maybe more—Atlas shifts under me.
"Inside?" Bane asks, quiet.
"Not yet," I say. My voice is rough. Scraped. "The grass. Can we just—the grass."
We move to the bank. Slowly. Bane keeps a hand at my back down the dock.
Atlas carries the blanket after I shimmy out of it.
We settle on the grass where we started—blanket under me, Bane on my left, Zero hanging back a few feet, Atlas soaking wet with his shirt clinging to him and not caring even a little, sitting beside me with our shoulders touching.
The pond is still. The moon is still on it.
After a while Bane and Zero drift. Not far—Bane to the tree line to wring out his shirt, Zero back toward the house to grab something, probably another beer. Atlas and I are alone.
His hand finds mine on the grass. Laces through. His fingers are cold from the water and so are mine and neither of us lets go.
"I'm sorry," I say. "About the water. I didn't know that was going to happen."
"You don't apologize for that. Ever."
"Atlas—"
"Ever, Max."
I close my mouth. My throat aches.
He's quiet for a while. His thumb moves slow across the back of my hand. I can feel him in the bond—the tight dark thread loosening, softening, going from the Atlas who walked through the door two hours ago to the one who held me in the pond, the one who lets me see the underneath.
"Thirteen days," he says. Quiet. Into the dark. "Thirteen days away from you. And the whole time—every meeting, every call, every night in a hotel room that smelled like nothing—the only thing I could think about was getting back here."
"Atlas—"
"Not the work. Not any of it. You." His thumb stops. Presses. "I'd be in the middle of something and I'd feel the bond go tight in my chest and I'd think: he's awake. Or: he's laughing at something. Or: he's in Bane's bed right now and I should be there. I need to be there. I need—"
He stops.
The pond is very still.
"I spent my whole life being the one who had the plan," he says.
Lower now. Almost to himself. "The one who knew the next move.
The one who held things together because if I didn't, no one would.
And for thirteen days I sat in rooms full of people who needed answers from me and the only answer I had was I want to go home. "
I can't speak. My throat has closed around something too big for words.
"I don't know how to fix this yet," he says. "I don't know how to save the business, or the nine omegas still trapped in that place, or any of it. That's new for me. Not having the answer. I've never—" A breath. "I've never been this lost, Max."
He turns to me.
The moonlight is on his face and his eyes are dark and his jaw is doing the small working thing it does when the control is costing him and I have never, in the months I have known this man, seen him look this bare.
"I love you," he says.
Not a speech. Not a strategy. Two words, delivered the way Atlas delivers everything that matters—precise, certain, stripped of anything that isn't true.
"I love you, and I don't have the answer, and I need you to know that those two facts are not connected. I would love you with every answer in the world. I love you with none of them."
I don't say it back.
I can't. Not because I don't feel it—I feel it so hard my chest aches with it, so hard I can barely hold the shape of it inside my ribs—but because the words aren't ready.
They're in me. They've been in me. They're sitting right under my tongue where they've been sitting for weeks and I don't know why they won't come out except that every time I've ever said those words to someone in my life they've been used against me later.
So I don't say them.
I reach up and cup his face in both hands. The way he's held mine. His jaw rough under my palms, still cold from the pond. I hold him there. I make him look at me.
I press my forehead against his.
I stay.
His breath shudders out of him—one long, breaking exhale, setting something down he's been carrying for months. His hand comes up to cover mine where it rests against his cheek. He turns his face into my palm and I feel his mouth there, warm, brief, not a kiss so much as a press. A receipt.
We stay like that until Bane and Zero come back.
Nobody speaks. Bane sits down behind me, his chest warm against my back. Zero drops onto the grass to my right, close enough that his knee touches mine. Atlas doesn't let go of my hand.
The four of us on the bank. The water still. The moon overhead.
I think about what Atlas said—I don't have the answer—and I think about the answer I swallowed two hours ago in his office. The one they shut down. The one that's sitting in my chest right now, growing roots the way I said it would.
I have the answer.
They just won't let me use it yet.
I close my eyes. Lean back into Bane's chest. Feel Zero's knee warm against mine. Feel Atlas's hand still laced with mine, his thumb still moving.
The notebook is on my desk upstairs. Open. Waiting.
I'm going to need it.