Chapter Thirty-Four
Espie
I've been pottering in the greenhouse for hours. Hands in the soil. Eyes on the seedlings.
The glass walls are fogged from the inside and the air hangs thick and warm around me, heavy with gardenia.
Right now, that suits me just fine.
Through the glass, across the lawn and the patio, the kitchen window glows. Aubrey is in there with Ezra, moving around the kitchen. Ezra is at the stove and Aubrey is at the counter, shoulders loose. Ezra says something and Aubrey ducks his head, and it takes me a second to realize he's laughing.
He's laughing.
I press my thumb into the soil, lips turned up as I feel his shy joy.
Ezra turns from the stove and catches Aubrey's chin in his palm, tilting his face up.
Aubrey is a few inches shorter and he has to look up to meet Ezra's eyes.
They look right together. The height difference, Ezra angling toward him.
A flash of wanting hits me. Not mine. Aubrey's.
Ezra takes his time as he leans down, his hand cupped under Aubrey's jaw, and Aubrey goes up onto his toes like he wants to close the last half-inch as they kiss. Arousal hits me in a wave. My grip tightens on the trowel I'm holding and I realize I've stopped breathing.
I can't stop staring.
The kiss ends. Aubrey drops back to his heels. He turns his head, looks straight through the fogged greenhouse glass at me, and winks.
He knew I was watching the whole time and he kissed Ezra anyway, probably kissed Ezra because I was watching, and now he's standing there with his shirt crumpled where he grabbed it and a smile on his face and zero remorse.
My own desire throbs. Gardenia is everywhere in here and I can't blame the plants for it.
Aubrey knew exactly what he was doing.
Aubrey told me he’d been with Ezra. He’d looked like someone who'd remembered he was allowed to breathe. Like the wanting wasn't a trap he'd stepped into but a thing he'd chosen on purpose. He wasn't performing okay. He was actually okay.
He's still scarred. So am I. We're going to be carrying it for the rest of our lives. The distance between barely surviving and wanting to live again isn’t small.
Ezra leans down and murmurs something in Aubrey’s ear, and Aubrey's smile tips wider and he nods. I don't have to read lips. Ezra was asking whether I was watching. Aubrey's amusement hits me, and despite everything I want to be annoyed but I'm mostly just caught.
I was watching. I'm not even sorry.
I stand in the greenhouse holding a seedling I forgot to plant, pulled in too many directions at once. The wanting is real. Mine and Aubrey’s tangled together until I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
And underneath it is the ache Sera left behind.
Aubrey begged her to stay and she walked out anyway. Now every quiet moment drops me straight back into the space she left behind.
Lex comes into the kitchen. His gaze lands on Ezra and Aubrey, then slides to me. Holds. A frisson goes through me at his intense, single-minded look. He's holding a white tray of seedlings, but I barely notice it as he slides the door open and steps out onto the patio.
He takes the steps down to the lawn and crosses the grass toward the greenhouse. He's tall. Broad-shouldered the way most alphas are. His gaze is trained on me the entire way until he comes to the door and lifts the tray.
My mouth goes dry. He's in a gray linen shirt with the sleeves pushed up, and his hair is doing that thing where it falls across his forehead, and I'm very aware that he is a good-looking man. Objectively. Scientifically. The awareness prickles all over me.
“I've brought gifts. Can I come in?” he asks.
He doesn't move. He's standing at the threshold with the tray and waiting. He always does that. Always waits, always asks, gives me the chance to say no.
He steps inside at my nod. Earl Grey and sandalwood drift through the greenhouse, mixing with the damp green scent of the plants. The tight fist behind my sternum eases.
He sets the tray on the bench. His hands are big, long-fingered, and the tray looks small in them. He straightens and smiles at me, open and unhurried.
And I…I like him in here. This is my space and he fits in it. It feels right. He’s right.
“I’ve brought heritage tomatoes,” he says, nodding at the tray. “The nursery finally had them. I may have gone to three different places before I found them, but that's — not important.”
I look at the seedlings. Six small pots. Warmth moves through my chest.
“You went and got them?”
“I know how much you've been looking forward to planting them. You said it's the right window,” he says.
I'd said that over lunch. I'd been looking at the tomatoes in the salad and I'd mentioned it might be nice to grow some ourselves, and he'd just nodded and asked me which type. I hadn't thought about it again.
He always does this. A comment lands in passing and a day later the thing is just there.
The magazines: Dad's old gardening magazine, the one I'd mentioned once because I'd seen a flowering chart I recognized, and the next morning three back issues had appeared on the coffee table. It was Lex all along.
“Can I help?” he asks. “If you'd like company. I won't get in your way.”
“Yes,” I say, and I mean it. I want him here. The greenhouse feels steadier with him in it. “Yes, I’d…like that.”
Lex is here. His scent is here. I'm glad of it, genuinely glad, and that's exactly the problem, because I want the rest of them too.
I want Kev's oakwood through the back door and Ezra's linen on the stairs and I want Sera's basil cutting clean through all of it, sharp and present and here.
I want all of them. I want the full thing, the whole shape of it, and there's a hole where one of them should be and isn’t.
My vision blurs and then the pot is blurry and then I can't see it at all.
Then Lex's arms are around me “Cry if you need to, Omega. I have you.”
Which is the exact thing I needed him to say.
My hands are dirty but I grab the back of his shirt and he doesn't say a word about it.
I push my face into his chest and I breathe him in hard, trying to hold on, and instead I just cry.
The kind that racks through my chest. He runs his hands up and down my back, slow and even, and he doesn't try to talk me out of it.
“Did she leave because of me?” The words shudder out of me. “Did I do anything? Was it a word I said, something I didn't do?” I pull in a breath and look up at him. “She didn't say goodbye to me. She didn't even say goodbye.”
Lex ghosts his fingers along my jaw, making me shiver. “It wasn't you, Espie.”
“How do you know?” My voice is tight.
He holds me tighter for a second. Then he says, “The first night you were here, after we brought you home from the OHC, I found Sera in the hallway outside your room at three in the morning. She'd been there all night. She never moved.”
I go still.
I remember the hospital room. The chair by the window. There, but separate. Always that margin of space.
“She wasn't keeping you in,” Lex says. “She was keeping herself out. She didn't trust what she'd do if she went in there, how much she'd need from you when you had nothing left to give. That's not rejection, Espie. That's Sera struggling with her own worth.”
I pull back enough to look up at him. He's holding his jaw tight. There's a tension in his face that isn't just concern for me, a pull that runs deeper, that's been there longer. He misses her. He wants her back as badly as I do.
“She doesn't think she's enough. I think she never has.
And I'm afraid everything that happened has only made her more sure of it.” He pauses.
Runs a hand back through his hair, and it's the first time I've seen him look anything other than settled.
“I kissed her. Last week. I thought — I don't know what I thought.
That she needed to know she was wanted. That words weren't going to be enough.”
My brows raise. “You kissed Sera.”
“There's a Neruda line that keeps coming to me.” He stops.
Looks almost embarrassed. “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.
That's what she is to me. What you both are. Not a function. Not a role. Just — that. What spring does.” He regards me steadily.
“Are you upset? About Sera. About me kissing her.”
“No.” I say it without having to think about it. Then, because my brain catches up half a second later: “Actually, I—” I stop. My scent blooms, thickens around us, and from the way Lex goes very still I know he can scent it too. “I don't think upset is the right word.”
His gaze roams over my face, his fingertips stilling on my cheek. So soft. Gentle. He won’t hurt me. He’ll never hurt me.
“What is the right word?” he asks, and his voice has dropped.
I don't have one. What I have is the image of him and Sera that my brain keeps pulling back to no matter how many times I set it aside. His eyes behind those glasses darken and lock on me completely.
He shifts his knuckle under my chin, tips my face up toward him. A question in the touch.
“I'd like to kiss you.” He pauses, and an almost awkward look crosses his face. “But only if you want that too. If you don't, that's fine. That's absolutely—”
He's rambling. Lex, who speaks in complete sentences for a living, is rambling at me in my greenhouse.
I want him to kiss me. Every reason I had to hold back has gone quiet and what's left in the silence is just this: I want him. I want him to kiss me and I'm done pretending I don't.
“I want you to kiss me,” I say. “Please, alpha. Kiss me.”
He goes still. His gaze moves over my face, tender and hungry at once. His fingers find my jaw and they're not quite steady. He leans down so slowly it's almost unbearable, closing the distance like he's giving me every chance to change my mind, like stopping would cost him everything.
His mouth touches mine and it's soft at first. Then I make a sound against him before one hand slides into my hair, and the other seizes my hip and hauls me flush against him.
The full length of him presses into me, his erection hard at my hip.
He pushes me against the bench, securing me there as he grinds against me with a deep groan.
Lex breaks the kiss to drag his mouth along my jaw, my throat.
He bites softly at the curve of my neck and I arch into him, offering him more.
His grip on my hip clenches and he presses his mouth harder against my skin.
He pulls back just enough to look at me, his hair messy from my hands, and the sight of him undone like that pulls low and tight through my whole body.
“You're beautiful, Espie. I need you to know that. Not because of what you look like. Because of how you are.” He pauses. “All of it. Every difficult, contradictory, extraordinary piece of you.”
He traces his thumbs along my collarbones, the curve of my ribs, tracing me by touch, unhurried, in no rush to be anywhere else. When he closes his mouth over my breast I arc into him, gripping his shoulders with both hands, a sharp breath tearing out of me.
He takes his time. God, he takes his time. I'd forgotten that pleasure could be unhurried. That it could build without anyone rushing toward an end point. My gardenia perfumes the whole greenhouse now, thick and sweet, and his sandalwood swells to answer it.
“Lex,” I whisper.
“I've got you, Angel. I'm not going anywhere.”
He tucks his fingertips behind the waistband of my pants, nails slightly scraping. The warmth of his hand spreads across my stomach and my hips tilt toward him. I claw his shoulders as he slips his fingers along my hip and between my thighs, cupping me.
“Let go, omega. Let me pleasure you,” he says.
He circles my clit with his thumb in slow, deliberate circles.
I'm slick and swollen and he takes his time, building pressure until I'm rocking into his hand and pulling at his shirt and not caring even slightly how frantic I look.
Then he slides a finger inside me, slow, and I exhale hard against his throat.
Two fingers, curling, pressing right where I need it, his thumb still moving, and it builds, pressure on pressure, until I lose the thread of every thought I was holding.
I notice pieces of him between one breath and the next.
The flex of his forearm. The set of his jaw, concentrated, present, entirely here with me.
Watching my face while he touches me, reading what works and doing more of it, adjusting without being asked, like he's been paying attention to me long before this moment and he's putting all of it to use right now.
He holds me while I unravel on him. Every muscle pulls taut. My back arches, my thighs press together, my fingers dig into his shoulders, and I'm right there, right on the edge, every nerve in my body wound to the point of breaking before I shatter.
When I can breathe again I lift my head and look at him. He withdraws his hand and gathers me against his chest, his arms closing around me. I snuggle against him and my tight muscles relax. His chin rests on top of my head. I feel his heartbeat against my cheek as he strokes down my back.
“You did so well,” he murmurs into my hair. “Such a good omega.”
The words sink in and stay. This is right. He is right but Kev is striding toward us, his long legs eating up the ground. His jaw is set. His eyes are flat.
I clutch Lex’s shirt as he goes rigid. Lex adjusts my clothing as Kev passes through the door. White noise rushes through my ears. I don’t want to hear whatever is coming.
Kev draws in a deep breath, his gaze moving over both of us.
He’s hurting. The ache moves through the bond sharp enough to make my chest constrict.
Kev’s shoulders sag.
“I just heard from Levi.”
He drags in another breath.
“Sera’s gone dark.”