2. Rhys
Rhys
Iwent back to the workshop after she'd gone. It's where I take the things I can't set down any other way.
The Maris sat up on her trestles where I'd left her at noon, hull open to the lamp. I picked up the iron and the mallet and found the seam I'd been working before the day went sideways.
There's a rhythm to caulking a hull. Drive the cotton home.
Move along a hand's width. Do it again. The work asks nothing of a man but his hands and his patience.
Which is the whole reason I've spent the best part of my life in here.
A man who was never much good with words can still be of use to a boat.
I'd meant to work till the thing in my chest sat down.
It wouldn't. And I knew why.
Freya Bevan was home. I'd had two days' warning, and I'd told myself I was ready. Then there she was on the stool in the chippy, chin up, daring the room to make something of her. Thinner than she went away. Grey with whatever the city had done to her.
And I did what I always do. Stood in the doorway with my cap in my hands like a great daft post. Said nothing worth saying.
Her scent had got into my jacket somehow, in the close warm air of the shop. Browned butter and salt. An omega's scent, faint now, but there every time I leaned in over the seam. And every time, something in me leaned after it.
A grown alpha ought to have better command of himself than that. Right up until that afternoon I'd have told you I had. Now I kept catching it and losing the rhythm.
Ten years gone. One afternoon back, and she'd undone me at my own bench without saying ten words to me.
Three of which were that I'd got tall.
It had always been like this, if I'm honest. I try to be honest in here, if nowhere else.
We were at school together, the three of us and her.
Even then she was the brightest thing in any room she stood in.
All mouth. Quick hands. Plans the size of the county.
I was the one at the back who mended what broke.
I watched her through all those years the way you watch weather coming in off the sea. Knowing it's bigger than you. Knowing you'd best not stand in its way.
The day she left I carried her bags down to the bus with a hundred things to say. Not one of them would come. So I said safe travels, Freya. Like a fool.
She went. That was that.
A man knows his own size. Freya had gone out into the world to be something, and even if it had used her hard and sent her home grey, she was still made for more than a harbour that smells of fish. More than an alpha who smells of tar.
The others, maybe. Miles, all shine and not a scrap of shame in it. Hudson, the kind of beta an omega could set her whole weight against and trust to hold. But the quiet alpha who mends the boats and never found his tongue?
No. I'd made my peace with that a long way back.
Or I'd told myself I had. Down here, with her scent still in my collar, that was starting to look like a different thing entirely.
I drove the cotton home. Moved along a hand's width. Did it again. Then smiled as the thoughts of her pushed back in.
She'd got mean, a bit. I liked it more than was good for me.
The door went without warning. It only does that for one man.
"You left." Miles came in out of the dark already wounded. "She's home five minutes and you slope off to commune with a boat."
"The boat doesn't make speeches at me."
"The boat is a poor substitute for my company, as you well know.
" He hauled himself up onto the spare trestle, the one I keep clear for the express purpose of him doing that, and sat swinging his boots like a lad of twelve.
"How long are you planning to hide down here?
I'll have a sweepstake running by morning. Hudson will want in."
"I'm not hiding. I'm working."
"You're hiding and working. In your case the two have never been strangers."
I gave him the look that's meant to send a man on his way. It's never once worked on Miles in twenty years of aiming it at him. It did nothing now.
Hudson came in behind him. Ducked the lintel the way he's had to since he was fifteen. He carried a plate with a cloth over it, because Hudson won't have a friend hiding in a workshop past dark with nothing hot in him. He set it by my hand. Lifted the cloth. Said not a word about my missing supper.
That's Hudson. He feeds you, and you keep your reasons to yourself.
"He's hiding," Miles told him.
"I can see that."
"I'm caulking a hull," I said.
"You can hide and caulk a hull at once. You're a man of parts." Hudson set his shoulder to the doorframe and folded his arms. When Hudson settles in, he can outlast weather.
"You spoke to her, though." Miles had gone quieter. Something careful moving under the brightness. "The whole chippy heard you. Ten years you've been saving it up. And what comes out of you is, you got mean."
"She did get mean."
"It's poetry," Hudson said, into his collar.
"She got mean. I told her so." I drove the cotton home and didn't look up. "I don't see either of you doing better."
"I picked her clean up and spun her round the shop."
"You'd do that to the postman."
"I would not. The postman and I have an arrangement. Leave him out of it."
That got the short laugh out of Hudson. The one he keeps for when Miles has earned it. Rarer than Miles believes, and more often than he deserves.
Then the laughing went out of all three of us at once, the way it does.
Miles looked at his boots. "She looks tired," he said. "Like the city had her for breakfast. Did you see her hands?"
I'd seen her hands. Burns up the inside of both forearms. Old ones. The kind you get in a kitchen that doesn't mind if you bleed.
I'd seen them. I'd wanted to take them in mine. I hadn't.
Naturally.
"She's not staying," I said. Flatter than I meant.
"She always says that."
"She means it this time. She meant it last time."
Hudson spoke from his place by the door.
He has a way of setting a thing down in the middle of the room so the rest of us have to look at it.
"She came home, though. Of all the places she could have gone to lick her wounds, she came back to the one town on this coast that exists to take an omega in.
People don't do that unless some part of them wants to be kept. "
None of us said the rest. We never have to.
The house had had a shape missing from it for years.
A chair nobody sits in. Plenty of omegas pass through the bay, this being the town they pass through, and not one had ever made the three of us turn our heads.
Two alphas and a beta with no omega to call ours.
A pack with a Freya-shaped gap in it. Since school.
Since before any of us would have put it into words.
Miles knew. Hudson knew. They'd known about me the whole while and never once made me say it.
That was the mercy of being loved by those two.
"We don't crowd her." Miles had gone serious, which on him is like the sun ducking behind cloud. "Whatever this turns into. She's worn right through. She sets the pace, every step, or there's no pace at all. Agreed?"
"Agreed," Hudson said.
They both looked at me. The hard part, for me, was always going to be the not-saying. They knew that too.
"Agreed," I said.
We went up to the cottage in the end and ate Hudson's stew at the table that's seen every good night and bad one we've had since we took the place.
Miles told the one about the French yachtsman he'd talked into buying half of Tam's bait box as a local delicacy.
The story puts on a fresh detail every time.
Tonight the man wept with gratitude on the slip.
Last spring he'd only shaken Miles warmly by the hand.
"He wept," Miles said, to the table at large. "You weren't there."
"You weren't there," said Hudson. "You were on the Kittiwake with me. We watched the whole thing from the water."
"I was there in spirit. The spirit of the thing is the part that matters."
We laughed anyway. You laugh at a story the ninth time because it's his, and he's one of ours.
Here's the thing about those two I'd never say to their faces. A man can be no good with words at all, no use to much of anyone past the ends of his own arms, and still, in a warm room with the right people, be understood right down to the ground.
It was a good evening. The kind I'd have given a great deal to have her sat in the middle of.
Which was the whole trouble in one.
Ten years I'd waited. Learned nothing in them. Except that I'd wait ten more if she asked me to.
And I'd never be the one to ask her to give up her dreams and stay.