Chapter Four – Lila.29 #2
The meal was a repeat of the night before. Stew, reheated but better for it, the flavors having sulked together overnight. I found myself ladling bowls without thinking, no longer holding my own at arm’s length, and set them in front of each man as though this had always been my task.
Even as we ate, the change was clear. Yesterday, Cole had spoken in sentences that seemed imported from some manual on minimal communication, Wade’s silences had been enormous, and Rhett had, with visible intent, tried to bundle and soften every silence with his own noise.
Now, fatigue and accomplishment had conspired to unwind them.
Cole talked a little more than the evening before, mostly about the fence, and he described the angle of the hill and how the ground there was “full of resentment for fence posts.” The phrase stuck with me.
I could see it. Rhett threw in a story about a goat he once tried to keep inside a perimeter, a story that involved tenacity, improvisation, and eventual defeat.
He pantomimed the goat’s leaps, his hands held up like little hooves, and the table shook when Cole nearly snorted stew from his nose.
Wade talked, too, and I noticed every time he spoke, the others went quiet and let the sound of his voice fill the space.
He told me about the auger, and he explained, without condescension and with the patience of someone who had once had to learn it himself, what exactly the hairline crack in the housing might do if left too long.
He did it gently, his tone steady and low, as though coaxing confidence out of a foal.
He only made one joke, and it wasn’t even a joke, more a dry observation: “Everything worth keeping needs tending, and everything you ignore has ambitions.”
I looked up at that. He was looking at me. There was no challenge in it, no edge, just the statement, left to float in the air, and I could feel it settle near my chest, warm and uncomfortable.
It was when the meal was nearly finished that everything started to happen at once.
I had always been sensitive to Alpha scent.
It was the rule you lived by, if you were an Omega, to notice but not acknowledge, to feel it but mask how it made you feel.
You learned to breathe shallow. You learned to focus on other senses.
Some Omegas craved it; most of us learned to treat it like a kind of secondhand cigarette smoke,pervasive, inadvisable, and only lethal when you let it get too close.
Tonight, the combined weight of their scents tangled up and hung low in the kitchen.
Cole’s earthy steadiness, Rhett’s dark-sweet cut of aftershave layered with something wild beneath, and Wade’s gunmetal base note, all of it mixing and thickening until even the windows, slick with condensation, felt complicit.
A warmth started up in my chest, working its way toward my face.
I blinked, my mouth dry, my body tightening itself for reasons that were both physical and not.
Wade’s voice found me again. “Are you alright?”
He did not say it like a man expecting yes or no. He said it as though he’d been waiting.
I opened my mouth to answer, but a noise left me first; a small, involuntary, not quite a word noise. I felt it slip out, and the embarrassment punched hard up my neck. I snapped my lips closed, tried again. “I’m fine,” I said, but my voice came out too low, the syllables clipped.
Wade’s eyes didn’t waver. Something cold and bright flickered in my gut with both fear and familiarity, and something like the shape memory leaves behind.
Cole’s chair thumped against the floor as he nudged it back a few inches. He didn’t stand, just leaned in, elbows on his knees, looking down at his hands. Rhett, for once, went quiet, his eyes on me, the smile gone.
In the silence, the scent closed tighter around me, a heat that flushed my scalp, a gathering ache in my arms and chest.
Wade exhaled once, a low rumble. The sound worked up from his collarbone and carried across the table. No one spoke. I tried to bring my hands together, but they trembled, so I pressed them flat to the wood, trying to look casual.
He leaned forward, a shift so subtle even the kitchen didn’t register it. His jaw flexed. I watched his nostrils flare. He was scenting me, I realized, and the rawness of it twisted lower, pulling at something I’d been gripping tight all these months.
A noise left my throat then, not a moan but the start of one. I looked down fast, showed him the part in my hair, held myself perfectly still. The next breath came out shaky, not because I was cold.
Wade spoke again, voice deep as a storm. “You sure?”
This time, the sound I made was soft and wordless. I felt it roll out of me, and I hated that I couldn’t wrangle it back in.
Rhett’s spoon clattered into his bowl. His hands went to the edge of the table the way you might brace for an earthquake. He didn’t look at me yet. He waited, maybe to see if I’d run or shatter.
I could feel it, the three of them, the pressure of their being both present and patient, and absolutely not moving away. My body wanted to fold, collapse into the scent and the steadiness, the warmth collected at the head of the table.
I moaned. This time it was real, and it was full and slow and hot enough that it burned my own ears.
Wade’s mouth opened a little, and his voice dropped, almost a growl now: “Breathe, Lila.”
I did. I drew in the air, thick with the scent of them, and it cracked something ragged and wild inside me.
I pushed my chair back and stood, even as the world spun up around me in a blur of heat and cold.
“I’m fine,” I repeated, but it wasn’t true anymore.
I left the table, closing the door gently behind me, and crossed the dark hallway to the empty living room. My knees shook. My hands went to my belly, holding it, rocking in the thick half-light of dusk. I breathed like Wade told me to.
Through the door, I could hear the men at the table, not talking. Not for a very long time.