Chapter 19 Mason
Mason
She smells like honeysuckle.
Wild, sun-warmed, tangled with something darker underneath. Black tea, maybe. And beneath that, a thread of strawberry.
My body responds to it without consulting my brain. I go up slow, hands bracing on either side of her hips, drag myself along her until my face is buried in the crook of her neck and I breathe.
The world narrows to a point, my heart slamming so hard she has to feel it.
"Mason." Her voice comes out small. Wrecked.
Arthur's' head fits above mine on the same side of her neck, his mouth close enough that I can feel the heat of his exhale against my temple. He breathes her in and the breath he lets out is long and shattered.
Knox, who's on her other side, lowers himself until his face is against her neck too, mirroring me, his nose dragging along the line of her throat. His eyes close. His lips part. And then his whole body goes still.
So I'm not crazy. We really can all smell her. All of her.
Beth shifts against me, still trembling.
"I can smell you," she says, her voice small, muffled against my chest. "All three of you. Like that night at the clearing, except—more. And it's—" Her voice splinters. "My god."
"Beth." My voice comes out rough. I tilt her chin up so I can see her face, and her eyes are wet, wide and terrified, and something in my chest folds in half. "I can smell you too... all of you."
"That means we're—" Knox starts, his voice shaking.
Arthur pulls back just enough to look at me over Beth's shoulder. His pupils are blown.
"Scent matches," he finishes, barely a whisper. Then louder: "We're scent matches. All four of us."
The statement sits in the center of my brain, enormous, immovable.
I have never been good with words. Knox has the words.
Arthur has the charisma. I have the thing where I feel everything at full volume and express approximately none of it, probably because my father communicated through nods and my mother through silence, and I learned early that if you feel something big enough to split you open, you swallow it.
You press your tongue to the roof of your mouth and you wait for it to pass, and eventually your body gets the message.
But right now, the honeysuckle is burning through every circuit my brain's built over the years.
And I'm scared. More scared than I've ever been. But...
"Hey," I manage, pulling back just enough to see her face. I cup her jaw and run my thumb along her cheekbone. "Everything will be okay. This is a good th—"
"Guys," she cuts in, her voice trembling. "I need to tell you something."