Chapter Fourteen #2
I left him to his guitar and his silence and his walls, and I walked down the hallway to the shared bedroom and stood in the doorway and looked at the bed where four people slept and tried to remember the last time all four of us had been in it at the same time.
I couldn’t.
· · ·
Jonah was waiting for me in the living room.
It was nearly midnight. Kieran had gone to bed an hour ago, and Rhys was still in his studio.
Jonah was on the couch with a book he wasn’t reading, his bare feet tucked under one of his blankets, and when I came in, he set the book down and looked at me with those green eyes that saw everything, always, without exception.
“Sit down, Dec.”
I sat. Not next to him. On the adjacent chair. I needed the distance. I needed the geometry of separation to hold the conversation in place, because if I sat next to Jonah, he would touch me, and if he touched me, the armor would begin to come off, and I was not ready for that.
Jonah looked at the distance between us. He understood it. He always understood.
“You heard her tonight,” he said. Not asked. Stated. Because Jonah knew my schedule, knew I worked late on Thursdays, knew that I would have been in my office when Nora took the Hargrove call.
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
“I know you don’t. That’s why we need to.”
“Jonah.”
“Declan.” His voice was soft. Patient. The voice he used when he was going to outlast me, which he always did, because Jonah’s patience was a geological force and my resistance was merely structural. “You’re scared.”
“I’m not scared. I’m rational. There’s a difference.”
“There isn’t. Not for you. Your rationality is what your fear wears when it wants to look respectable.”
I stared at him. The precision of the observation was infuriating. It was also, in the manner of most infuriating things Jonah said, completely accurate.
He stood up from the couch. He crossed the distance I’d put between us. He stood in front of my chair and looked down at me, and his expression was tender and implacable and very, very sure.
“You’re not protecting us,” he said. “You’re protecting yourself.”
“The pack...”
“The pack is four people, Dec. Not a corporation. Not a structure. Four people who chose each other, and one of them, the one who has never been wrong about a person in his life, is telling you that she belongs with us. And instead of listening, you’re building spreadsheets to justify keeping her out. ”
My jaw tightened. “That’s not what I’m doing.”
“It’s exactly what you’re doing. Because admitting that she might be right for us means admitting that the pack is going to change, and change is the thing that terrifies you most.”
He was standing too close. I could smell him.
Jonah’s scent was the one constant in my life that I had never been able to analyze or categorize or reduce to data, because it bypassed every analytical system I had and went straight to the part of me that was just a man who loved someone.
Warm. Sweet. Like sunlight on clean sheets.
“Jonah, I can’t...”
“Yes, you can.” He reached down and took my hands. Drew me up from the chair. I went, because I always went when Jonah pulled, because his gravity was the one force my resistance had never been engineered to withstand. “Let me in, Dec. Right now. Stop thinking and let me in.”
The armor came off.
Not all at once. It never came off all at once with me. Jonah knew that. He knew me the way I knew financial projections, completely and from memory, and he undressed me the same way I undressed problems. Layer by layer. Methodical.
He started with my tie. Loosened it slowly, watching my face, his fingers precise against the silk.
Then my buttons, one by one, top to bottom, and I stood there and let him, and the vulnerability of being undressed by someone who was looking at you with that much tenderness was almost more than I could hold.
“You do everything so carefully,” he murmured, sliding my shirt off my shoulders.
“Every button, every file, every word. You build these perfect structures and you think they’ll keep you safe.
” His hands were on my chest. His palms warm against my skin.
“But you’re not a structure, Declan. You’re a person. ”
“Jonah...”
“And persons break.” His mouth found the base of my throat. A slow, deliberate kiss pressed against my pulse point. “And that’s okay.”
I broke.
My hands found his waist and I pulled him against me and the sound that came out of me was something I didn’t recognize.
Desperate. Aching. The sound of a man who had been holding a wall in place with his bare hands for weeks and had just let go.
My mouth found his and I kissed him the way I did everything, with precision and focus, cataloguing the taste of him and the heat of him and the exact pressure that made his breath stutter.
Except my precision was fracturing. The methodical approach was crumbling.
Because Jonah’s hands were in my hair and his body was pressed against mine and he made a sound, low and open and wanting, and the sound bypassed my brain entirely and hit something animal and urgent that lived beneath the armor.
I lifted him. He wrapped around me, legs and arms and warmth, and I carried him to the couch and laid him down and knelt over him and looked at him, my omega, my heart, the person I loved with a precision that bordered on worship and a desperation I could barely contain.
“There you are,” he whispered, looking up at me.
His eyes were dark and his cheeks were flushed and he was smiling, not the diplomatic smile or the pack-steadying smile, but the one that was only mine.
The one that meant he could see me, the real me, the one who existed beneath the control. “There’s my Dec.”
I undressed him the way I did everything.
Methodically. Precisely. Each piece of clothing removed with attention and intention, my hands learning what they already knew by heart because the knowing never became routine, never became rote.
Every time I touched Jonah felt like an act of devotion.
Every time he arched into my hands felt like proof that something in the universe was organized correctly.
He teased me about it. He always teased me. “You’re folding my shirt,” he said, breathless and laughing, as I set it on the arm of the couch.
“It’ll wrinkle.”
“Declan. We are about to have sex. I don’t care about wrinkles.”
“I care about wrinkles.”
He pulled me down to him by the back of my neck and kissed me, and the shirt was forgotten, and the wrinkles were forgotten, and the only thing that existed was his mouth and his body and the sounds he made when I touched him, sounds that were open and unguarded and so beautiful that they made something inside me physically ache.
I loved him with precision. I loved him with focus.
I mapped his body with the attention I gave to every important thing, thorough and relentless and completely devoted.
And when the control finally fractured, when the careful, measured approach shattered into something raw and urgent and desperate, he caught me.
He held on. He whispered yes and more and there, Dec, there, and I buried my face in his neck and let the last of the armor fall and was just a man, loving someone, terrified and certain in equal measure.
After, he lay against my chest and traced patterns on my skin and the quiet between us was the only kind of quiet I’d ever been able to tolerate. The kind that wasn’t empty. The kind that was full of someone else’s breathing.
“She’s not going to break us,” Jonah said quietly.
I didn’t answer.
“Dec. Look at me.”
I looked at him. His green eyes were steady and warm and completely certain in a way that I envied with every cell in my body, because certainty was the one thing I had never been able to manufacture, despite building my entire life around the attempt.
“She handled a client crisis at 8:30 on a Thursday night and didn’t tell a soul,” Jonah said.
“She built a forty-eight-hour buffer into the Hargrove account because she saw the risk before anyone else. She has run this office single-handedly for three years and never once asked for credit. And you heard her tonight, Dec. You heard her.”
“I heard her.”
“Then you know.”
I closed my eyes. I held him. I said nothing, because the thing I knew was not something I could say out loud yet. Saying it would make it real, and real would mean change, and change was the thing that terrified me most, and Jonah had been right about that, as he was right about everything.
· · ·
The shared bed.
I lay on my side in the dark and listened to my pack breathe.
Kieran was to my left, already asleep, his body radiating heat like a furnace.
Jonah was between us, curled into Kieran’s chest with one hand reaching back to rest on my hip, a bridge even in sleep.
The contact was automatic. Instinctive. An omega keeping his alphas connected.
Rhys’s side of the bed was empty. He’d stayed in his room. Third night this week.
Kieran smelled like Nora. Faintly, beneath his own scent, her presence lingered. Clean linen and honey and something warm that I couldn’t categorize because it wasn’t in any database. It was just her. Just Nora. Woven into my alpha’s skin like a thread he couldn’t pull free.
I stared at the ceiling. I felt the pack bond humming between us, strained and stretched and alive, and I felt Jonah’s hand on my hip, and I felt the empty space where Rhys should have been, and I felt the crack in the wall that I’d built between myself and Nora Whitfield.
Small. Irreversible.
She had built a forty-eight-hour buffer. She had talked Frank Hargrove off a ledge at 8:30 p.m. She had done it without being asked, without expecting recognition, without telling anyone.
She had done it the way I would have done it.
And that, more than anything, more than Kieran’s certainty or Jonah’s conviction or the impossible biology of a scent match with a beta, was the thing that cracked the wall.
She was like me. Competent and invisible and quietly holding the world together while it forgot to notice.
I pressed my face into the pillow and felt the pack shift beneath me like tectonic plates, slow and irreversible and rearranging the landscape of everything I’d built.
The crack was small.
But I could feel the light coming through it.