CHAPTER SEVEN #2
"I don't actually mind being watched over," she said slowly, working it out as she said it.
"That's the strange part. If you'd asked me — if you'd said, 'I want to set up patrols near your property because I'm worried about Ashgrove, would that be okay' — I probably would have said yes.
It's the not asking that got under my skin.
It's — I spent a long time with someone who made every decision about my safety on my behalf and called it love, and by the time I understood what that actually was, I'd stopped noticing the difference between being protected and being controlled.
I need there to be a difference. With you.
I need you to actually let there be one, even when it's less efficient than just deciding things yourself. "
"There's a difference," he said, quiet and certain. "I'll do better at showing it. Starting with — do you want the watch schedule? Actually want it, not just tolerate it because it's already in motion?"
She thought about the shape at the tree line her first night here, the fear that had spiked through her watching it and then, later, the strange relief of learning it had been him.
She thought about the marker stone, Ashgrove's mark carved fresh into old gray rock, the very real danger Caleb hadn't softened or hidden from her even once.
"Yeah," she said. "I want it. I just needed to be the one who said yes."
Something eased in his shoulders, visible even in the dim light, and he nodded once, like he was filing the lesson away somewhere permanent.
"Then it stays. And from now on, anything else that touches your safety, your property, your choices — you hear it from me first, before it happens, not after. I mean that."
They stood there a moment longer, the boundary marker a dark shape between them, the first real disagreement of whatever this was between them resolved not by one side winning but by both sides actually listening, and Everly felt something settle in her chest that she hadn't expected to feel this soon, this easily, with a man she'd known less than a week.
Trust wasn't automatic, she reminded herself, even now, even with the evidence stacking up in his favor faster than her guarded heart wanted to admit. But it was, for the first time in longer than she wanted to think about, starting to feel possible.
"Come on," she said, surprising herself. "I'll make dinner. You can tell me more about this harvest festival. Marisol's apparently determined to drag me into."
Caleb's whole face changed, something warm and unguarded breaking through the careful alpha composure he wore like armor most of the time, and he fell into step beside her without another word, both of them walking back toward the cottage through the deepening dark, close enough now that their shoulders brushed once, twice, neither of them moving away.
---
Dinner was simple — pasta with whatever vegetables Everly had managed to coax out of the small overgrown garden bed behind the cottage, a loaf of bread Dot had sent home with Marisol earlier that week, a bottle of wine Caleb produced from somewhere in his truck with the sheepish admission that he'd grabbed it on impulse days ago and never found the right moment to bring it over.
They ate at the kitchen table, the same one where he'd told her everything that first morning, and the conversation moved easily between practical things — the harvest festival, which turned out to be an annual town-wide event that the pack quietly half-funded and fully attended, a tradition going back generations — and smaller things, the kind of ordinary getting-to-know-you conversation Everly hadn't realized she'd missed until she was in the middle of having it.
She learned he'd wanted, as a much younger man, to leave Blackbriar entirely — had spent one restless summer at nineteen seriously considering enrolling somewhere far away, engineering maybe, something with no relation to pack business at all, before his father's first health scare pulled him back into the orbit he'd never really escaped since.
He learned, in turn, that she'd once wanted to run her own furniture restoration shop, a real one, storefront and everything, before Derek had talked her out of it slowly enough that she hadn't noticed the dream disappearing until it was already gone.
"You could still do that," Caleb said, topping off her wine without asking, a habit she found she didn't mind from him the way she'd minded it from other men, maybe because he always watched her reaction closely enough afterward to stop the second she wanted him to.
"The shop, I mean. Nothing about being here rules that out. "
"I know." She turned her glass slowly, watching the wine catch the kitchen's low light.
"I think I stopped believing it was allowed, is the real problem.
Not that it was impossible. Just that it was the kind of thing you don't get, if you're the kind of person who ends up with someone like Derek.
Like wanting something that big for yourself was already evidence you'd chosen badly, so why bother wanting it again. "
"That's not how it works." He said it plainly, no pity in it, just quiet certainty. "You don't lose the right to want things because someone talked you out of wanting them once."
She looked up at him across the small kitchen table, candlelight — an actual candle, she realized, one of Ruth's, pulled from a drawer and lit without ceremony sometime during dinner without her quite noticing when — catching the gold in his eyes, and felt the pull of the bond her aunt's letter had described settle into something less like an external force and more like a simple, quiet truth she was choosing, slowly, on her own terms, to believe.
"Maybe I don't," she said. "Maybe I'm figuring that out."
They stayed at the table long after the food was gone, wine glasses empty, candles burning lower, talking about nothing and everything in the unhurried way of two people who'd both, separately, forgotten what it felt like to want to stay in a conversation rather than escape it.
Trust wasn't automatic, she reminded herself again, even now, even with the evidence stacking up in his favor faster than her guarded heart wanted to admit.
But it was, for the first time in longer than she wanted to think about, starting to feel not just possible, but real.