Chapter 31 #2
She puts her hand on my arm. Shows me something from the shelf—some kind of sauce.
She's reading the label like it contains crucial information, telling me things about the ingredients that I'm not really tracking but that I'm listening to completely because her voice rearranges my nervous system in a way that nothing else has figured out how to do.
By the time she finishes I've forgotten what I was thinking about.
We turn down the frozen food aisle.
Finn and Malcolm have found the ice cream section and have already been arguing for what appears to be longer than the ice cream decision warrants.
"Rocky road," Finn says, with the conviction of someone defending a principle.
"Black cherry," Malcolm says, equally firm.
Vee wrinkles her nose at the black cherry in a way that's visible and immediate. Then she covers it, because she's polite, but I saw it.
They each grab a pint and put them in the cart.
I lean down toward her. "What do you like?"
She glances up at me with that shy smile. "I'm not complicated. Chocolate."
I wait until Finn and Malcolm have moved on to examine other options further down the case.
Then I reach into the cart, take their pints, and put them back.
I put three pints of chocolate in instead.
I lean back down. "That way if you need more, you can eat theirs too."
She looks up at me. Her face does the full version of the smile—the unguarded one, the open one—and then she giggles. The sound hits me in five different places simultaneously and none of them are the ones Arden would call regulated.
I don't care.
The checkout line is fine until it isn't.
We're almost done. Malcolm is loading the belt. Finn is reading the back of something he threw in the cart spontaneously. Vee is next to me talking to Alex about things I'm not tracking closely enough to follow.
I feel it before I turn around.
Alpha scent.
The pack from the aisle. They've come up behind us in the line—three alphas, their omega between them. Normal. Completely normal. They're not looking at us with anything except mild impatience at the length of the line.
My body doesn't care.
Every circuit fires at once. The space between them and Vee is twelve feet and shrinking as the line moves. Unfamiliar alphas. Behind us. Too close.
The growl comes up before I can stop it.
It's not a small sound.
The cashier freezes. The couple behind the pack takes a visible step back. The pack alphas go very still in the way alphas go still when they've registered a threat and are doing the math on their options.
Then Vee's hand lands on my chest.
Flat. Warm. Steady.
I look down at her.
She's looking up at me, and her expression doesn't have fear in it. Not of me, not of them, not of the situation. Just that calm, certain quality she has when she's decided something.
"Tell me what you put in the cart today that I didn't ask for," she says.
My brain shifts.
"The pasta," I say. My voice comes out rough.
"What else."
"The jam. The chocolate. The—" I pause. "The three things in the produce section."
"Four things."
"Four things."
She keeps her hand on my chest. Her palm is warm through my shirt. The growl has died back to a sound that isn't audible anymore. Behind us I'm dimly aware of the pack giving our party a considerably wider berth, which solves the proximity problem without requiring anything further from me.
"The cashier is waiting," Vee says.
I look at the cashier. Who is very professionally pretending that the last forty-five seconds didn't happen.
Malcolm steps forward and finishes the transaction. I keep my eyes on Vee and my hand over hers where it's still resting on my torso.
We make it to the car.
The ride home is easier than the ride there.
Malcolm and Finn have resumed their ice cream argument, now focused on who would have enjoyed black cherry more if they'd been allowed to keep it. The debate is pointless, loud and completely comfortable.
Vee is next to me again. She takes my hand the same way I took hers on the way there, fingers lacing through mine.
Then she turns and kisses me. Brief and warm, her hand coming up to my jaw. "You did so well," she says.
I look at her.
"I growled at strangers in a grocery store," I say.
"You growled and then you stopped." She holds my gaze. "That's the difference, Rhys. You stopped."
I think about that.
Outside the window the town gives way to trees again as the road narrows.
The familiar turns that lead back to the cabin.
Back to the place that has smelled like pack since the first day I arrived and put down every defense I had for five minutes and then picked them back up and told myself it was a temporary lowering.
It wasn't temporary.
Vee's hand is in mine. Her shoulder is warm against my arm. Malcolm and Finn have given up on the ice cream argument and started a new one about something equally inconsequential. Alex is driving with the expression of a man who is glad about how the day went.
Maybe this works, I think.
Maybe all the complicated geography between what we are and what we're allowed to be… maybe none of it matters as much as this. This car. This pack.
This omega with her hand in mine telling me that stopping is the difference.
As long as I have her, I think I can keep stopping.
As long as I have her.