Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Zane
The moan that comes down through the second floor is loud enough to make Gray choke on his beer.
“Jesus Christ.” Beckett looks at the ceiling. “They know we can hear them, right?”
“They don’t care.” Tyler doesn’t look up from the laptop, where he’s been working on the pack bond filing for the last hour. “Post-claiming hormones. The drive to reconnect is biological.”
“Thank you, Dr. Wu.” Beckett salutes him with his beer. “Really takes the romance out of it.”
Another sound comes down, this one unmistakably Reese, and I can’t help myself. “Damn. Jackson’s rougher with her than he is with Eli.”
The room goes still, and I remember one second too late that Eli is sitting at the other end of the couch. I brace for the death glare.
He smirks instead. “I know how to keep quiet.” He takes a slow drink. “Wait until it’s my turn. She won’t.”
Bo laughs and the tension goes out of the room. “Appreciate the warning. I’ll buy earplugs.”
“Or don’t,” Eli says, and he isn’t entirely joking.
Gray clears his throat. “So we’re doing this out loud now.”
“Isn’t that the point?” I put my feet on the coffee table until Bo swats them off. “We’re filing pack paperwork. We’re all going to be bonded to her. Feels strange to keep pretending none of us think about it.”
“He’s got a point,” Cameron says from the corner chair.
Gray rubs a hand down his face. “Fine. Cards on the table. What are we actually doing here?”
“Legally speaking—”
“Not legally, Tyler. Logistically.” Gray waves at the ceiling, where things have quieted down some. “Jackson’s claimed her. Beckett’s claimed her. The rest of us are supposed to follow before nationals. How does that work? Do we draw straws? Make a schedule?”
Beckett stares at him. “A schedule. For claiming our Omega. Very romantic, Captain.”
“You got a better idea?”
“We don’t need an idea,” Bo says. “We let it happen when it happens.”
“We have two weeks.”
“Then we have two weeks.”
Gray gives him a look that says this is exactly the sort of answer that makes him want to walk into traffic.
“It doesn’t need to be a production,” Eli says. “Jackson and I weren’t planning a threesome that night. It got away from us.”
“Got away from you,” Gray repeats. “Into a threesome. With claiming bites.”
“It was a good night.” Eli shrugs. “Don’t knock it.”
Tyler finally looks up from the laptop. “For the filing, we need three bonded pairs to qualify as a recognized unit. Four is better. Five puts us out of reach on any discrimination claim.”
“So one more gets us over the line,” Gray says. “Three more and nobody can touch us.”
“The claims aren’t the hard part.” Bo shifts on the couch. “The hard part is doing it because we want to, not because Tyler needs another signature.”
“The form exists to protect her.” There’s an edge in Tyler’s voice I don’t hear twice a year. “And us. Without recognition, the university can separate the pack and remove her from the team.”
“We know,” Cameron says. “Bo’s still right.”
Tyler’s mouth tightens, but Eli gets there before he can answer. “He’s not saying the paperwork doesn’t matter. He’s saying I don’t want Reese wondering ten years from now whether somebody bit her because we had a deadline.”
That shuts everybody up.
I look around the room. Seven men, half-empty beers, Tyler’s laptop glowing on the coffee table, and Jackson upstairs doing his best to make sure none of us forget exactly what we’re talking about.
“The real question isn’t timing,” I say. “It’s whether we’re ready. Pack bonds are permanent. This isn’t about nationals or the administration or anybody’s father. This is the rest of our lives.”
Tyler pushes his glasses up. “The average pack bond lasts sixty-eight years.”
Bo turns his head slowly. “Did you seriously look that up?”
“Obviously.”
“Tyler.”
“I’m saying we should be sure.”
“I’m sure.” Cameron doesn’t raise his voice, and every head turns anyway. “I’ve been sure since the night I took her out on the bike. We sat at the overlook and looked at stars while you idiots argued about who got the chair next to her at dinner.”
Beckett sits forward. “That was a date?”
Cameron looks at him.
“You took her on a date and didn’t mention it?”
“Didn’t know I needed permission.”
“How many times?” I ask, because now I need to know. Cameron’s always been the hardest one to read, hanging back while the rest of us fall over ourselves every time Reese walks into a room.
“A few.” He shrugs. “She needed away from the noise. I gave her that.”
“Unbelievable.” Beckett looks genuinely offended. “The quiet one’s been running game this whole time.”
“It’s not game. It’s showing up.” Cameron looks at Gray. “You could try it instead of strategizing about her like she’s a race to win.”
Gray’s face changes for half a second before he gets it under control. “I’m trying to protect her.”
“From what? Us?” Bo shakes his head. “We’re not the enemy, Gray. Your father is. The administration is. That reporter on our dock is.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?” Bo leans forward with his forearms on his knees. “Because from where I’m sitting, you’ve kept a room’s width between you and her since the championship. You carried her up to bed and left. You talk about her like she’s a problem instead of a person you’re in love with.”
Nobody moves.
It’s the first time anybody has used that word in this house, and it hangs there long enough that Beckett finally takes another drink.
“Well, shit. Bo went and said it.”
“Somebody had to.” Bo doesn’t look sorry. “We’ve been walking around it for weeks, calling it biology or convenience or team chemistry. It isn’t.”
“Was it ever?” Eli asks. “Biology, I mean. I don’t think it was. Not for any of us.”
“It wasn’t for me,” I say. “I knew she was different the second she walked into that boathouse. Before we knew she was Omega. Before any of it.”
“Same,” Cameron says.
Tyler nods. “I have notes from before we knew she was Omega.”
Beckett slowly turns his head. “Notes.”
“Observations.”
“Tyler. Buddy. You can just say you thought she was hot.”
“I prefer precise language.”
“Of course you do.”
I lean forward and set my beer between my feet. “Here’s what gets me. We’re sitting here talking about sixty-eight years, and half of us have never even bought her dinner.”
“Speak for yourself,” Cameron says.
“Right. The secret motorcycle dates.”
“They weren’t dates.”
“Did she go somewhere alone with you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you spend time together?”
“Obviously.”
“Did you want to spend time with her?”
Cameron stares at me.
“Congratulations. You dated Reese.”
Beckett points his bottle at him. “Meanwhile, I’ve been turning up to study sessions nobody invited me to and keeping Quinton off her when I can. Apparently I’ve been doing romance wrong.”
Gray’s attention snaps over. “Quinton. Has he tried anything?”
“Nothing you could point at.” Some of Beckett’s easiness disappears. “He’s friendly. Too friendly, maybe. Asks about her schedule, asks about the team. He’s fishing. I just can’t work out what for.”
“I don’t trust him,” Gray says.
“Because of Sophia?” Bo asks.
“Because I’ve known him since prep school.” Gray picks at the edge of the label on his beer. “He doesn’t ask questions unless he wants something.”
“What does he want?” I ask.
“If I knew that, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Beckett turns his bottle between his hands. “He’s asking enough that I’ve noticed.”
That gets Cameron’s attention. “How much?”
“Enough.”
Gray’s jaw sets. “Then Reese needs to know.”
“Know what?” I ask. “That you hate him?”
“That there’s history.”
“What history?” Eli asks.
Gray is quiet for a second. “Sophia. Prep school. A lot of shit that doesn’t matter anymore except Quinton doesn’t let go of anything he thinks somebody took from him.”
“And you think Reese is part of that?”
“I think I don’t know.” Gray looks toward the stairs. “That’s the problem.”
At least that’s something.
Cameron shifts in his chair. “Tell her what you know.”
“And then let her decide what she does with it,” I add. “She’s got a project with him worth forty percent of her grade. She can’t just stop speaking to him because eight Alphas got suspicious.”
“We stay close,” Gray says.
“Close is fine. Following her around campus isn’t.”
“I wasn’t suggesting—”
“You were thinking it.”
Beckett snorts into his beer.
Gray points at me. “You are rapidly becoming my least favorite person.”
“That’s okay. Cameron’s been your least favorite since he called you emotionally constipated.”
“I didn’t say that,” Cameron says.
“You implied it.”
“I said he strategizes too much.”
“Same diagnosis.”
Bo is trying not to laugh when a groan comes down through the ceiling, deep and raw and unmistakably Jackson.
Eli mutters, “Fuck,” then shifts in his seat and crosses his legs with considerably less subtlety than he thinks.
Beckett notices immediately. “You good there, Stone?”
“Shut up.”
The shower comes on a minute later, loud enough through the pipes that Bo looks toward the ceiling. “That’s their second one. There won’t be any hot water left in this house.”
“Maybe we table the relationship audit,” Eli says, sounding strained, “until they’re finished.”
“Until you’re finished, you mean.”
He flips me off without any heat in it.
Gray sighs. “This conversation isn’t over.”
“What’s left?” I stand and stretch. “We’re all in. That’s been obvious since day one.”
“Has it?”
“To some of us.” I head for the kitchen. “I’ve known since she told you to go fuck yourself on her first day of practice.”
“She never said that.”
“She said it with her whole face. It was beautiful.” I pull another bottle out of the fridge. “Some of us knew she was something before she went into heat. Just putting that out there.”
“Low blow, Hollis.”
“Truth hurts, Lockwood.”
I’m against the counter when I hear the stairs. Jackson comes down first with his hair wet, looking more settled than I’ve seen him in a year. Reese follows a few seconds later, flushed and wearing one of his hoodies that comes down almost to her knees.
She slows when she sees all of us. “Hey.”
There’s something almost shy about it, like she knows damn well we heard them and hasn’t decided whether we’re going to make her regret coming downstairs.
“Hey yourself.” I toss her a water. “You good?”
She catches it. “Yeah. I’m good.”
“Good, because while you two were trying to bring down the ceiling, we discovered that none of us have properly taken you out, Cameron’s been smuggling you off on secret motorcycle dates, Gray is emotionally constipated, and Tyler looked up the average lifespan of a pack bond.”
Reese blinks at me. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Sixty-eight years,” Tyler supplies from the living room.
“Also, according to Eli, he’s planning to make you louder than Jackson did.”
“I did not say that,” Eli calls.
“You absolutely did.”
“I said she’d be louder. That’s not the same thing.”
Reese’s mouth falls open.
Jackson snorts beside her. Behind him, the rest of them are wearing every expression between horror and delight.
Then Reese laughs. Full and real and surprised, the kind that makes everybody else in the room start smiling whether they mean to or not.
“You’re all insane.”
“Yeah.” I grin at her. “But we’re your kind of insane. If you’ll have us.”
Something changes in her face.
She looks past me at the six other men watching her, then back at Jackson beside her. For all the talk we just did about forms and claims and sixty-eight years, nobody says anything now.
“I’ll think about it,” she says, but she’s smiling when she does.
“Fair.”
She sits on the floor in front of the couch and cracks open her water. Beckett puts the TV on, Bo asks if anybody wants the rest of the jambalaya before he puts it away, and Tyler immediately tries to tell him how long it can safely sit at room temperature.
Within five minutes, the conversation has turned into nothing in particular.
I stay against the kitchen counter for a while, watching Reese steal Jackson’s spot against the couch even though he’s standing three feet away.
He lets her. Cameron goes back to whatever he was reading.
Gray isn’t saying much, but he’s stopped peeling the label off his beer. Nobody has solved anything.
Then Reese looks over, catches me watching, and pats the floor beside her.
I go sit down.
Sixty-eight years can wait until tomorrow.