Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Reese
Ialmost cancel three times.
The project is due in under two weeks and we still have the presentation to finish, and that’s the only reason I’m walking into the library instead of staying at the house where eight Alphas would happily build a wall around me. I’m not letting my GPA go down with everything else.
Quinton’s already at our table in the back corner with his laptop open and two coffees waiting. He looks up when I get close and his smile is the same one he’s had for weeks.
“Wasn’t sure you’d show.” He slides one of the cups over. “Vanilla latte, extra shot.”
“Thanks.” I take the chair across from him and keep the table where it is. “Sorry I’ve been a ghost. Things have been a lot.”
“I saw the articles.” He tilts his head. “That reporter did a number on you.”
My stomach turns over. Of course he saw. Everybody’s seen.
Two pieces have run so far and both of them are about the photograph.
A crew that’s unusually close, a coxswain who transferred mid-year and won’t comment.
Kowalski said the word out loud in our boathouse on Thursday, but she hasn’t printed it, and until she does it’s one reporter’s theory that nobody is obliged to believe.
“It’s being handled,” I say, which is the nearest thing to true I’ve got.
“I’m sure it is.” He picks at the lid of his cup. “Your guys seem pretty protective.”
“It has its moments.”
We work in quiet for a while, which is a relief. Quinton’s always been good at knowing when I need the room. It’s one of the things I liked about him back when I thought he was a nice guy offering friendship with nothing attached to it.
“Hey.” His voice brings me back. “You okay? You’ve been on the same paragraph for ten minutes.”
“Distracted.” I make myself look at the screen. “Where were we on the market analysis?”
“Almost done.” He turns the laptop toward me. “I finished the competitor breakdown while you were dealing with everything. Figured you had enough going on.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I wanted to.” He shrugs. “We’re partners. Partners help each other out.”
There’s a little weight on the word, or maybe I’m looking for it now. Quinton has been nothing but decent to me, and everything the guys said about him sounds paranoid in a quiet library on a Friday afternoon with a vanilla latte sitting beside my hand.
“So we need the conclusion and the slides,” I say, scrolling through his work. It’s thorough. “We could finish the draft today if we push.”
“Or we could take a break. You look like you haven’t slept this week.”
“I’m fine.”
“You keep saying that.” His eyes stay on mine. “You don’t have to perform for me, Reese. I’m not going to judge you and I’m not reporting back to anybody. I’m here if you want to talk.”
It’s more tempting than it should be, because he’s right that I haven’t slept, and I’m tired all the way through from holding my face still in front of the pack.
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Okay. No pressure.” He holds up his hands. “The offer stands.”
We work another hour. The conclusion comes together faster than I expect, his writing folding into mine without either of us fighting for it, and by the time we save the file I’ve forgotten to be nervous.
“That’s a solid draft,” he says. “Polish the slides this weekend and we’re done.”
“Thank God.” I stretch until my back cracks. “One less thing.”
“You know what you need?” He closes the laptop and stands. “Food. Real food, not whatever protein bars your guys keep putting in front of you.”
“I should get back.”
“Come on. There’s a tapas place around the corner with patatas bravas worth crossing town for. My treat, for finishing the hard part.”
I hesitate. The smart move is home, to Bo’s sweet tea and Jackson in the doorway and eight men who would put themselves between me and a bus.
I’m so tired of being managed.
“One hour,” I say. “Then I have to go.”
The tapas place is small and crowded, which should help and doesn’t. Quinton steers me toward a booth in the back with his hand on my lower back, and it stays there a beat past where it should.
I slide in fast and put the table between us again.
“So,” he says when we’ve ordered. “Can I ask you something personal?”
“Depends what it is.”
“Fair.” He tears a piece off the bread. “Are you happy? With them, I mean.”
The question gets in under my guard. “It’s complicated.”
“Is it?” He looks at me straight on. “Because from out here it looks like you’re drowning. Like they’re all so busy protecting you that nobody’s asked what you actually want.”
“They care about me.”
“I’m sure they do.” He sits back instead of pushing. “But you don’t look happy.”
“I’ve had a bad week.”
“I know. That’s kind of my point.”
Our food comes, giving me an excuse to look away. I spear a potato and move it around my plate without eating it.
Quinton leaves me alone for a minute.
That’s what he’s always been good at. He doesn’t crowd the silence. Doesn’t fill every empty space with advice. Even now, after everything the guys have told me about him, it’s hard to reconcile the person sitting across from me with the version of Quinton they know.
“You deserve to get to be a person sometimes,” he says eventually. “Not the coxswain. Not whatever’s happening with the team. Just Reese.”
I look at him. “You make that sound easy.”
“It should be.”
“It’s not.”
“No.” His expression softens. “I guess it isn’t.”
I take a drink and wish I’d gone home.
“Can I ask you something else?”
“You’re pushing your luck.”
That gets a smile. “Why do you keep going back?”
My fork stops.
“To the house,” he says. “To all of it. If you’re this miserable, why stay?”
“I’m not miserable.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not.”
“I believe you.”
The fact that he doesn’t argue makes me want to.
“They’re my team.”
“I know.”
“They’re more than that.”
His eyes hold mine. “I know that too.”
I should leave it there. Instead I hear myself ask, “Then what exactly are you trying to say?”
Quinton looks down at his plate before he answers.
“I like you.”
I don’t know why hearing him say it feels different from already knowing.
“I have for a while. I didn’t say anything because you had enough going on, and I figured if you were interested, you’d let me know.” He gives a small shrug. “Maybe I read that wrong.”
“I didn’t know.”
“That’s sort of the point.” His mouth pulls sideways. “I wasn’t trying to make it your problem.”
For some reason that makes this harder, not easier.
“Quinton—”
“I’m not asking you for anything.” He leans back. “You asked what I was trying to say, so I’m telling you. I like you. I think you’re funny and smart and terrifying when somebody puts bad data in front of you. I like working with you. I like having coffee with you. That’s it.”
“That’s not nothing.”
“No.” His eyes stay on mine. “It’s not.”
For a few seconds neither of us says anything. Then he reaches across the table and takes my hand.
I should pull away.
I don’t, not immediately.
His thumb moves across my knuckles, gentle enough that I hate how much worse that makes the confusion.
“You don’t have to keep being whatever they need you to be,” he says.
The words catch somewhere strange.
“I’m not.”
“I hope not.” His thumb passes over my knuckles again. “I just think you deserve somebody who cares about Reese before they care about what Reese can do for a crew.”
“They do.”
“Then I’m glad.”
I study his face, looking for the angle. “You don’t sound glad.”
“I’m trying not to tell you what to do.”
“That’s new.”
He gives me a faint smile. “See? Terrifying.”
Despite myself, I almost smile back.
Then he says, “You shouldn’t have to spend your life being their Omega just because they decided they need one.”
Everything in the room goes very far away.
His thumb stops against my hand.
“What did you say?”
Quinton’s eyes flick over my face. “I said you shouldn’t have to be whatever they need.”
“No.” I pull my hand out of his. “After that.”
A pause, barely long enough to count.
“Beta. Sorry.”
“You said Omega.”
“Did I?” He shakes his head. “Slip of the tongue.”
It wasn’t, and we both know it wasn’t.
That word has not been in print anywhere. Kowalski knew because somebody told her. Now Quinton knows too.
The restaurant suddenly feels too small.
“I should go.”
“Reese, wait.”
“Thanks for dinner.” I already have my bag. “I’ll email you about the slides.”
“At least let me walk you home.”
“I’m fine.”
I’m halfway to the door when he catches my arm. Not hard, but hard enough to stop me.
“Reese.” His voice has dropped. “Just hear me out.”
“Let go of me.”
He doesn’t. Not right away.
“I’m not trying to scare you. I just need you to understand.”
My pulse kicks harder. “Quinton. Let go.”
His fingers loosen, but instead of stepping away, he moves closer. I get a lungful of him, Alpha musk sharp and cloying, wrong in a way my body recognizes before my brain does. Nothing like Bo’s late-summer warmth, cut grass and sun-dried hay, or the clean pine of Gray.
Nothing like home.
“Understand what?”
“That you’re wasting yourself on them.” His voice stays low, almost reasonable. “You could have so much more than this.”
“Move.”
“Reese, I’m trying to help you.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
His hand comes up toward my face, and I go rigid.
“You don’t know what they’re doing to you,” he says. “If you’d just let me—”
He leans in.
I shove him hard enough that he has to take a step back.
“Don’t touch me.”
A few heads turn. For one second I see something in Quinton’s face I’ve never seen before. Anger, maybe. Not embarrassment. Not surprise.
Then it’s gone, and the pleasant version of him slides back over the top.
“Sorry.” He puts his hands up and moves back. “I misread it. I thought—”
“You thought wrong.”
“I know. I said I’m sorry.”
I don’t wait for the rest. I get through the door into the cold, and my heart is going hard enough to hurt.
The walk home takes fifteen minutes. My hands stop shaking somewhere around the tenth, and the rest of me doesn’t settle at all. Quinton knew. That’s the thought that follows me all the way back. Not that he tried to kiss me. Not even that he grabbed my arm after I told him I was leaving.
He knew.
Kowalski walked into the boathouse yesterday already knowing exactly what I was. Quinton just used the same word like it belonged in a conversation we’d been having for months. Maybe there are a dozen ways he could have heard it. I can’t think of one I believe.
The house is loud when I come in. Zane and Beckett are arguing in the living room, Tyler’s typing at the dining table, and somebody’s doing dishes in the kitchen. All of it ordinary. All of it safe.
Home.
The word lands before I can stop it.
I don’t want ordinary right now. I don’t want eight faces turning toward me or Gray asking what happened or Jackson feeling whatever’s coming off me through the bond. I don’t want to explain why I’ve come in gray and shaking and wanting to get in the shower with the water as hot as it goes.
I make it three steps down the hall before Eli looks up from the study.
He’s in there on his own, reading something on his tablet. His eyes find my face, then my hands, then the bag I’m still gripping hard enough to hurt.
“Reese?” He sets the tablet aside. “What happened?”
I step into the room and close the door behind me.
“Quinton tried to kiss me.”
Eli sets both hands flat on the desk. It isn’t what I’d get from Bo or Gray or Jackson. There’s none of the immediate heat, and somehow that frightens me more.
“Tell me all of it,” he says.