Chapter 34
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Reese
Zane knocks at nine-forty with an armful of vending machine food and a shit-eating grin.
“I brought sustenance.”
“That’s a bag of pretzels and four Snickers.”
“I brought what the machine had.” He comes in without being asked, which is fine. He’s been walking into rooms I’m in since the day we met. He dumps everything on the desk, then stands there looking at me. “How are you?”
“Tired.”
“Right.”
“Zane.”
“I’m going to say a thing, and it’s going to come out wrong.
” He’s already talking faster, hands moving now that they aren’t full of candy.
“I’m not upset about the lying. Bo’s upset about the lying, and Bo gets to be, since Bo’s the one you looked directly in the eye in the lobby.
I’m upset about a different thing, and I’ve been walking around the parking lot for forty minutes trying to figure out what it is. ”
I sit on the end of the bed. “Did you figure it out?”
“Yeah.” He drops down beside me. “You had the best day of your life today, and you had to have it alone.”
That lands harder than I expect.
“Everybody else got to just be happy,” he says.
“We won, and that was the whole thing for us. You were sitting in the same boat with a card in your pocket and that phone call from yesterday and the fact that it was your last race, and you still had to do the thing where you look fine so nobody else has to deal with it.”
I look down at my hands while he keeps going.
“I hate it. That’s my whole position. I’ve thought about it for forty minutes, and my official position is that I fucking hate it.”
“Noted.”
“So I’m going to sit here and eat a Snickers, and you’re going to have the day now instead. Late, but you’re having it.”
I put my head on his shoulder, and we sit there for about ten minutes. Zane eats two Snickers and gives me half of one without asking whether I want it. I eat it anyway.
Beckett arrives at ten with a bottle of bourbon and Cameron behind him.
“I’d like the record to show I told him not to come,” Beckett says.
“I’d like the record to show he texted me the room number,” Cameron says.
“That was for logistics.”
Beckett shuts the door with his foot. He’s carrying the bottle and three plastic cups from the bathroom, and there’s a specific brightness to him that means he’s decided something in advance and intends to make it look spontaneous.
“Right. Here’s where we are. Nobody in this hotel is sleeping.
Bo is downstairs having a feeling at Gray, Tyler has gone to bed with a spreadsheet, and Jackson and Eli have disappeared, which is their business.
” He pours four fingers of bourbon into a cup and hands it to me.
“You have had the worst best day in the history of collegiate athletics, and I’ve decided the correct medicine is for you to stop making decisions for approximately five hours. ”
“Beckett.”
“You get to say no. At any point. Everything stops and we watch television.” The performance drops out of him for that part, then slides right back into place. “But I want it noted that I have thought about this extensively, and I have a plan.”
Zane sits up. “There’s a plan?”
“There’s a plan.”
“Nobody told me there was a plan.”
“You’re in the plan.”
His whole face changes. “I’m in it?”
Cameron is still standing by the door. “Am I in it?”
Beckett looks at him. “You’re an unscheduled addition to the plan.”
Zane takes the second cup. Beckett keeps the third. Cameron ends up with the bottle and doesn’t comment on the fact that there isn’t a fourth cup, and I watch Beckett decide not to apologize for failing to anticipate him.
I drink mine too fast. It’s a mistake immediately, but it also makes me laugh for the first time in about six hours.
“Let’s hear it.”
“The plan,” Beckett says, “is that you don’t decide anything until morning.”
“That’s not a plan. That’s a premise.”
“The plan is in the details, and the details are proprietary.”
“Is it written down?” Zane asks.
“It’s in my head.”
“So no.”
“It’s a rich internal document, Hollis.”
Cameron sets the bottle beside the pretzels and moves to the wall by the window, arms crossed.
That’s where he’ll stay until somebody gives him a reason not to.
Watch, catalogue, wait. He’s spent this whole spring being the last one to arrive at almost everything, and he’s never once seemed bothered by it.
I look at the three of them: Beckett standing over me with his cup, Zane cross-legged beside me with chocolate on his thumb, Cameron in the dark part of the room already knowing there’s something under all of this that Beckett hasn’t accounted for.
“Yesterday I went to pieces in a boat.”
Beckett’s expression barely changes, but something behind it does. “I know.”
“Eight bonds hit at once and I couldn’t see. That’s not a small thing we can ignore because it was a nice day.”
“I know,” he says again. “Which is why I asked Tyler.”
Zane’s head snaps up. “You asked Tyler?”
“I asked Tyler a physiology question.”
“You asked Tyler how many of you I can have at once.”
“I asked a hypothetical.”
“He gave you a spreadsheet.”
“He gave me a tab.” Beckett is entirely unashamed.
“It’s a very good tab. Bond load isn’t strictly headcount.
It’s proximity, intensity, and how recent the pair bond is, which is why eight of us screaming at you through a race at two thousand meters is different from three of us in a hotel room where nobody is screaming at all.
Two he called negligible. Three he called conservative.
Four he called a research question, and I told him nobody asked him for four. ”
I stare at him. “You had a whole conversation.”
“We had a very short conversation, and then he emailed me. He emails, Reese. He’s been in that room emailing for two hours.”
I put my face in my hands. It comes out as a laugh at first, then another one, and suddenly I’m laughing hard enough that I can’t breathe. Except it isn’t funny anymore, and I know it before any of them do.
Zane’s arm comes around me while Beckett crouches in front of me so he’s below my eye line instead of standing over me. He doesn’t touch me. I know him well enough now to know how much that restraint costs him.
“Say the word and we watch television.”
“I don’t want television.”
“Then tell me what you want.”
“That’s the one thing I can’t do right now.”
Beckett studies me for a second, then nods like I’ve given him exactly the answer he needed. “Good. Then don’t.”
He stands, takes the cup out of my hand, and sets it on the desk out of reach. It’s such a small decision to have somebody else make for me that the relief is almost embarrassing.
“Rules. There’s one word, and it isn’t no, because you’re going to say no to things you want out of habit and I’m not spending all night trying to guess which kind you mean. It’s hold water. You say that, everything stops. Not slows down. Stops.”
“Hold water.”
“Say it back to me at any point tonight and I’ll drive you to another state.” He looks at Zane. “Hollis.”
“Hold water.”
“Blake.”
“Hold water,” Cameron says from the window.
“Second rule. You don’t run this.”
“I don’t run anything anymore.”
It comes out with more behind it than I meant. Beckett hears all of it, but he doesn’t let me turn one night into the rest of my life.
“Tonight you don’t run this. That’s a smaller sentence, and it’s the only one I’m making tonight.”
Then he kisses me.
There’s nothing careless about it, but there isn’t anything tentative either.
Beckett has kissed me a hundred times with an audience and made a joke out of almost every one.
This isn’t that. His hand closes around my jaw, thumb tucked under the corner of my mouth, and he takes his time until my hands find his shirt and twist into it.
His bond comes alive under my sternum, flickering the way it always does, on and off and on, quick as a struck match. I feel the exact second it catches and holds.
The mattress shifts behind me. Zane’s hands settle on my shoulders and his mouth finds the top of my spine, and the sound I make disappears into Beckett’s mouth.
“There she is,” Zane murmurs.
Beckett doesn’t even break the kiss. “Hollis.”
“I’m being supportive.”
“Be supportive with your mouth closed.”
“That’s contradictory.”
Beckett finally pulls back, his forehead resting against mine while he breathes harder than he wants me to know. “Arms up.”
I put my arms up, and he pulls my shirt over my head while Zane gathers my hair before it can catch in the collar and drops it over one shoulder.
Their hands don’t collide once. Three weeks ago they couldn’t share a doorway without turning it into a territorial dispute, and now they’re moving around each other like they’ve practiced.
I narrow my eyes at Beckett. “You talked about this.”
“I don’t know what you’re referring to.”
“You absolutely talked about this.”
His mouth finds the mark high on my shoulder. “You’re making decisions again.”
“Asshole.”
“Better.”
Zane gets my jeans open from behind without being asked and works them down over my hips, and I step out of them while Beckett is still busy with my mouth.
Zane laughs against my back, then follows them down, finding his own mark high on the inside of my thigh. The two bonds light at once. Beckett’s sharp, bright flicker goes gold at the edges while Zane’s rolls through me warmer and easier, and my arms give before I’m expecting them to.
Zane catches me around the waist. “Okay.”
Beckett lifts his head. “That’s not a word we’re using tonight.”
Movement catches at the edge of my vision. Cameron has left the window.
He crosses the room without saying anything and puts his hand at the small of my back, directly over the mark he left there four nights ago with his bike ticking as it cooled behind us.
His bond opens like a door in a warm house, with no flicker, no rush, and no sense of something arriving.
It’s the only one of the eight that has never felt like an event.
Beckett looks up. “Blake.”
“She was falling.”