8. The Scale Doesn’t Start At Zero
The Scale Doesn’t Start At Zero
~BECKETT~
She still taps the pen three times before she writes.
Tap, tap, tap, against the clipboard edge, unconscious as a heartbeat, the exact metronome I listened to across a hundred kitchen-table nights of seating charts, vendor lists, and the first time she does it, over by the ballroom windows.
Five years fall out from under me like a rotten step.
I catalogue her all morning.
Can't help it.
It’s an instinctive effect that’s gotten to that level where I don't even try. It's the one trespass that happens entirely inside my own skull where the rules can't reach.
The bracelet is her grandmother Whitlock's, the thin braided gold one, the only jewelry from that family she ever loved, and she wears it on the right wrist now instead of the left.
There's a scar near her thumb I don't have the history for, a clean pale line, glass or a blade, healed years ago, a whole story of some ordinary Tuesday when she bled, and I was not in her life to know it.
Her shoes are suede flats built for ten-hour days on lawns and stone, chosen by a woman who learned the hard way what her work actually asks of a body, nothing about them for display, everything about them true.
And she doesn't ask anymore.
That's the biggest one.
Five years ago, she'd float a decision softly, hedged, permission-shaped, does that seem all right, would it be crazy to, trained her whole childhood to pre-apologize for having judgment.
Today I watched her move a two-hundred-person dinner across my own property line in one declarative sentence and dare the lawn to object.
Whoever did that for her, it wasn't me.
I know exactly what my contribution was…
She isn't stronger because of me. She's stronger the way scar tissue prevails with time, and a man doesn't get to be proud of the knife's work.
But fuck…standing in my own ballroom watching her run a room I couldn't hold five years ago, I am proud of her anyway, uselessly, enormously, with nowhere to put it.
So it goes in the drawer with the rest. My drawer's a workshop by now. Whole wing of instances and regrets I dare stack like they’re useless Pokémon cards that don’t deserve to be on shining display.
I hate how I have to act like an emotionless baboon to function anywhere near her. She doesn’t know how it’s driving me fucking mad, pressing every piece of sanity until I can almost feel it snap.
Seeing her in the elevator, her scent beginning to taunt my senses, was already tempting enough, but I swear I didn’t imagine it.
Catching hints of her slick, knowing with every damn second in the shared space that I was turning her on, making her wet.
I wasn’t even touching her, wasn’t even looking, acting like the elevator buttons were suddenly the most interesting thing in the world. I have to fight not to think about it, or I’d get hard all over again.
Having to walk silently back to my truck, pretending the distance didn’t feel like it would end me, was just as challenging as standing in that elevator, acting as if I didn’t want to press the emergency stop button, slam her against the metal walls, and kiss her with every emotion I’ve baggaged in the last five years.
Some would say it's pride. Others who’ve done similar to protect those they love, all for the sake of believing there’s some alternate motive for me and my fellow packmates leaving the Omega we absolutely love at the altar with an excuse not worthy of shattering her precious heart.
Now look what our actions have led to.
Consequences that left me in a truck, sitting there for 45 mins, hard as a fucking rock until I couldn’t fucking think.
Just thinking about last night makes me feel shameful and embarrassed because there I am, a coward in my truck with not enough balls to apologize to the woman I surely ruined, and thankfully came out stronger than ever without me…my cock hard and thick while I dare remember the past we shared.
The truck cab is too warm, windows fogged at the edges even though the engine’s off.
I’m parked in the service lot behind the inn, far enough from the main building that no one should wander by.
Forty-five minutes of sitting here with my cock straining against my zipper, throbbing in time with the memory of her scent—sun-warm apricot and crushed garden roses, sweet and sharp and mine.
Or what used to be mine.
I lean the seat back a notch, jaw clenched, and finally give in. One rough hand palms the thick bulge through my jeans. A low groan escapes before I can swallow it.
Fuck.
Just the ghost of her perfume in that elevator had me leaking pre-cum like a teenager. I drag the zipper down, free my cock, and it slaps heavy against my stomach—thick, veined, flushed dark at the head, already slick at the tip.
I wrap my fist around the base and stroke once, slow and firm.
My eyes close.
The memory floods in, unbidden and vivid.
The elevator doors seal us in. Her scent blooms the second the air settles—apricot ripening under summer sun, roses with broken stems. My control snaps.
I crowd her against the cold steel wall, mouth crashing into hers. She tastes like coffee and longing. My hand shoves her skirt up, fingers finding soaked lace. She’s drenched. One push and two thick fingers sink into tight, fluttering heat.
She moans into my mouth, hips rocking greedily.
“Beck—”
My hand speeds up on my cock, thumb swiping over the sensitive head, spreading the steady leak of pre-cum. The cab fills with the wet sound of skin on skin and my ragged breathing. Cedar and black tea spike heavily in the truck, my own Alpha scent responding to the phantom of hers.
“Look at me,” I growl, turning her to face the mirror. The memory is so raw and fresh, as if it truly didn’t occur more than 5 years ago, a few months before what should have been the best day of our lives…only to turn to our worst.
That could be why it makes it so easy to fall into the rhythm of the past, getting lost in this desperate need for relief.
I free my cock and notch it against her dripping entrance. One thrust and I bury myself to the hilt.
So fucking tight. So wet.
Her walls grip me like they never forgot. I fuck her hard, deep strokes that make her cry out with every slap of skin. In the reflection, her face is pure bliss—lips parted, eyes glassy. I reach around, rub her swollen clit, and she comes with a sharp wail, pulsing around me.
“Amber,” I rasp aloud in the truck, voice wrecked. My fist flies faster, grip tightening. The memory shifts, her legs wrapped around my waist as I lift her, pounding up into her while she clings to my shoulders.
Her scent coats everything—sweet, needy, perfect. I can almost taste the slick on my tongue.
Pressure coils tight at the base of my spine. My balls draw up.
I stroke harder, thumb pressing just under the head on every upstroke, the way she used to do with her soft fingers. The first rope of cum shoots hard across the dashboard, thick and white.
Another follows, then another, painting the dark vinyl in messy streaks while I groan through gritted teeth, hips jerking into my fist.
Even after I finish, I’m still hard.
The knot at the base of my cock swells fast and angry, throbbing painfully. It was supposed to be for her.
We waited—me, August, Cade—all of us holding back until the wedding night. One by one we’d knot her, lock deep inside our Omega, pump her full and seal the pack bond with teeth at her throat. Mark her as ours forever.
Instead, we left her standing in a ballroom with nothing but a note and a broken future.
I curse under my breath and wrap both hands around the swollen knot, massaging firmly the way she always did—gentle pressure at first, then tighter circles that eased the ache.
My thumbs dig in, rolling over the sensitive bulge. It hurts. It always hurts when it’s not inside her. Cum still drips from the tip, sliding down over my fingers as I work the knot, breath coming in harsh pants.
How I yearn for her soft hands. Her tender touch. The way she’d kiss my neck and whisper “I’ve got you, Beck” while she milked every drop with that greedy pussy of hers before she’d use those skillful hands to massage my knot for whatever length of time I needed to feel satisfied and whole.
I keep stroking the knot, eyes shut tight, wishing it was her. Wishing I could take it all back. The truck smells like sex, regret, and the faint lingering trace of apricot-rose from memory alone.
My knot finally starts to go down, but the emptiness in my chest only grows.
She’s stronger without me.
And I’m still here, hard and aching and alone in my truck, jerking off like the coward I am.
The memory fades as I force myself to be back in reality, needing to focus on the present or else I’d be sporting a hard-on in a heartbeat, and no one has time to be explaining myself when the woman I’m fantasizing about is surely counting the minutes where she doesn’t have to be in the same environment as me.
The wind's been freshening off the water all morning, and we're back in the conservatory for final measurements, her team spread down the length of it, her at the north end under the braced ridge with her pen going tap, tap, tap, when I hear it.
Not loud.
A creak with the wrong grain in it, high and to the left, the sound of load going where load was never invited, and my body is moving before the thought finishes; three strides, fast, and every instinct I own is screaming to grab her, arm around her waist, and haul her out of the fall line the way you'd snatch anyone from under weight.
It takes everything to not do that.
Every fucking level of restraint…
I stop, two feet short, hands open, everything in me pulling against the leash I put on myself in a ballroom an hour ago, and I say, hard and level:
"Amber. Step back. Now. Toward me, two steps."
She moves. No questions, no freeze. Just two clean steps on those sensible shoes, and the corner panel lets go where she'd been standing, a slab of old plaster; a sleeve of dust coming down off the braced section and cracking apart on the stone floor exactly across the spot her notes were being written.
The conservatory rings with it, and then there's just dust drifting in the sea light and her team pounding down the length of the room and my heart going like a dropped hammer.
"Okay!" Juniper arrives first, hands everywhere, patting Amber down like a customs check. "Okay, nope, we hate this room now—"
"I'm fine." Amber's looking at the plaster.
Then at the distance between us, the two feet I didn't cross, measuring it. I can see her measure it, calculating, and then up at me, dust sifting through the light between us.
Something moves through her face that I can't read and have no right to. She knows what it costs.
She heard the name, too.
First time in five years, out of my mouth, permission or not, and neither of us is going to mention it, since both of us are clearly denying one another from acknowledging this pulsing friction that will surely self-destruct.
Sooner or later…
"The braced section gets netted and sheeted by tomorrow," I say to her, the room, and to my own pulse. "Nobody works under it until the steel's in. That panel was on the June report, page forty. It moved up the schedule just now."
"It certainly did," says Marlowe, dry as kindling, toeing the wreckage.
The inspection wraps on the drive, gravel, and sea wind, her team loading the vans. Amber stands apart with the engineering report under her arm and her clipboard finally lowered, and delivers the verdict in full vendor voice, for the record, for her people, and for Priya's notes.
"The venue is conditionally approved." Tap, tap, tap. "Conditional on every item in this report being completed, inspected, and signed off in six weeks. Steel, drainage, railing, lighting, backup structure, all of it, six weeks from Friday, or we move the wedding and eat the loss. Can you do it?"
Six weeks. It's brutal.
It's two crews and no margin and my own hands on the steel at five every morning, and I run the whole calculation in four seconds the way I've been running this house's numbers half my life, and the answer's real, so I give it to her straight.
"I can. You'll have it."
Yup. I’m still a lying coward cause clearly I’ll do anything to satisfy her, even if she’d never praise or acknowledge me for it.
Amber looks at me for a long moment, longer than vendor voice allows, the wind working a strand loose from her pinned hair, gold in the light off the water, and then she says, quietly, in a completely different register, one built for an audience of exactly me:
"You said that before."
She's in the van before my chest finishes caving.
Doors, gravel, gone down the drive through the blue hydrangeas, her army carrying her back off my cliff, and I stand on it alone with a report full of things I know how to fix, understanding the actual terms of the next six weeks better than any contract Lena will ever notarize.
The steel is the easy part.
Every promise I make on this property from now until the equinox gets weighed on a scale she built five years ago out of the one I broke, and the scale doesn't start at zero like a fair shot.
It shouldn't. None of us deserve it to…
I walk back inside past the lantern my grandfather kept burning for boats in the dark, and get my tools.
Let’s get this started…