16. The Elephant In The Road #2
Absolutely not. You left that road behind you, Sawyer.
Both directions of it. I bend whichever way a good thing bends.
I stopped apologizing for that a long time ago.
But this is not the moment. That man is not a safe bet.
There's a woman under my steering wheel who I very much doubt signed on for whatever just arced across six inches of night air between me and her ex-Alpha.
I put my face back in order before anyone, but August can read it. He saw. I know he saw. He surely files it away, then answers the question I actually asked instead of the one I didn't.
"If it means getting our Sweet Apricot back," August says, "then yes. Fucking yes."
He turns it on the other two now, and five years of it pours out at once.
"We keep handling her heart like a snow globe we're astonished hasn't shattered.
As if the fact that it's still whole means we haven't been dropping it this whole time.
We abandoned her. Out of fear. Then she went and built this…
this entire, gorgeous machine that hands total strangers the exact happiness we ran away from giving her.
" His breath tears. "Do you understand what that costs her?
She stands in the back of a hundred weddings a year and watches people who fought for each other get the thing she planned down to the fork.
Every season. Couple after couple choosing each other out loud, and her orchestrating all of it from the shadows.
The woman who got left, smiling, flawless, wondering every single time whether she'll ever once stand on the other side of that aisle. "
Nobody breathes.
"And even if we win her back," August goes on, quieter, "she'll spend the rest of her life auditing it.
Wondering if we only came because the trouble came knocking again.
Because that is what we taught her love does.
That is not a thing she should have to check for forever.
It is not what she deserves." His jaw works.
"And yet the idea of losing her…watching her get swept off by him—" a small jerk of his chin at me, not cruel, just true "—or by some whole new pack that learned in one week what we couldn't manage in five years…
I cannot do it. I haven't touched another Omega since the morning we drove away.
Not one. There is no version of my life with someone else's face in it. "
He exhales, and what comes next is almost too low to catch.
"Amber is the Omega for me. She's the stem.
I'm only the petals. I'll wilt and rot and grind through every dead season it takes to bloom back the right way…
.the way that lets her thrive, if she'll just give me the chance to try.
So if learning to stand and fight means saying to hell with my own pack rather than running from one more threat built to scare us off, then to hell with it. So be it."
Neither Beckett nor Cade has a single word.
Then Beckett moves; not to argue, for the first time all night, but to press the heel of one hand hard against his own sternum, like something behind it has finally given way.
"You're right," he says, and the words leave him like nails pulled from old wood.
"All of it. The manual with nothing written in it.
I've known for five years. I built a hundred other things rather than sit down and learn the one that counted.
" He stares at his own hands on his knees.
"I don't know how to lead us back to her.
But I'll follow whoever does. Even if it isn't me. Even if it's him."
For a second, I don't have a word either, which almost never happens to me.
Damn.
I rolled into this town certain these three were a lost cause with excellent shoulders.
I was wrong about at least one of them.
The quiet one.
The one who just made my chest do the thing I've spent five years making sure it doesn't.
He's got it. Buried deep, learned far too late, but real iron all the way through.
They still can't have her back on the strength of one good speech in a truck.
That's not how a price works. But I file it, the way he files things, because a man about to run a campaign should always know where the true iron sits in the other line.
"One of the townsfolk said they spotted a woman near the west parking lot," I offer, smooth as pouring, laying the false trail down flat.
"Waiting on a ride. Her team took her truck.
She likely assumed one of you had her." A lift of one shoulder.
"If I were three men trying very hard not to lose her twice, I'd start there. Fast."
August holds my eyes a beat longer than the lie has earned.
He knows. I'm nearly certain he knows, or half-knows, or has decided the knowing costs more than the not.
Then he nods, once, and turns to Cade.
"West lot," he says. "And do not ask me one stupid question the entire way there."
He looks back at me. Whatever crossed between us a minute ago is folded down and put away, and what's left is a man asking a rival for a favor because the woman outweighs the pride.
"If you find her before we do—" he stops, corrects himself, honest to the bone even now "—if you so much as hear where she is before we do, tell her something for me.
Tell her we'll do whatever it takes to be worth a second chance.
That we'll start at the very beginning, if that's what it takes to learn how to love her right.
" He pauses. "And tell her we'll be here tomorrow.
Before 8:17. On our feet, not running. She'll understand the time. "
I nod, slow.
"I'll hold you to it, Bellamy." I mean the name and the promise both. "Don't you dare let her down again."
Cade hits the gas before August can answer.
The truck lurches back onto the road and pulls away, taillights shrinking into the dark. The last thing I catch is August's face turned half toward his own window. The look on it isn't strategy. It isn't performance. It's longing cut with conviction, sharp enough to draw blood.
That man meant every word.
Out of the three, he's the one who actually meant it.
Which is going to complicate my entire life. Noted.
I wait until their lights are gone from the last curve.
Then I ease off the shoulder, roll slowly down the road, and turn at the first side lane — a rutted track between two stands of pine where nobody goes after dark.
I cut the engine. The night comes down soft and complete.
I push my seat back on its runners, as far as it will go, and I look down into the footwell.
She's wrecked.
Amber Whitlock, who ran a public hearing this afternoon without her voice wobbling once, is curled in the dark at my feet with her cheeks slicked silver and her bottom lip trembling like the last leaf before it lets go of the branch.
She heard all of it.
Every word.
The cowards and the snow globe and the stem and the petals and the man in the back seat swearing he'd burn his own pack to the ground before he'd lose her again.
She heard the men she loved finally say the true things — five years and one dark road too late, to a stranger, while she hid beneath his steering wheel.
I've talked my way out of every disaster I have ever met.
I have nothing for this one.
There isn't a sentence in the language that fixes what her face is doing.
So I do the one thing I'm actually good at, underneath all the words.
I open my arms.
That's the whole of it. No speech. No angle. I open them. I wait. I let her be the one to decide.
She reads the sign the way she reads everything — fast, complete — and she comes apart on the way up. She unfolds from the footwell, climbs over the console into my lap, presses her wet face into the crook of my neck, and finally, finally, lets it out.
The sob that leaves her is the ugly kind.
The real kind.
The kind a person only lets you hear once you've quietly stopped being a stranger without either of you deciding when it happened. I wrap both arms around her and I hold on.
She fists a hand in the front of my ruined shirt, the way you grab the one solid thing in a fast current, holding on like I might get pulled under too. I'm not going anywhere.
I press that fact into the top of her head without saying a word of it out loud, because she has had a lifetime of men saying it, and one dark road's worth of proof that saying it and staying are not the same word.
Her apricot floods the cab, unhidden now, every note of it, bruised and salt-soaked and impossibly sweet. It winds up through my magnolia and pepper until the two of us smell like one confused, aching thing that doesn't have a name yet.
I don't shush her.
I don't tell her it's fine.
It isn't fine.
She'd know I was lying. I am done being lied to, and done doing it to anyone else.
I just hold the most competent woman I have ever met while she shakes apart in a parked truck down a dirt road. I rest my chin in her hair.
I understand, with a clarity that scares me worse than the flutter did, that for this one stolen moment we are not two professionals who met on a Tuesday. Not a producer and a planner.
We're two people who learned the same lesson in two different states, years apart, and carry it in the identical place under the ribs.
We're the ones who get left.
The ones who leave first, sometimes, so at least the leaving belongs to us.
The ones who build the entire beautiful celebration, who hand everyone else the vows and the forever and the golden hour out on the cliff.
Who make certain, every single time, that every last person in the room gets their happy ever after.
While we're left with the crumbs…