28. Try To Keep Up
Try To Keep Up
~AMBER~
The first thing I notice, before I've even found a spot to stand, is that the whole bar smells like Cade.
It's faint under the wall of everything else — spilled beer, tourist perfume, fried anything drifting out of the kitchen — but it's there, threaded all the way through the crush of bodies.
That spiced rum and blood orange, sandalwood, warm salted caramel underneath. A scent I'd know in a blackout.
I wrinkle my nose at it, thrown, and crane up onto the toes of my boots to scan the packed room.
Cade?
I hadn't expected him tonight. I wonder for a second if he's here in this Thursday sea of strangers, working, close — then I catch myself and stop, because there's no rush in me.
I'm early. My date isn't even here yet. I've got nothing to do but wait and let two shots of good tequila keep doing their warm, loosening work through my veins.
Is this a date, though? Or is it a pack thing?
I truly don't know anymore, and that's the strange new shape my life has taken.
Maybe August turns up. Maybe Beckett. Maybe all of them decided, in that silent Alpha telepathy they seem to share, that if one of them gets an evening with me, they all do.
Part of me minds that. Part of me — the newer part, the part I'm still getting acquainted with — doesn't mind it even a little.
I honestly can't tell which part is winning tonight.
I'm grateful, at least, for the tequila.
The girls poured it into me before I left the house — Marlowe and Juniper, both of them absolutely thrilled, in that loud, aggressive, sash-waving way they get, that I was finally "getting outside.
" Which, translated out of their private language, meant I was finally leaving my own house for a reason that wasn't work.
A reason that wasn't spending yet another Thursday night home alone, with lovely Max.
I feel my face go warm, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the tequila.
Max. The neon-pink truth I keep tucked in my nightstand drawer — the one Sawyer found sitting on my pillow that very first night, and swore, grinning like a devil, that he'd learn the name of.
He did learn it, eventually. He also learned a great deal about what to do with it, over one very long and thorough and frankly educational night that I am absolutely not going to stand here and replay in the middle of a crowded bar.
My face is definitely red now. I hunt down a table before anyone can ask me why.
Juniper had done my makeup while Marlowe wrangled my hair, the two of them talking clean over each other about which bar had the best of what, pouring the tequila, zipping me into this corset like they were arming a knight for battle.
Go get 'em, tiger, Marlowe had said, smacking my behind on the way out the door.
And if the three stooges turn up, you make them work for it.
Juniper had just teared up again, because Juniper apparently tears up at everything now, ever since I cried on my own living room floor and broke a five-year seal on it.
I claim a high top near the main bar and hitch myself up onto the stool, deciding I'm done drinking until my date actually materializes in the flesh.
Would I call myself a little tipsy? Yes.
Absolutely. Should I have driven myself here in this condition?
Fuck, no. But Sawyer texted earlier that his truck's been giving him grief again, and I was not about to send that man a message reading by the way, I'm three tequilas deep, come collect me.
It isn't that I doubted he'd come. I know down in my soul that man would teleport clean across the county if I so much as asked.
It's that I know, just as surely, we would never once make it back out my front door — and that seemed deeply counterproductive to the entire concept of a first date.
Heat crawls up my neck at the thought, and it drags a much larger question up behind it, one I've been circling for weeks now.
Would I want my Heat with him? With any of them?
I've been on blockers for years, religiously, the way I do everything.
But lately, being this close to this many Alphas, I can feel the blockers quietly losing the argument.
Or maybe it isn't the Alphas at all. Maybe it's simpler than that.
Maybe, after five years of treating my own body like a thing I'd filed away as broken, I'm finding out it was never broken. It was only ever waiting.
For a long stretch, the distance and the silence and the empty bed had me half-convinced I wasn't worth the wanting.
That I'd been built without the part that wants back — that maybe I was simply made cold.
Turns out I just needed to feel it again.
To feel loved. To feel, if I'm being brutally honest with myself, yearned for.
That was the whole of it. That was all it ever was.
My eyes drift the room while I wait, cataloging it the way I catalog a seating chart. They snag, at last, on the bar.
On Cade.
He's behind it — working, a cocktail shaker going in both hands, his sleeves shoved up his forearms — and I understand all at once why the whole place smelled of him the moment I stepped in.
He's the source. When his eyes lift and find mine across the crowded room, my breath does something complicated in my chest.
I can't read him. That's the thing that stops me cold.
I have always been able to read Cade — he's the easiest of the three, all easy charm laid over the top and want running underneath.
The want is there now, right enough, in his gaze; a depth of hunger I would know anywhere, the exact look he wore five years ago when he told me he loved me, when he swore he couldn't wait for me to be theirs.
That rawness is still in him, plain as a struck match.
But there's something else layered over it tonight.
Something off. Something almost like wrong.
My instincts read it as rejection, and it lands in my chest with a dull, confusing ache.
It's the strangest cocktail of feeling — his hunger and his distance in the very same look, both of us holding a stare that used to mean everything and now means something neither one of us will say out loud.
I keep my face carefully neutral. Bored, even, if I can manage to sell it.
Because whatever is passing between us across this bar tonight, it is not requited love.
It's two people quietly pulling away from one another, and neither of them brave enough to name it.
"You single, beautiful?"
My eyes pull off Cade. I have to tip my head up, because there's an Alpha planted square in front of my table now, smirking down at me with the loose confidence of a man who's been having a very good night so far. Broad. Decent enough looking. Reeking of cheap cologne layered over cheaper beer.
"Brady." He offers the name up like a present. "From out past the city line. Can I buy you a drink, gorgeous?"
I size him up the way I'd size up a difficult father-of-the-bride: harmless, a little drunk, used to hearing a yes and carrying no plan whatsoever for a no.
On any other night I might have let him buy the drink, just for the small, petty pleasure of being wanted by a stranger with nothing to lose. Not tonight.
I smirk, but I only shrug, one shoulder. "Sadly," I say, "my Alpha wouldn't much care for that."
My eyes flick back to Cade as the words leave me — I can't help it, it's a test I didn't know I was running until it's already run — and I catch it.
The spark. Jealousy, right at the root of his pupils, dark and instant.
But he's still shaking that drink. Still working.
It's been mixed well past the point of any recipe on this earth by now, and he keeps right on shaking it, watching me over the heads of the crowd.
He does not put it down. He does not come.
I know he's working. There's a whole bar between us and forty impatient tourists stacked up in front of him and no earthly way for the man to just abandon his post and march over here to defend his territory.
I know all that. Still — God help me — some reckless, wishful, five-years-starved part of me wishes he would.
That he'd slam the shaker down flat and say fuck it and come stomping across this whole room, every inch of him, jaw set and shoulders squared and muscle shifting, to inform this poor man from the city line that I am his Omega and very, very taken.
He doesn't. He mixes a drink that does not need mixing. It's wishful thinking, and I know it's wishful thinking. I hate down to my bones how much I wish it anyway.
"So where's this Alpha at?" Brady presses, glancing pointedly around, not finding anyone leaping to my rescue. "He really let you out looking like that, all on your lonesome?"
I open my mouth to smile and say the thing that ends this — and a hand slides around my waist from behind.
Firm. Sure. Pulling me back flush against a broad chest before I can even gasp.
My whole body draws tight for half a second, until my nose catches up to what's happening, because it is not Sawyer's scent wrapping itself around me.
It's cedar and smoked vanilla, black tea and the clean mineral smell of rain hitting warm stone.
Beckett.
"Sorry — Brady, was it?" The voice rumbles out low and lazy over the top of my head, warm and easy and absolutely lethal. "But this one here's my Sweet Apricot."