29. The Last Twinkie
The Last Twinkie
~BECKETT~
"Tolerance my ass."
I say it mostly to myself, watching Amber Whitlock spin in a slow, delighted circle around our campfire, giggling at absolutely nothing, and I start seriously reconsidering whether the four of us should have let her match us shot for shot down the whole length of the strip.
We ended the night back here, at the house — the big rambling place outside town that's meant to make us look like a functioning pack to a suspicious government, and tonight, for the first time, damn near does.
Somebody built up a fire in the pit out back.
Somebody else turned up marshmallows and graham crackers and a bar of the good chocolate, and we spent the better part of an hour making s'mores like a pack of overgrown children, passing around a bottle of whisky none of us had any business trying to finish.
The whole yard smells like woodsmoke and burnt sugar and the salt coming up off the marsh in the dark.
It's the first night since all four of us moved under one roof that hasn't felt like four strangers sharing a rental and a shared legal problem.
There's no performance in it tonight, no one watching to see if we pass.
Tonight it feels — almost, if I don't look at it too straight on — like the exact thing all that paperwork keeps insisting we already are.
There, in the middle of all of it, glowing gold in the firelight, is her.
She's dancing. Barefoot in the grass, boots kicked off God knows where, still poured into that lace corset that's been quietly murdering my composure since the Driftglass, her curls come half-loose around her flushed face.
The prop for tonight's performance? A Twinkie.
She's cradling the thing in both hands like it's a newborn, twirling it slow through the firelight, singing something tuneless and joyful to it under her breath.
Across the fire from me, Sawyer and August are settled together on the low bench, heads bent close, deep in some quiet, easy conversation I can't make out over the crackle of the wood.
I watch August laugh at something the man says — really laugh, head tipped back, the whole careful guard of him gone loose and open.
Well. I've known August Bellamy the better part of a decade, and I know his faces the way I know the backs of my own hands.
There's the polite one he wears for customers.
The cool one he wears for people he's quietly decided don't matter.
Then there's the one — I watched it come over him once already, slow and total and doomed, with Amber — the soft, undefended one he wears for a person he's falling for. He is wearing it right now. At Sawyer.
I don't say a word about it. It's not my business, and it's not a problem.
I'm about as straight as a fence post, always have been.
But I've lived long enough to know a pack can hold more than one shape of love inside its walls.
Plenty do. If August wants to go and fall for the very man who talked me out of my own leadership on a dark road a few weeks back, that's between the two of them, and it stays in this yard.
Watching August let himself want something out loud, for once — after five years of the man treating his own heart like a thing he owed the world an apology for — that's a fine thing to witness. I'll take it.
My eyes drift back to Amber, the way they always do. She's still dancing, still serenading her snack cake, and she's drifting a good deal closer to the fire than I care for. So I pat my thigh.
"C'mere, cutie," I call, low and easy. "Come sit on Daddy's lap 'stead of dancing yourself into that fire pit."
She giggles — a bright, unguarded sound that does something to my chest — and comes waltzing over, and I keep the relief off my face.
Truth is, I don't much care about the lap.
I care that she's three feet from an open flame with the better part of a whisky bottle in her and no shoes on.
Amber sober isn't clumsy. Amber sober could walk a tightrope across the harbor while running four vendors on the phone and never miss a step.
But this Amber — loose and giggling and gold — I'm not gambling this one anywhere near fire.
She lands sideways across my lap, all warm weight and whisky-sweet breath, and holds the Twinkie up between us like she's presenting me the crown jewels. "Beckett," she says, with tremendous gravity. "This is a delicacy."
"Is that so." I settle a hand at the small of her back, anchoring her. "You do recall it's food, Apricot. It's edible. That's the entire point of the thing."
"No." She clutches it to her chest, scandalized to her bones. "No one can eat it."
"She's been guarding that Twinkie since the gas station two bars back," Sawyer calls over, not bothering to lift his head off the back of the bench. "Wouldn't let me so much as breathe on it."
"It's earned that fear," Amber says, with tremendous dignity, and August laughs — soft, into the dark — and I watch Sawyer nudge the man's knee with his own.
I arch an eyebrow at her. "Not even me?"
She goes quiet, turning it over with her whole face, firelight leaping in her eyes. "...Only," she decides at last, "if we share it."
"Fine." I fight down a smile. "But you've got to feed me. Those are my terms."
She smirks — slow, drunk, devastating — and leans in until her nose nearly bumps mine. "Is that what you want, Mr. Shaw?"
I hold her gaze. God, she's close. "That depends," I murmur. "What does our Sweet Apricot want?"
She hums, low and pleased, drifting on the question. Then, soft, nearly lost under the snap of the fire: "I want us to be a pack again." She takes a slow, unbothered bite of the Twinkie, like she hasn't just knocked the wind clean out of my chest.
Relief moves through me so hard I have to work to keep it off my face, have to keep my hand steady and slow on her spine.
There it is. The exact thing I've been half-afraid to hope for all night.
She wants us back. She said it out loud, in words, with her own mouth.
Drunk — sure, she's always been a more honest drunk than a careful sober woman, every last one of her walls laid flat by the whisky — and God knows I'd give a year off the end of my life to hear her say it stone sober, in hard daylight, where she can't take it back.
But she said it. That counts for something.
"Do you, now." I rub a slow circle between her shoulder blades. "Mm. I don't know that we're worthy of that yet, Sweet Apricot."
It's half a lie, and the other half is the truest thing in me. Because I do want to be worthy of it. I want to fight for it so badly my back teeth ache.
I've been chewing on her the whole night.
On her words. On the way she squared those bare shoulders and walked off from us at the first bar with her chin up, daring us to follow — and the way Sawyer looked at me in the half-second before she did, quiet and knowing, like he could already see which of us would move and which would freeze.
I moved. I want it on the record that I moved.
But I spent that first hour with a cold stone of dread sitting in my gut, thinking about all the nights I wasn't there, wondering if she'd gotten home safe, realizing I don't even know where her new place is.
None of us do. She built a whole entire life, five years long, and not one of us knows which door in this town is hers.
It made me feel like precisely what I am — a man handed the one job of keeping this woman safe, who failed her so completely he can't so much as name her street.
But underneath the failure, plain and stubborn as the fire in front of me, sat the other thing.
The thing five years and a whole ocean of silence never once managed to kill.
I love her. I love her so hard it's stupid.
I couldn't move on from it if I tried, and Lord knows I tried.
Five years, and I never once touched another soul.
Couldn't. My body simply refused, like it had signed some contract I didn't remember agreeing to.
I don't know about Cade — that man keeps his cards face-down even from us.
But August? I'd wager this house August hasn't so much as glanced at anyone else.
Sitting here with her glowing in my lap, I find myself wondering whether she's spent these five years just as empty-handed as the rest of us.
She lifts the Twinkie toward my mouth — then snatches it back an inch, narrowing her eyes with drunk cunning. "Confession first," she informs me solemnly. "You have to confess a thing. Then you earn a bite. Those are my terms now."
I huff a laugh. Fair's fair. "All right." I hold her stare, and I decide, right here by the fire, to hand her a true one. "I haven't been with anyone since you. Five years. Not one soul."
Her eyebrow climbs. She watches me close as she lets me take the bite — soft cake, sweet cream, her fingers grazing my lips — and then she leans in, whisky-warm, until her mouth hovers a breath from mine. "Really?" she whispers.
We hold it. The whole dark world narrows down to the inch of firelit air between her lips and mine.
I am trying — trying hard — not to come undone over this: the warm weight of her, the whisky on her breath, the way that corset shifts every time she so much as breathes.
It's a losing fight. My hand's moving on its own now, slow strokes up the lace of her spine, and I am one bad idea away from finding the strings of that bodice and learning what's under it by feel.
I've never been a man who thought much about doing this out under an open sky — I know for a fact she's done exactly that with August, in a flower field, and I've long since made my peace with it — but right now, with her like this, I am sorely, sorely tempted.