34. Pancakes For Four
Pancakes For Four
~AMBER~
Iwake the way you surface from warm water — slow, reluctant, some animal part of me already bargaining for five more minutes before my eyes have agreed to open.
The first thing I register is that I can't move.
The second is that I don't want to.
I'm pinned.
Not trapped — held. There's a wall of heat down my left side and a second one curled along my right, and the weight of a heavy arm draped across my waist keeps me anchored to the mattress like I might otherwise float off.
My eyes crack open to gray morning light and the slow-turning ceiling fan, then drift sideways to take inventory the way I take inventory of everything.
Beckett is on my left, flat on his back, one arm flung up over his head and the other lost in the tangle of sheets.
He's snoring.
Not a delicate, romance-novel sort of snore either — a full, rattling, chainsaw-through-old-oak snore that I somehow slept straight through.
His chest rises and falls in slow swells.
Cedar and smoked vanilla roll off his skin in the drowsy, banked-coals way a scent goes when a man is deeply, thoroughly unconscious, the black-tea note underneath gone soft as steam.
There's a bruise blooming purple-gold on his shoulder that I'm fairly certain I put there.
Sawyer is on my right, and Sawyer is a snuggler.
This is new information. He's got himself curled into my side with his face half-buried in my hair, one leg hooked over both of mine, and that heavy arm across my waist belongs to him.
His hand rests splayed over my ribs, fingers loose in sleep.
Magnolia and black pepper drift up warm from the crook of his neck, the aged-bourbon undertone mellowed by hours of sleep into something closer to vanilla and oak.
Every few breaths his nose twitches against my scalp like he's checking I'm still there.
Past Sawyer, in the far corner of the enormous bed, is August. He's the reason I almost laugh out loud and give the whole game away.
The man has stretched himself out along the very edge of the mattress, one arm tucked under his pillow, and he has not moved a single inch.
Beckett could apparently roll a semi truck through this bed and August would stay exactly where he landed, composed as a marble effigy, breathing so quietly I have to watch his shoulders to confirm he's alive.
Iris and pear blossom reach me faintly from all the way over there, threaded through with green sage.
Five years I've known that man, and I never once caught him sprawling.
We are, every one of us, completely naked.
The sheet has migrated south during the night, and the evidence of how we spent it is written all over me — a row of faint teeth marks along my collarbone, fingerprint bruises pressed into the soft inside of one thigh, the honey-warm, well-used ache that settles into a body that got exactly what it wanted several times over.
My own scent has gone syrup-thick and satisfied, apricot ripened all the way to jam, roses blown fully open, and it mingles with theirs until the whole room smells like a garden the morning after rain.
For a long moment I don't do anything at all.
I lie there in the middle of them and let myself feel the weight of it — three separate rhythms of breathing, three scents I could pick out of any crowd on earth, the particular gravity of being wanted by more than one person and trusted enough to be left asleep among them.
The house ticks and settles around us. Out past the window a heron lifts off the marsh with a slow, patient beat of wings.
A few days ago, I woke alone in my cottage and counted it a good night if I didn't dream about a ballroom.
I press that thought down before it can spoil the morning.
Even now, hours later, I can smell all three of them layered over my own skin, and the wild part is I don't want a shower.
I want to keep them there a while longer.
Last night comes back to me in pieces.
Sawyer working the blow dryer through my hair in long, patient passes while Beckett sulked about being demoted from hair duty.
The way that quiet, domestic little scene had tipped, the way everything with these men tips, into hands and mouths and the four of us learning the new shape of what we are.
I'd been tipsy.
Fine — I'd been drunk, the good and reckless kind, the kind that unlatches all the doors I keep bolted.
Partway through the night I'd stopped managing the moment and let it simply happen to me.
God, that had felt like setting down a bag I'd hauled uphill for five years.
Liberating.
That's the word.
I finally said every quiet thing out loud, and the ceiling didn't cave in.
Even Beckett, drunk on me and running his mouth about altars, had held his one stubborn line — he wouldn't lock his knot inside me until there's a real ring involved.
The memory makes something in my chest go warm and exasperated at once.
The man will rearrange my whole spine at midnight, then turn into a Victorian widow about a wedding band.
My bladder and my brain reach a quorum at roughly the same moment: I need to get up, and I need to do it without waking three Alphas who will absolutely conscript me back into this bed if given the chance.
This is a logistics problem.
Logistics, I can do.
I start with Sawyer's arm. I lift it by the wrist, slow as defusing a bomb, and ease it down onto the warm dip I'm about to vacate.
He makes a low, grumpy sound and his hand immediately fists in the sheet where I used to be, which — I press my lips together hard to keep the laugh in.
I slide down toward the foot of the bed inch by inch, off the mattress, onto cool hardwood.
Beckett's snore stutters.
I freeze, one foot on the floor, heart in my throat. He smacks his lips, rolls his head, and settles back into the rhythm. August never so much as flickers.
The gray robe is puddled on the floor where it got abandoned.
I scoop it up and shrug it on, and even it smells like all of them now, like I could never again wash the four of us fully out of one piece of fabric.
I tie the belt, take one last look at the ridiculous, beautiful sprawl of them, and slip out the door.
The new house is quiet in a way my little cottage never manages.
Big, rambling, all creaking bones and morning light, the marsh out past the windows still wearing its dawn fog.
I pad down the stairs on bare feet and let the kitchen receive me.
I put the kettle on.
I am, contrary to persistent rumor, a tea person — coffee makes me feel like my heartbeat is trying to escape through my eyes — and there's a decent loose-leaf situation in the cabinet that somebody thoughtful stocked before we moved in.
I spoon leaves into the strainer, lean against the counter while the water climbs toward a boil, and do the thing I always do in an unattended quiet moment.
I check my phone.
There's the usual overnight sediment. A rescheduling note from the linen vendor.
A photo from Priya of two nearly identical shades of blush that she needs me to choose between by Monday.
A voicemail from Paloma Crane, the celebrity publicist, that I decide with great maturity to ignore until I've had my tea.
My thumb is halfway through a reply about the blush — the left one, always the left one, the right one photographs gray — when I feel it.
A soft press of lips to the top of my head.
I tip my face up.
Sawyer's standing over me, shirtless, hair a disaster, wearing nothing but a pair of low-slung sweats he must have found on the bedroom floor. He's smirking down at me with that slow Charleston warmth that could talk a bride out of a tantrum at forty paces.
"Now that," he drawls, "looks an awful lot like working."
"It's not working." I lock the phone against my chest, guilty as a kid caught with a cookie. "It's checking emails."
"Blooming Apricot." He plucks the phone right out of my hands and sets it face-down on the counter, unhurried, like he's confiscating contraband. "Checking emails is working with extra steps. Today's our day off. Remember? We shook on it. There was a whole ceremony."
"There was not a ceremony."
"There was a handshake. Handshakes are binding in this house. I plan weddings. I know a contract when I see one." He leans a hip against the counter and folds his arms, and the morning light does something unfair to the lean cut of him. "You hungry?"
My stomach, traitor that it is, chooses that exact instant to growl loud enough to echo.
Heat floods up my neck and into my face.
Sawyer's grin goes wide and wicked.
"I'll take that as a yes."
"That was the plumbing," I say. "This house is old."
"Sure it was."
He's already moving, already pulling the refrigerator open and surveying its contents with the confidence of a man who has never once been intimidated by a kitchen.
He straightens with a carton of eggs in one hand and reaches with the other for the apron hanging on its hook — a truly hideous thing, mustard yellow, printed with dancing lemons, left behind by whoever rented this place last.
He loops it over his head and ties it at the small of his back, over bare skin and low sweats, and turns to me with a flourish.
"Well. Guess we're having ourselves a pancake morning."
I take one look at a grown Alpha, shirtless, in a lemon-print apron, and I lose the fight to keep a straight face.
"You look," I inform him, "like a calendar nobody asked for."
"Miss July," he agrees, entirely unbothered, and cracks the first egg one-handed into a bowl. "Get over here and make yourself useful. You measure. I've got trust issues with anybody who eyeballs baking soda."
So I make myself useful.
I find the flour and the good vanilla. I measure while he whisks.
We fall into the easy back-and-forth of two people who both know their way around a task.
He tells me the trick his grandmother swore by — a splash of the buttermilk held back and folded in last, for fluff — and I tell him that's an unhinged amount of confidence for a man whose first pancake is going to be a sacrifice to the pan gods regardless.