34. Pancakes For Four #4
"Are you stupid?" It's not a shout. That's the terrible part.
Beckett doesn't shout. His voice just gets heavier, each word set down like a stone laid in a wall.
"We signed a contract. The four of us put our names on a temporary pact, and you think it's fine to spend the night at a woman's place…
a woman who works ten feet from you…and stroll in the next morning like you picked up milk?
Think about how that sounds. Say it out loud and listen to how it sounds. "
"It's Iris." Cade, defensive now, scrambling. "She's not…come on. She's not even an Omega. It's not like that. I don't have feelings for her or anything."
"Oh, that's the bar?" Beckett again. "So if Amber spent the whole night at some coworker's place…Josh, let's say Josh, and came home smelling like his couch, you'd be fine. Just fine and dandy with that?"
A pause.
When Cade answers, he's actually reaching for it, and it makes my stomach turn.
"She…okay, she wouldn't stay over at Josh's. That's different."
"It's the principle." Sawyer's drawl, stripped of every ounce of its usual warmth. "That's the whole thing, Cade. It's the fucking principle of it."
"But she fucked you!" Cade's voice cracks up the middle. "All of you! How is that—"
"Yeah, she did." Sawyer doesn't miss a beat.
"Back when not one of us had signed a single piece of paper, when we were four unattached adults who owed each other exactly nothing.
That was then. This is now. We're a pack now…
a real one, on paper, with terms. That means you don't get sleepovers with women.
Same as she doesn't get sleepovers with any man who isn't one of us. That's not complicated to understand."
"This is so stupid." I can hear him pacing, the frustrated scuff of his boots. "This is insane. Maybe you should've written that down too, huh? Put it in the little terms and conditions with everything else, since apparently I need it in writing."
"It's common courtesy." August. Quiet, cold, final. "It isn't rocket science, Cade."
"Whatever." Cade's voice climbs, fraying, and I know that sound.
I know it in my bones.
It's the sound of a man backing toward a door he's already decided to walk through.
Isn’t this the perfect test as to whether he’d leave me at the altar again?
The sad part is…I’m confident if push came to shove…he would.
And that right there is a big fucking problem.
"You know what? Forget it. I'm out of here. All of you, all of a sudden so damn smitten over an Omega who's just gonna blow the whole thing up again. Trigger the same catastrophe all over, and you'll be right back where we started. But sure. Sure. I'm the problem."
The door slams.
The whole house shudders with it.
A picture frame rattles on the wall beside me.
The quiet rushes in behind it.
I rise slowly, on unsteady feet, moving to stand at the top of the stairs with my back against the wall and both hands pressed flat to my mouth.
The anger's gone out of me all at once, the way a fire drops when the wind quits, and what's underneath it is so much worse.
Catastrophe. He said catastrophe. He said I'd blow it up again…like it was ever me who blew it up. Like I was the one who walked away.
My eyes flood.
My scent is turning under me no matter how hard I fist my hands, the sweet apricot going bruised and brown at the edges, the sharp green snap of broken stems threading through, the smell of a hurt I can't logistics my way out of.
I press harder against my own mouth, then turn away from the stairs and I try, I try so hard, to hold it in the way I've held everything in for five years.
Who am I kidding?
I don't hear him come up the stairs.
Beckett moves quietly for such a big man. I only know he's there when two warm, heavy hands settle gently over my shoulders from behind, careful, asking nothing.
I turn my head. I look up.
His knuckles are red. His jaw is tight.
But his eyes — his eyes are full of something that stops the breath in my chest, a conviction so complete it leaves no room for doubt.
I keep waiting, even now, some cowardly reflex in me braced for a man to flinch and choose the easier road.
Beckett doesn't flinch. He looks at me like he made this decision a long time ago, out by a stalled truck on the side of a road, when he swore he was done running and put himself between me and the worst of it, and every day since has only been him keeping the promise.
"Then there were four," he says softly.
His thumbs stroke once over my shoulders. A tear slips down my cheek, then another, and he watches them fall without looking away.
"That's all. That's the whole math of it, Apricot. Four."
I have no words.
There isn't a single sentence in me equal to the size of what's cracking open in my chest. So I do the only thing I can.
I nod.
His arms come around me from behind, folding me back against the solid warmth of him, wrapping me up in cedar and smoke and steadiness.
He tucks his chin over the top of my head and just holds me, the exact, uncomplicated comfort my whole starved soul has been yearning for, and never once dared to ask for out loud.
For five years the old rhyme only ever ran one way in my head.
One by one they'd left, until there were none, until there was just me and a wilting bouquet and the world's loudest silence.
Now I have this chance of redemption…only I’m the one in the driver’s seat, and it’s my turn to finally decide who gets to wield the cards of my life.
Then there were four...