35. Run Toward Home #2
"You slept the night at another woman's place when you have a home full of people waiting on you.
" He ticks it off on his fingers, relentless.
"You have a pack you put your name to three days ago.
You are obligated…legally, by a document, obligated…
to act like a unit. And you just…forgot all of that existed for one whole night?
Then you have the nerve to come home sulking because they ate breakfast without the guy who didn't come home?
" He throws his hands up. "Be so for real right now. "
Heat crawls up the back of my neck because some small, buried, stubborn part of me knows he's right. I felt it this morning in that doorway; the wrongness of it, the way Amber wouldn't quite meet my eyes, the way Sawyer set a plate down a shade too hard.
I felt all of it and buried it and reached for defensive instead, because defensive is a stance I know how to hold.
"There was no other option," I snap.
"Bullshit." The word cracks out of him. "You could've slept in your truck. You've slept in that truck a hundred times. Hell, you could've slept on the actual ground. You chose the couch. You always choose the version that keeps one boot out the door."
"Why are you taking their side?" My voice climbs, and I hate that it climbs, hate that I sound like the kid he used to be able to make cry. "You're my brother. You're supposed to be defending me here."
"Defending idiocy?" Theo laughs, short and disbelieving. "You've known me my whole life. When have I ever once defended something stupid just because it came out of your mouth?"
"So you're on their side."
"Yes." He doesn't even blink. "Yes, Cade, I'm on their side, because it's the right side.
It's principle. How would you feel, genuinely, picture it, if your Omega spent the whole night at some man's house?
Just to sleep. Nothing happened. Just a couch and a couple hours. You'd be fine with that, would you?"
"She slept with Sawyer," I fire back. "She's slept with all of them. Nobody's calling that cheating."
"You signed the agreement days ago!" Theo says it slow, the way you'd walk a stubborn kid through something he's decided not to understand.
"She was with Sawyer before there was any contract to break.
And whether it happened before or after doesn't matter, because Sawyer's inside the contract.
He's part of the unit. Iris isn't. That's not a hard line to see, unless you're working real hard not to see it. "
"Stop calling me stupid."
"Then stop doing stupid things."
I shove up out of the chair and pace to the window, because holding still under all of this is more than I can do. Out in the yard the hens scratch at the dirt, oblivious to the whole business.
"You weren't there five years ago," I tell the glass. "You were a kid. You don't know what it cost us. You don't know what I've been carrying since."
"So tell me." Theo's voice doesn't give an inch. "Right now. Lay it out. Because from where I'm standing, the only thing I have ever watched you carry is an excuse to bolt before anyone can make you stay."
"I'm protecting us!" It bursts out of me before I can stop it, too loud in the little kitchen. "I'm protecting this whole town, and none of you can see it."
Theo blinks.
"From what, exactly? The boogeyman?"
Here's where the fear I've been swallowing for weeks finally claws its way up my throat.
"I've been getting threats," I say, low. "Real ones. It's only a matter of time before somebody makes a move, and I'm the one standing in front of it."
For a second I think it'll land.
I think he'll understand.
What I can't say, what lodges behind my teeth like a fishhook, is the real shape of the fear.
That it was never about me.
It's this house. It's the Tide Table with my mother's name painted over the door.
It's the scholarship carrying my little brother out of this town toward something bigger than any Mercer has ever gotten near, the one thing in my whole orbit going right, and how little it would take for a man with money and a grudge to reach out and snuff it. I can't lay that on Theo.
So I let him keep thinking I'm just paranoid.
"That," Theo says, "is what we have laws for. And police. And a mother who knows every soul in this county and could raise an army with three phone calls. You don't get to torch your own future and call it a bodyguard."
The word cracks something in me.
"Wow." I hear how ugly it sounds even as it leaves me.
"My own brother. A coward."
"Mom." I wheel toward her, because Theo's a lost cause and she's always, always been my last resort.
She's set the spatula down, turned the burner off, and is standing there looking at me. There's no heat in her face at all, no anger I can push against.
There's only a quiet, bottomless disappointment, and it drops the floor out from under my heart.
"Mom, come on. Please. Defend me here. Tell him."
"Honey."
She says it so softly that both of us go still.
Theo's mouth closes.
The pancakes sit forgotten and cooling on the griddle behind her.
"Somehow," my mother says, "I raised you to believe that what you just did to that girl is okay. And that's on me."
I open my mouth to argue — the reflex is automatic, the deflection already loaded — and then I actually look at her.
Her eyes have gone bright and wet at the rims, and she's holding herself very carefully, the way she used to hold herself at the kitchen sink late at night when she thought we were asleep.
The argument dies on my tongue.
Wait.
"Mom?" Theo's up out of his chair before I've moved, crossing to her, one big hand settling gentle on her shoulder. The heat's gone out of him too, replaced by something careful. "Hey. What's wrong?"
"Like father like son," she whispers.
She says it to the window, not to me, like if she doesn't aim it directly at my face then she isn't really pinning those four words to my chest.
But I feel them land anyway.
I feel them sink in through skin and bone, and something I've spent my whole life refusing to look at rolls over in the dark.
Like father.
My father, who I barely remember past a truck door slamming and a taillight shrinking down our road. My father, who my mother never once badmouthed, not in thirty years, not even when the mortgage was late, and the winters were long.
Did he do this? Did he do exactly this?
I've built my whole life around never asking that question.
My father is a taillight and a slammed door and a chair at this table nobody ever filled again.
I turned him into a cautionary tale, a thing that happened to us, and it never once crossed my mind that I might be repeating him word for word — the late nights, the reasons that all sound so reasonable out loud, the woman standing at a sink pretending it's only water in her eyes.
My mother has spent twenty-five years refusing to say his name in anger. She just said four words in its place, and they land harder than his name ever could.
"We need eggs." My mother's voice snaps back into place, brisk, brittle, a lid pressed down hard over a pot about to boil. She unties her apron and loops it over the chair. "For the pancakes. We're short. I'll run out to the coop."
"Mom—" I start.
"It's fine, honey. I just need the eggs."
Neither of us fights her on it.
What is there to say?
She's out the back door before I can find a single word, the screen clapping shut behind her, and through the window I watch her walk down the yard toward the chicken coop with her arms wrapped around herself in the warm morning air like she's cold.
Theo curses under his breath.
When he turns back to me, his eyes are hard again.
"You fucked up," he says.
"I didn't mean to upset her." It comes out small. "I swear I didn't. I don't even know what I—"
"She's not upset about the past, you idiot.
" He shakes his head slowly, and there's something almost sad in it now, sadder than anger.
"You think she's back there crying over a man who left twenty-five years ago?
She made her peace with him a long time ago.
She's ashamed because she just watched you do the same damn thing he did, and you're standing here so sure you're the hero of it that you can't even see the wreck you're making of your own future. "
I have nothing.
For the first time all morning, I have absolutely nothing.
Theo pushes off the counter and heads for the back door after her. At the threshold, he stops. He doesn't turn all the way around — just enough that I catch his profile, the set of his jaw, the morning light catching the side of his face.
"You let fear run your whole life," he says, quiet.
"And one day soon you're going to wake up and realize it cost you everything you actually wanted.
I'm not built like that. I'd rather fight for the future I want than cower to a bunch of people who'd be thrilled to see me end up miserable and alone. "
Then he's gone too, the screen door clapping a second time, and it's just me.
Me, a cold griddle, and the smell of pancakes I'm not going to get to eat, in a kitchen that suddenly feels three sizes too big.
I look down at my own forearm, at the ink I got at nineteen because it sounded like a promise back then. Three words, faded blue-black, curved along the muscle where I see them every single day and mostly don't.
Run toward home.
I've spent five years running.
I just never once checked which direction.
Out the window, my mother is a small figure at the coop, gathering eggs into the hammock of her shirt, taking her time so the red will be gone from her eyes before she comes back in.
Theo's already down the yard to her, shortening his long stride to match her slow one. The two of them fit out there. They fit at that table.
I'm the one who keeps turning up in doorways.
Theo's words won't quit. They circle the empty room and come back around, louder each pass, refusing to lie down.
I'd rather fight for the future I want than cower…it's too late for that…isn't it?