Chapter 2
Two
Cal
I walk back into the firehouse with the effect of forty ruined scones on my boots and a grin I can’t shake loose.
Rhett’s stretched out on the couch with his feet up, throwing a tennis ball at the ceiling and catching it without looking.
Eli’s at the stove with his back to the room, working a pot of grits low and slow for the crew’s breakfast. The whole bay smells like coffee, bacon, old smoke.
Home. Same as it always does. Same as it has for six years.
I love this room more than just about anywhere.
The couch none of us will throw out even though it’s held together with duct tape and pure stubbornness.
The rig gleaming in the bay because Rhett polishes it when his head gets too loud to sit still.
Eli deciding what we eat and not asking anybody’s vote.
Six years, worn in soft like a good pair of boots.
“Fixed?” Eli asks. He doesn’t turn around. He never needs to.
“Fixed enough.” I drop onto the arm of the couch and knock Rhett’s feet off it. “Their alarm’s shot. Corroded backup. Told her I’d swap the whole unit this week.”
The ball stops mid-air. Rhett catches it, holds it, turns his head toward me slow, like a dog that just heard the treat bag open two rooms away.
“You told her,” he says. “Her who?”
“The new baker. Marigold’s niece. Took over the shop.” I keep my voice light. I keep it real light.
“Wren.”
I blink. “What?”
“Her name’s Wren.” Rhett tosses the ball up again, casual as anything, but he tossed it a half-second too quick. “Dot’s been going on about her for weeks. Marigold’s girl, come up from the city.”
Funny. I know her name. The whole town knows her name, it’s been part of the wallpaper for three weeks. But I stood in that shop for fifteen minutes and never once worked up the nerve to use it, and this guy’s got it sitting ready in his mouth like he’s been keeping it warm.
Rhett knows everybody’s business, sure. That’s half his personality and most of his charm. But there’s knowing a name and there’s carrying one, and he said hers like a man who’s been carrying it. Said it out loud before I did, and I’m the one who came home wearing her scones.
I let it go. For now.
“Well.” I pull a squashed scone off my boot and eat it, because I’m not an animal and it’s a good scone. “Wren’s alarm is shot. I’m going back on Thursday to fix it. That’s the whole damn story.”
“That’s not the whole story.” Rhett sits up. “Your face is doing a thing. Eli, tell me his face isn’t doing a thing.”
Eli glances over his shoulder. One look, top to bottom, the same look he gives a building before he’ll let a single one of us walk into it. Then he turns back to the pot.
“It’s doing a thing,” Eli says.
“Traitor,” I tell him.
Three weeks that shop’s been lit again, and until this morning not one of us had set foot in it.
Marigold fed this house for years, Sunday loaves at the bay door, extra at Christmas, never once let us pay her for a thing.
We carried her casket. And then the ovens came back on with somebody new in her apron, and the three of us got very busy finding trucks to wax and hoses to roll, because going in meant standing in her shop while it turned into somebody else’s shop, and nobody wanted to go first. We run into burning buildings for a living.
One bakery had the whole crew beat. All it took, in the end, was a broken smoke alarm.
I’ve talked my way through this whole town since I was old enough to talk. Teachers, coaches, every girl in three counties, Mrs. Alder and her demon of a cat. Never once been work. You smile, you mean it, they smile back.
Then a woman with flour in her hair looks at me like I’m a stray dog she’s too polite to shoo off her step, drops a tray of scones on my boots, won’t even shake my hand, and twenty minutes later my heart’s still going like I ran a full drill in gear.
I keep getting stuck on the details of her.
Brown hair falling out of a knot she gave up fighting hours ago.
A smudge of flour on one cheek, she had no idea was there.
A mouth built for arguing, and a pair of eyes that took one long look at me and filed me straight under problem.
I’ve been filed under a lot of things in my life.
Never that one. And I can’t tell if I hated it or if it’s the only damn thing I’ve thought about since.
That’s new. I don’t love it. I can’t stop thinking about it.
“She smelled incredible,” I say before I’ve decided to say anything.
The bay goes quiet.
Not empty quiet. Listening quiet.
Eli’s spoon stops moving in the pot. Just for a second. Then it starts again, slow, like nothing happened. Rhett isn’t grinning anymore.
“Incredible how,” he says.
“Like.” I go looking for it, and it’s hard to hold onto, hard to put down flat on a table where you can point at it.
“Vanilla. Warm sugar. Orange, like the peel of it. Fresh bread under everything else.” I shrug like it doesn’t matter.
It matters, and every alpha in this room knows exactly how much.
“Like a bakery. She runs a bakery. Makes sense.”
Nobody says the word.
We’re all thinking it. Not one of us has said that word out loud in this house in a long, long time.
Omega.
Rhett’s quit throwing the ball. Eli’s quit pretending the grits need him. For one second, the three of us just sit inside the idea of it, and none of us breathes wrong, in case it startles off like a deer at the edge of the trees.
I lean my head back and shut my eyes, so I don’t have to see either of them looking at me like that.
We’ve been a pack six years. Me, Eli, Rhett, since the season we landed on the same crew and figured out, without ever really talking about it, that we fit.
Eli holds it together. He’s prime, though he’d sooner eat the wooden spoon than say the word, and I’d wear it to the head if I said it for him.
Rhett keeps us laughing, so none of us thinks too hard about anything.
I keep us warm. It’s a good life. It’s a good, full life.
It’s just missing the one thing an alpha pack is built around a hole in the shape of.
And after six years of Dot steering every unbonded omega in the county past our table at the pancake breakfast, we quit waiting for it.
You can’t leave the porch light on forever for someone who was never coming.
You learn to like the dark. You tell yourself the dark is plenty, and most days you even believe it.
Sunday’s the breakfast. First of the month, the whole town coming through our doors for pancakes, and Dot right in the middle running the show.
Thirty years married, two alphas of her own, and not one ounce of shame about any of it.
Last month, she sat the new pharmacist so close to Rhett they were nearly sharing a chair.
The month before that, a widow from the church with a gleam in her eye.
It never takes. We smile, we flip the pancakes, we send everyone home fed and unmated, and Dot looks at us like a cake that won’t rise no matter what she does to it.
“Dot’s going to have a field day,” I say. “Sunday. Brand-new omega running the bakery across the street.”
Rhett groans into a couch cushion. “She’s going to seat her at our table.”
“She’s going to seat her in one of our laps.”
“Don’t.” But he says it into the cushion, and he doesn’t mean a word of it, and every man in this room hears that too.
I look at Eli’s back, dead still at the stove now, both hands flat on the counter.
I look at Rhett, gone quiet and unlike himself, turning that ball over and over in his fingers.
And I think about a woman across the street who smells like every single thing we swore up and down we didn’t need anymore.
“It’s probably nothing,” I say. To all of us. To none of us.
“Sure,” Rhett says.
“She looked at me like she wanted me to leave.”
“Sure she did.”
“She’s got a whole quiet life going on over there. She said so. Twice.” I hear how I sound. Like a man building a case he’s already lost. “She’s not looking for” I wave a hand at the three of us, the couch, the pot, the six years of it. “This.”
Eli turns the heat down under the grits. Taps the spoon on the rim, once, and sets it on the rest. He still hasn’t looked at me.
“You said Thursday,” he says.
“Thursday.”
“Take Rhett.” A pause. “And bring her something back for the scones she lost. You don’t turn up empty-handed after a woman drops her whole morning’s work on your boots.”
Which is Eli for about nine things at once.
It’s Eli, for I heard every word you just said. It’s Eli, for I’m not going to say the loud thing, so I’ll say the useful one. It’s Eli, for the porch light we all turned off six years ago just came back on by itself, and none of us is going to admit we noticed.
“Yeah.” My grin’s back, and this time I’m not aiming it at anyone. It’s just there. “Yeah. I’ll take Rhett.”
Rhett throws the ball at me, hard. I catch it against my chest.
“Two-man job, an alarm,” he says.
“It is famously not a two-man job.”
“Thursday,” he says, and lies back down on the couch, and starts throwing the ball at the ceiling again like his whole morning didn’t just tip sideways.
I’m already working out what to bring her.
Not scones, she’s got scones for days. Those little lemon things in Marigold’s book, maybe, if I can get Eli to talk me through them.
Flowers are too much. Flowers say a thing I’m not allowed to say yet.
Here I am, doing all this math over a woman who wouldn’t put her hand in mine, and I can’t even work up the sense to be embarrassed about it.
Over at the stove, Eli tastes the grits, adds salt, tastes it again. Same as he does every day. Steady as a wall.
But he’s standing at the window now while he does it. The one that looks straight at the door of the bakery.
I don’t think he knows he’s doing it.
I decide not to tell him.