Chapter 17
Seventeen
Cal
The knot eases after a few minutes, but she doesn’t move off me, and I don’t move her.
She’s fallen asleep. Right there against my chest, on a flour-dusted counter at nine at night, wrung out by a body that’s been robbing her of sleep for a week.
She went under between one breath and the next, mid-sentence almost, like she finally found a spot safe enough to stop fighting in.
So I hold her, my shirt half on, wrecked and tender, completely out of my depth, and I don’t move a muscle for the better part of an hour.
Because if I move, this ends. And I am nowhere near ready for it to end.
I watch her sleep, which I have no business enjoying as much as I do.
Flour in her hair. A smudge of mascara she forgot about under one eye.
Dead to the world, drooling faintly on my collarbone, and I’m looking at her like she hung the moon and stocked the sky behind it.
I hold still so I don’t wake her, and I catalog things I’ve got no right to.
The little frown she wears even asleep. How her hand’s fisted in my shirt like even under she’s decided not to let go of me.
I’d stand here till my legs gave out. Longer.
I keep thinking about how she said it. Don’t go.
Not soft, not sweet. She said it like it cost her, like the words were being pulled out by the root, like asking for one single thing she wanted was the hardest drill she’d run all week.
And she asked anyway. She asked me. Whatever else happens, whatever she decides when her head clears, I get to keep that.
She was too tired to lie, and the truth reached for me.
I’m the easy one. Things come to me, I enjoy them, I let them go, and none of it has ever cost me a night’s sleep. Nothing gets in deep because nothing has ever had to.
This got in deep. This got all the way in.
I told her it wasn’t nothing. Said it out loud, tied to her, everything in me cracked wide open, and the terrifying part isn’t that I said it.
It’s that it was the truest thing out of my mouth in years.
I meant every word. I’d say it again right now if she woke up.
I’ve spent my whole life meaning things about as much as a warm bath means something, pleasant, easy, gone the second you pull the plug.
I have never once meant anything like I mean her, and I found that out standing in a dark bakery with her asleep on my chest, and it scared me worse than any fire I’ve walked into.
You want the truth about brave? Brave is easy when nothing you love is in the building.
I’ve run into places coming down around my ears and never felt what I feel right now, holding a sleeping woman who could take one look at me next week and decide I’m the spare.
Fire I understand. Fire has rules. This has no rules and no exits.
I walked straight in anyway, grinning, like I walk into everything, and now I’m in here for good and somebody’s bricked up the door.
She told me not to be kind. Don’t be kind, she said, I can survive a lot of things but not kind.
And I want to find whoever taught a woman that kindness is the dangerous one and have a long, unfriendly conversation with him.
Some son of a bitch made a habit of her and then made a discard.
Somebody left so many times she started leaving the room first, just to get there before anyone could beat her to it.
I don’t want their names, because knowing wouldn’t help her and it’d only make me want to drive somewhere and be stupid.
What I want is a hundred years to teach her slow that being wanted plainly isn’t the trap.
That some people mean to stay. That I mean to stay, if she’ll have me, if she’ll have all of us, which is a thing I’m not allowed to say out loud yet and can barely stand not to.
And that’s when the other thing arrives. Right behind the wanting, quieter and heavier.
The guilt.
Because I broke the plan. I know I did. We agreed, all three of us, at that dark window. We wait. We don’t crowd her. We give her a clean, uncrowded shot at choosing, and we keep our thumbs off the scale while she’s scared and half out of her mind with pre-heat.
Then she said don’t go and looked at me like I was water in a drought, and I didn’t wait. Didn’t even try. I told her, with my own mouth, that we were meant to give her room, and the second she pushed I folded like a bad hand.
And the hell of it is I don’t even get to tell myself I did it for her.
I’d love that story. Noble Cal, giving the scared omega the one thing she reached for.
But I know my own heart, and half of what folded me tonight was plain want, the same want that’s been eating me alive for weeks.
She gave me the opening ,and I’ve never once in my life said no to a thing I wanted this bad.
Eli would have. That’s the whole difference between us.
That’s why he’s prime, and I’m the one who lifts the heavy things and makes people laugh.
I used to think that was the whole of me, and be fine with it. Fun Cal. Easy Cal. But you can’t lighten this. There’s no charming a heat, and I’m finding out at thirty-one that the one trick I own doesn’t work on a single thing that matters.
Rhett got there first. Now me. Two of us in, before the heat, before she’s chosen a single thing with a clear head.
And Eli, our prime, hasn’t so much as kissed her, because he’s the only one of us with the spine to do this right.
He’s back at the house holding the line while I stand here having run straight across it, and I’m going to have to walk in that door tonight smelling of her and look him in the eye.
He won’t yell. That’s the worst of it. He’ll just look at me, and I’ll have to stand there while he understands that the plan’s in pieces, that the two loud ones couldn’t hold, that he’s the last man standing on a line the rest of us already trampled.
I could go the other way, sure. Roll in and joke it off.
Cal being Cal, couldn’t help himself. He’d let me, too, that’s the thing about Eli, he’d hand me the joke and never once make me pay for it, and that’s exactly why I won’t take it.
He deserves it said straight, once, from the loud one.
So I’ll walk in, and I’ll tell him plain.
That I was with her. That she reached and I couldn’t say no.
That I’m not sorry, and I’m sorry, both at the same time, and I’ve got no idea how to carry that.
And the clock’s still running under all of it.
Two, three days. Her first heat, barreling in, and she’s just told me flat she’s going to face it alone.
A stubborn, exhausted, half-feral omega, riding out the hardest thing her body will ever do in an apartment over a shop because she’d sooner suffer than risk being left.
There’s not one thing I can do about that, because it’s hers to choose, and I already broke one promise tonight. I’m not breaking that one too.
She stirs. Surfaces. Blinks up at me, and I watch the walls come back behind her eyes, brick by brick, the moment she remembers where she is and what we did.
“You stayed,” she says. Like it’s an accusation. Like it’s a wound.
“I stayed.”
“You should go. The heat’s—” She swallows. “It’s close. You can’t be here when it lands. I mean it, Cal. Whatever tonight was, I’m still doing that part on my own.”
I want to argue. Every cell I’ve got wants to argue. But I swore I’d never be the man who pushes her, and one of us has to be steady about tonight even if it can’t be Eli. So I ease her down off the counter, find her shirt, help her back into it like she’s something I’ve been trusted with.
She lets me. That’s the thing I’ll carry home.
Prickly, walled-up, don’t-be-kind Wren lets me button her back into her shirt with my clumsy hands and doesn’t tell me to quit.
It’s a small thing. It’s the biggest thing that happened all night, bigger than the sex, and I know it, and I think somewhere under all that armor she knows that I know it.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll go. But I’m not taking back a word of it.”
She won’t look at me. “I know. That’s the problem.”
I kiss the top of her head because I can’t not. I let myself out into the cold. And I stand on Main a minute in the dark, smelling of her, scared out of my mind, happier than I have ever once been, and dead certain I’ve made a beautiful mess that none of us knows how to clean up.
There’s one piece I can’t get past, standing out in the cold with my whole life rearranged around one flour-dusted counter.
A mess means there was something worth making one over.
Six years we had it tidy. Tidy, cold, complete.
Three men and a clean empty spot in the middle of us.
I’d take this mess over that tidy every single day for the rest of my life.
I just have to live through telling Eli that, and live through the next three days, and live through whatever she decides at the end of them.
Then I go home to face my prime.