Chapter 20
Twenty
Eli
She’s asleep before the knot’s fully eased, and I hold still and let her have it.
She fought so hard, all week, against needing anybody.
I saw every round of it. A woman white-knuckling her own body, like asking for a hand, was a character flaw.
Then she reached for me at the door, and now she’s gone under against my chest, dead weight, drooling faintly on my collarbone, finally quiet.
I’d stand here holding her till the sun came up before I’d move an inch and risk waking her.
So that’s what I do. I stand there. I don’t move.
And I take stock, because that’s how I’m built. I read a room even when the room is a woman asleep on me in a dark bakery.
The first thing I read is the obvious one. I can smell them on her. Cal and Rhett, worn into her skin under her own warm-sugar scent, days old and hours old both, the whole story of her week written in a language I’ve spoken my entire life. Rhett first, faint now. Cal, newer, still bright.
I brace for the jealousy. I’ve been braced for it since the night I first caught Rhett on her, waiting for the ugly thing to show up and turn me into somebody I don’t care to be.
It never shows. That’s the part I didn’t see coming.
When I sort the scents on her, mine and Cal’s and Rhett’s all tangled with hers, my body doesn’t read a competition.
It reads complete. Six years I figured I understood pack from the outside.
You can’t, from the outside. From in here it isn’t a thing to fight over.
It’s the first time in years the arrangement of the world has felt finished.
It’s like walking into a house you never knew was cold.
Six years the three of us have run warm enough, good enough, a real pack, and I’d have told you we wanted for nothing.
We were lying, all three, politely, to ourselves and each other.
There was a room in the middle of us with the heat off.
And now there’s an omega asleep on my chest who smells like all of us at once, and the heat’s on in that room for the first time in years, and I hadn’t let myself feel how cold it was until it wasn’t.
It was never about which of us. It was always her, and whether she’d have the lot.
Which is where the quiet trouble starts.
I’ve run the numbers, and they aren’t in my favor.
Cal is sunlight. Rhett’s a firework. I’m the one who leaves soup on a step and doesn’t knock twice.
The slow read. Set me beside that grin and I go quiet and useful, which is a fine thing to be and a poor thing to fall for.
Nobody lies awake over the useful one. I made my peace with that young, the way you make peace with weather.
What I want more than being picked is her safe, happy, looked after.
If that’s Cal’s warmth and Rhett’s noise and me carrying the heavy things, it’s a good life. I’ll take it.
I’d just rather not be at the edge. That’s the whole of it, said plain, the one time I’ll say it.
I’ve spent a lot of my life near good fires without ever quite getting asked to sit down at one.
I’ve gotten comfortable there, standing where it’s warm enough.
But comfortable and content turn out to be different words, and holding this particular woman while she sleeps has made me want, for once, to be asked to sit all the way down.
She stirs, resettles, tucks her face closer into my throat. I feel it land, low and sure, and decide not to examine it tonight.
I know one thing, at least. I went last. Held the line the longest, did it right, waited.
And then she asked me plain, and I could not have said no to save my own life.
So now the three of us are in, before her heat, before she’s picked anything with a clear head, and the tidy plan I made everyone swear to at that window is well and truly done for.
Cal cracked it. I finished the job. And I can’t seem to be sorry. That’s new.
One piece of me isn’t confused. The alpha piece, the one I keep on the shortest leash in this pack.
It’s known since the flour on her cheek.
It doesn’t care about the math or the plan.
It wants to bury her in soft things and dare the world to come through me.
I’ve spent my life not letting it drive.
Tonight I’m having trouble remembering why.
I let it up a little. Her. The pack whole. A life with noise in it. I kept that want down so long I’d half decided it died back there in the dark. It didn’t. It’s been waiting, patient as I am, for something worth getting brave for.
The soup’s gone cold on the counter. I’ll warm it when she wakes.
She’s going to come up starving, wrung out, braced for me to have made too much of this, or too little.
And I’m going to hand her the soup and the good bread, ask her nothing at all, because it’s the one language I’ve got that she seems to trust. She trusts a man who wants nothing from her.
I can be that. I’ve had practice at wanting quietly.
Water when she’s thirsty. Food she won’t remember eating.
A body between her and the cold at three in the morning.
The steady thing. I’ve been the steady thing for this pack six years, the wall everyone leans on and nobody thinks to thank, and I never once minded, because being needed is the closest I ever let myself get to being wanted.
But holding her tonight, feeling her hand over her whole trembling weight to the three of us without a fight, I catch myself wondering what it would be like to be both at once.
Needed and wanted. I don’t have any data on that. I find I’d like some.
Two days, maybe less, and the heat lands.
She’ll try to face it alone. I know it like I know a coming front.
And the hardest thing I’ll do all year is respect that, keep the porch light off, let her white-knuckle the worst days of her life forty feet from three men who’d give a goddamn arm to be let in.
Because it’s hers to choose. I won’t crowd a scared woman into a decision she can’t take back, not even to save her from a bad one.
Unless she asks. That’s the whole of the hope I’ll allow myself, standing here in the dark with her heart slowing against mine. Unless she asks.
She said don’t go three times this week. Once to each of us. She meant it all three. That’s not a woman having a nice time she’ll forget by morning. That’s a body that’s made a decision the head hasn’t caught up to.
I let myself have that. Just that much. It’s more than I usually hand myself.
Then she makes a small sound against my throat, half a word, my name, maybe, and burrows deeper. And I give up thinking entirely. I just hold the omega asleep on my chest, cold soup and all, and stand watch over the first thing in years I’ve wanted badly enough to break a rule for.
The weather can do what it likes. I’m not going anywhere.