Chapter 23
Twenty-Three
Eli
“Say it,” I tell him.
Rhett drags a hand down his face. When it drops, the grin’s gone with it, and what’s underneath is a man I’ve lived beside for six years and hardly ever seen.
“I want her,” he says. “Not for a night. For keeps. I’ve wanted her since the day she told me she was trying not to meet anybody, and I’ve been hiding behind jokes about it because that’s what I do, and I’m done.
That’s the first thing.” He pulls a breath.
“Here’s the second. We’re standing here letting her ride out a heat alone, and we’re calling it respect, and it isn’t.
It’s us being cowards in a nicer fucking coat. ”
Cal straightens off the truck. “Rhett.”
“Let me finish.” Rhett’s voice cracks, and he pushes through it.
“She’s never going to text us. Ever. You know it.
She’s the most walled-up person any of us has ever met, and the plan we made, the good, decent plan, it only works on a woman who’ll ask.
She will die of stubborn before she asks.
So the plan isn’t respecting her choice.
It’s handing her fear the pen and stepping back to watch it sign. ”
Cal doesn’t argue this time. He looks across the alley at the dark window, and his face does the thing it does when a situation has stopped being one he can charm, and he has to just feel it instead.
“He’s right,” he says, low, to me. “I’ve been calling the waiting decent all week.
I think I called it that because it was easier than knocking on a door that might get shut in my face.
That’s not decency. That’s me being a coward with a nicer vocabulary. ”
The bay goes quiet. Her scent hangs in it, thick and desperate, and every part of me that isn’t listening to Rhett is straining toward the wall.
He turns to me. “You’re the prime. Nothing moves till you move. So I’m asking you, straight, no bit, no exit. Move.”
It’s out now, laid on the workbench between us. The thing I’ve been carrying quietly for a week, that they’ve both been too kind to say out loud.
The plan is mine. The stall is mine. I built the whole careful architecture of waiting. I told myself it was for her. Rhett just walked over, turned it over, and showed me the underside.
So I look at the underside he’s turned up.
It isn’t want. I want her so much I’ve had to ration my own hands.
It’s that I’ve never once believed I earned the seat I sit in.
Cal is this town, generations deep. Rhett is loved by every soul he’s ever cracked a joke at.
I came here with a bag and no story I wanted to tell, and they made me prime anyway, and I’ve spent years half-sure it was a clerical error somebody would catch.
So when it came time to lead them toward the one thing that matters most, I froze. I dressed the freeze up as patience. I made them all swear to it. And I let a scared woman lock herself in with the worst night of her life rather than admit I didn’t trust my own right to knock on her door.
I’ve fought fires that scared me less. A fire, you know the exits and your job down to the muscle. This has no drill. There’s just walking across a room and setting your want on a workbench, like Rhett just did, and I’ve spent years being very good at not doing that.
That’s the ugly shape of it. Rhett’s right. He’s usually right, under the noise, and nobody ever credits him for it.
I look at him now, really look, the man this whole town files under comic relief, and I see what it cost him to cross this bay and set his heart on my workbench with no joke to catch it if it fell.
He did the bravest thing in the room. He did it first. And he did it for her.
If the good-time guy can drop the act to fight for this, I’ve got no excuse left worth the name.
My reluctance was never nobility. It was fear in my best coat, same as his jokes, same as Cal’s grin.
Three men in a firehouse, each hiding from the exact same thing behind a different face.
“You’re quiet,” Cal says. Gentle. He’s got the patient look of a man waiting on another one to make up his mind.
“I’m thinking.”
“Think faster,” Rhett says, but there’s no heat in it, only fear, and I understand it, because it’s mine too.
I look at the two of them. Cal, who would follow his heart through a wall but won’t step past his prime, because he loves me too much to make me smaller.
Rhett, who has never in six years asked me for a serious thing, is asking me now with his whole chest. They’re waiting.
They’ve been waiting on me for weeks, and I’ve mistaken my own fear for their good.
A prime holds the line. I’ve told myself that a hundred times. The part I never finish: a prime also knows when the line’s become a wall he’s hiding behind, and steps over it first so his pack can follow.
The wanting steadies into something plainer. A decision. It settles into me like a load settles once you finally get the right grip on it.
“We go to her,” I say.
Both their heads come up.
“Not to claim her.” My voice comes out level, sure, the voice I use on a scene when men need to know the ground is solid.
“We don’t crowd her, we don’t push, we don’t turn up like she owes us anything, because she doesn’t.
We knock. We offer. We tell her plain that we’ll see her through it if she wants us, and drop supplies at the door and walk away if she doesn’t.
Either answer is a good one. She carries no weight for whichever she picks.
” I hold Rhett’s eyes. “We give her the choice we’ve been pretending she already had.
And we make sure she knows, before her heat takes the last of her sense, that the door only ever needs a word from her side. Not a text. A word.”
Rhett lets out a breath like he’s been holding it a week. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. That.”
“And if she says go?” Cal asks. Quiet. Bracing for it.
“Then we go,” I say, “and we leave the light on. We let her have exactly the life she chooses. And we love her from the far side of a locked door for as long as it takes, because that’s the job too.” I mean every word, and every word costs me, and Cal nods slow like he can hear the price.
Then, because it’s true, and because it’s the first time in years I’ve said a thing like it out loud, I add the rest.
“But I don’t think she wants us gone. I’ve held her while she slept.
She built a whole nest out of the three of us and locked herself away from the very thing she gathered.
That’s not a woman who doesn’t want us. That’s a woman who’s scared of how much she does.
” I pick my keys up off the bench. “So we go remind her she’s allowed. ”
Rhett stares at me. Cal, too. And for one second, standing at the head of my own pack with my brothers looking at me like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, the old clerical-error feeling goes quiet. I feel it, plain and strange and warm.
I belong at the front of this.
It’s a small thing to feel and a large thing to have gone too long without. I don’t stop to examine it. There’s a woman who needs us braver, faster, than I need to understand my own head.
“Well,” Rhett says, and the grin comes back, but softer, realer. “Look who found his feet. Took you several years and a heat, but I’ll allow it.”
“Get your coat,” I tell him.
Cal’s already got his, already at the door, already lit with the particular joy of a man just told he’s finally allowed to do the thing he’s been dying to do.
Rhett grabs the bag we packed days ago, and all pretended wasn’t for this.
The water, the crackers, the soft blanket none of us mentioned buying.
We packed for her a week ago. We just needed one of us brave enough to carry it across the street.
We go.