Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
Rhett
I lose the joke somewhere in the third hour, and I don’t go looking for it.
Nobody warns you what a rut actually takes.
Not your control. Your cover. Every trick I’ve been perfecting since I was six, the grin, the deflection, the fast line that lands a laugh and gets me out the door before anyone looks too close, all of it burns off like fog off a road at noon.
What’s left is the guy underneath. The one I keep chained in the dark.
And he doesn’t have a single funny thing to say.
He wants exactly one thing, and right now he’s got her in his arms.
I’ve had a rut exactly zero times in six years, because you don’t rut without an omega, and now I’m learning the whole thing at once, from the deep end, no map.
It’s less like being turned on and more like being turned inside out.
Everything I keep hidden is suddenly just out, on the surface, in the air between us, and I’ve got no free hand to shove it back down, because both of them are full of her.
It’s my turn with her. The knot’s eased off Eli.
Cal’s had his. Now she’s rolled into me, feverish and soft and reaching.
I’ve got her on her side, her back to my chest, one leg hooked over mine.
I’m inside her deep and slow, and I cannot make myself go fast. My whole body’s screaming to.
But I need this to last, need to feel every second of being the one she’s wrapped around, because some scared piece of me is still braced for it to be the last time anybody lets me.
So I take it slow. I map every inch of her with my hands while I move, the dip of her waist, the soft weight of her breast, the place low on her belly that makes her breath hitch.
I’ve had a lot of women fast. I have never once had one like this.
Slow, in the dark, wanting me back. She rocks into me, greedy even wrecked, and I match her, and every drag of it feels like a thing being given instead of taken, which is not a sensation I’ve got much practice with.
She’s tight and slick and impossibly soft around me.
Every little sound she makes goes straight through me and lands low, someplace I’ve got no name for.
I’ve got one hand splayed flat on her belly, holding her back against me, and the other has found her clit, slow circles that make her whole body clench and shudder around me.
I want to live here. In this exact minute.
Her wrapped around me in the dark, taking what I’ve got and handing it right back, nobody laughing, nobody halfway out the door.
“Rhett.” She says my name into the dark, wrecked, reaching back to fist a hand in my hair. “Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop.”
“Not stopping, trouble.” My voice comes out rough, scraped down to nothing. “I’m not going anywhere.”
What undoes me, more than the counter, more than anything in my whole stupid life, is this.
I can’t hold the scent back.
In a rut, there’s no locking it down, no keeping the sweet buried under the smoke where it’s safe.
It just pours out of me. That burnt-sugar note I’ve spent my entire life making sure nobody got close enough to catch, the tell, the soft center, the actual me, leaking out into the small hot dark of her nest with nowhere left to hide it.
And she catches it. Of course she does. She’s been catching it for weeks without ever getting a fix on it, and now it’s everywhere, thick in the air between us.
I feel her go still against me. Feel her drag a breath in through her nose, deep, searching.
My whole body locks up waiting for it. Waiting for her to file me right back under fun, under harmless, under Rhett being Rhett.
“There it is,” she breathes.
“There what is?” I already know. I just need to hear her say it out loud.
“That sweet thing. Under the smoke.” She turns her head and presses her face into my throat, right into the source of it, and breathes me in like she’s been trying to get at it for weeks.
“I could never catch it. Every time I reached for it, it was gone.” Her voice cracks. “It’s you. It’s the actual damn you.”
“Yeah.” It comes out barely there. “That’s all that’s back there. Just that.”
“Rhett.” She says it like she’s furious with me, which is somehow exactly right. “It’s my favorite part.”
And that just about finishes me off.
Nobody’s ever wanted the part behind the jokes.
Nobody’s ever even known it was there, because I’ve bent my whole life into a shape that made sure of it, keeping the room laughing so the room would never look, being the good time so nobody went digging for the rest. Quiet gets you left.
I learned that at six years old, and I have never once, in all the years since, risked finding out if it was still true.
And this woman, feverish and half out of her mind, two other men she could reach for a foot away, has her face buried in the exact thing I hide, telling me it’s her favorite.
I don’t know what to do with it. That’s the truth.
I’ve got a hundred smooth moves for a hundred situations and not one single tool for being wanted like this.
Plain. For the part I was so damn sure was the problem.
My throat’s doing something. My eyes are doing something.
A whole life of never letting one soul close enough to find the soft spot.
She walked in a few weeks back, covered in flour, and found it on the first honest try.
And instead of using it to leave, she’s got her face pressed into it, calling it her favorite.
I press my mouth to the back of her neck, and I stop performing.
All the way. For the first time in my adult life there’s no bit, no angle, not one funny thing standing between me and another person.
I just hold her. Move in her slow and deep.
Let her have the whole unfunny truth of me, the wanting, the scared, the sweet under the smoke.
And I don’t flinch away from a single second of her having it.
“Stay in it with me,” she whispers, feeling the shift, because of course she feels it, she reads the back of my neck like I’ve spent my whole life reading everybody else’s. “Whatever you just put down. Don’t pick it back up.”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
I make her come like that, wrapped up in me, my name in her mouth and the real me thick in the air.
And when the knot swells and locks and ties us together, I bury a sound in her hair I would never let another living soul hear.
Not a joke. Not a line. Just her name, over and over, like it’s the only word I’ve got left and I’ve got no use for any of the others.
Tied to her, spent, cracked all the way open, I brace for the panic. The old reflex. The urge to laugh it off, drop a wink, get the grin bolted back on, and get gone before she sees too much.
It doesn’t come. There’s nowhere I’d rather be seen.
She’s got my arm wrapped around her, my hand held tight against her chest. Eli’s dropped a heavy, steadying hand on my back without a word, like he does when one of us is going through it.
“Knew it,” Cal’s mumbling from her other side, half asleep, grinning, I can hear it in his voice. “The two of you. Knew it before either of you did.” And I’m lying in a nest a woman built out of the three of us, wanted, all the way down to the part I was so sure would send anyone running.
I keep waiting to feel exposed. Cracked open like this, in front of the two men whose opinion I’d sooner die than lose and a woman who could still change her mind when the fever clears.
I don’t feel exposed. I feel held. There’s a difference I’m only now, at thirty, in a bakery, learning the shape of.
The joke would be easy from here. It always is. I just don’t want it anymore.
Some cowardly corner of me is already whispering that the fever will break eventually, days from now.
And when it does, when her head clears and the animal in her quiets down, she might look back at what she said in the dark, my favorite part, and want to take it back.
That’s the old fear. The one that’s run me like a dog on a wire since grade school.
But she’s got my hand crushed against her chest like she’s not planning to hand it back.
Eli’s steady weight is at my spine. Cal’s grinning at the ceiling like a man who won something.
And for once in my life I decide to trust the evidence right in front of me over the sad little story in my head.
She wanted the real one. I’m going to let that be true and see what happens.
“Hi, trouble,” I say into her hair. Quiet. Just for her.
“Hi.” She laces her fingers tighter through mine. “There you are.”
There I am.
Turns out I was worth the digging after all. Who the hell knew?