Chapter 28
Twenty-Eight
Eli
Somewhere in the small hours of the second night, she stops needing me and starts wanting me, and I feel the exact second it turns.
There’s a difference. A heat is a body doing math.
It needs an alpha, any alpha, and it takes what it’s handed without caring whose hands they are.
For a day and a night, I’ve been that. Steady hands.
A knot to take the edge off. Necessary and interchangeable both, and I told myself that was plenty.
Needed you can earn. Wanted I never learned to ask for, because asking is how you find out the answer’s no.
Then it changes.
The wave’s cresting again. Cal’s spent and dozing, his arm thrown over her hip.
Rhett’s murmuring something half-asleep into her shoulder.
And she surfaces up out of the fog and looks around the dark of her own nest, and she isn’t looking for an alpha.
She’s looking for me. Her eyes find mine, fever-bright and dead certain.
She reaches out one shaking hand. She says my name.
Not alpha. Not please. Eli. Like there’s exactly one set of hands in the world that’ll do, and they happen to be mine.
The part of me that’s been braced for six years quietly lets go.
“I’ve got you.” I move to her, gather her up against my chest. She melts into me like she’s been waiting all night for this exact weight.
I feel the tremor in her ease the second my scent settles over her, coffee and rain and worn leather, the smell she calls grounding, the one thing I have always had to give.
“You,” she breathes into my throat. “It has to be you. I don’t know why, it just, God, Eli, please.”
“I know why.” Low, into her hair. And I do. Because I’m the still point. In the middle of the storm her body’s making, I’m the fixed thing she can hold onto, and some deep animal part of her worked that out a long time before her clever head would. “Hold onto me. I’m not going anywhere.”
I take her slow. It’s the only speed I’ve got, and it happens to be the one she needs now, the fever gone from a scream down to a deep, rolling ache that wants filling more than it wants fast. I lay her back into the nest, settle over her, push into her by inches, watching her whole face come apart.
She wraps around me. Pulls me deep. Holds on like I’m the only solid thing left standing in the world. Tonight, maybe I am.
“There.” My mouth at her temple. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you, sweetheart.”
She’s wrecked and slick and perfect. I move in her like a man who intends to be doing exactly this the rest of his life, because I’m starting to think I am.
My control went hours ago, worn down to nothing over two days of her.
What’s under it turns out to be this. Tender and filthy in the same breath, my mouth at her throat saying things I never say out loud to anyone.
Good girl. That’s it. Take me. Let me feel you come.
She falls apart around me with my name in her mouth, over and over, and it does not sound interchangeable. It sounds like a choice.
I could come apart right there, and it would serve me right, but I hold on, like I hold on to everything, and take my time with her instead.
I want her looked after even now. Especially now, when she’s too far gone to ask for a single thing.
So I go slow, deep, steady, and I don’t stop, not through the first time she breaks or the second, learning every sound she makes and giving each one back to her doubled.
Turns out a reliable pair of hands is a fine thing to be in a heat, with a woman who needs steady more than she needs anything else on earth.
In the worst grip of a heat, when her body would take any warm alpha and thank it, she keeps choosing the specific one. The quiet one.
When the knot swells and locks, tying us together, I bury my face in her neck and finally let myself have the thing I’ve been rationing since the morning she dropped a tray of scones on Cal’s boots.
All of it. The wanting. The having. The being wanted back, out loud, by name, in front of my own pack, with nothing at all held in reserve.
And the fear goes quiet.
The one that’s run under everything for too long.
The one that keeps a bag half-packed in the back of my head, that tells me I’m a guest here, that the welcome’s a loan somebody will call in, that the welcome runs out.
It’s got nothing to say tonight. It can’t.
You cannot feel like a man who might be asked to leave with an omega wrapped around you sobbing your name into the dark, picking your steadiness over two men who are, by any honest measure, a hell of a lot easier to love than you are.
She wanted me. Not an alpha. Me, past the quiet and the slow, chosen on purpose. A woman doesn’t build a nest out of a man she’s settling for. For once in my life I let the evidence win the argument.
“Stay in it,” she whispers, like she said it to Rhett, like she somehow knows to say it to each of us in the exact words we need. “Whatever you’re feeling right now. Don’t you lock it down. Not with me.”
“Not with you.” I agree, and I mean it as a vow. I think she hears it as one, because her hand finds mine in the dark and grips down hard.
Tied to her, spent, cracked open like I haven’t let myself be in longer than I can remember, I do the thing I never do.
I let it show. I let her see the whole undefended size of it, the want and the relief and the terrible, aching gratitude of it.
She looks up at me and doesn’t flinch from an inch of it.
She just lifts her hand and lays her palm flat against my cheek, holding my face like it’s worth the holding, and says, “There you are. I’ve been trying to get to you for weeks. ”
Cal stirs and drops a warm hand between my shoulder blades, half asleep, an old habit.
Rhett, without cracking an eye, reaches over and grips my wrist, once, hard.
From Rhett that’s a whole speech. My pack.
Wrapped around me. Wrapped around her. The four of us tangled into a nest a stubborn, frightened woman built out of the smell of us, because her body knew the truth of it weeks before any of us would say the word.
Six years we carried that cold spot around and called it fine. In the end, it wasn’t a plan or a scheme or the right omega at the right pancake breakfast. It was this one, who came here to disappear and fit like she’d been cut for the gap.
Home has a shape now. Small, hot, smells like sex and sourdough and the three people I’d burn the world down for.
I don’t say any of that. I’m me. I don’t have the words for it, and I’d choke on them if I did. So I just hold her through the knot and the long slow aftershocks, pull the good quilt up over the three of them, and keep watch, like I always have, like I always will.
The only difference is that tonight, for the first time in a long time, nobody has to ask me to stay.
I’m already exactly where I belong.