Chapter 41
Forty-One
Eli
She reaches for me last, and I finally understand it isn’t because I come last.
That’s the story I’ve told myself my whole life.
Last picked, last thought of, the one you get to eventually if you get to him at all.
I’ve worn it so long it fits like my own skin.
But she’s got Cal grinning and spent on one side of her, Rhett wrecked and quiet on the other.
And she turns her head and looks for me, and there’s nothing leftover in how she says my name.
“Eli. Come here.” Like she saved me for last on purpose.
Like last is a place you put the thing you want to take your time over.
So I take my time. It’s the only speed I’ve got, and tonight it’s the exact one she wants.
I gather her up against me, her back to my chest. She melts into it, boneless and warm, already halfway wrecked from the other two. “Still with me?” I ask into her hair, because I need to hear it, sober, no fever answering for her. “We can stop any time. Just say it.”
“Don’t you dare stop.” She reaches back, fists a hand in my hair. “I want you. Slow. Like only you do.”
So I give her slow. I push into her by inches, one arm banded across her, my mouth at the back of her neck, and I feel the exact second she hands me the last of her weight.
She’s slick and hot, impossibly soft. I move in her deep and unhurried, exactly like I’ve imagined it since a September morning I had no business imagining anything about her.
Cal’s kissing her shoulder, murmuring. Rhett’s got her free hand laced in his.
I hold her through all of it, steady, saying the things I only ever say in the dark, good girl, that’s it, you feel like home.
She comes apart on me, slow and shaking, with my name in her mouth.
I follow her over quiet, because quiet’s how I do everything.
After, we end up in a heap, the four of us, in a nest that was built for exactly this and finally gets to do its job with everybody awake.
Wren’s tucked in the middle, which is the only place the nest was ever going to put her.
Cal’s three-quarters asleep with his face mashed into her shoulder.
Rhett’s tracing lazy nonsense on her hip, telling some outrageous lie about a call we ran in the spring.
She’s laughing, loose and glowing. Cal grumbles that some of us are trying to sleep, and Rhett informs him sleep is for people who didn’t just get everything they ever wanted.
From where I lie I take the two of them in, and I notice something I’ve been too busy to name for weeks.
They’ve gone quiet in the good way. Cal, who spent six years terrified underneath the grin that he was too easy to bother keeping, has stopped performing charm at her and just beams instead.
Rhett, who was so sure the man under the jokes was worthless, keeps letting that man show, and nobody’s laughed him out of the room yet.
My brothers are settling into their own skins in front of me, and a prime notices that kind of thing, like you notice a fever breaking.
The pack’s not just whole. It’s easy. We wore that cold spot around for six years and called it fine, and I’d forgotten a pack could feel like this, warm all the way to the middle.
I lie on the edge of it, because the edge is where I always end up. Except tonight the edge of the bed has her hand stretched back to find mine, holding on even mostly asleep, and it turns out the edge is a different place entirely when somebody’s reaching for you across it.
I keep waiting for the old thing, and it doesn’t come.
The fear. The one that’s run under everything, the one that keeps a bag half-packed in the back of my head and tells me I’m a guest, that the welcome’s a loan somebody’s going to call in, that I’m the wall everyone leans on right up until they don’t need a wall.
I keep waiting for it to pipe up, because this is exactly the flavor of good that’s always made it loudest. Too much to lose.
Too good to keep. It’s got nothing to say tonight.
It can’t find a foothold, because you cannot feel like a man who might be asked to leave with an omega’s hand laced in yours in her sleep and your pack breathing slow and easy all around you, whole for the first time in six years, because of her.
I’ve spent my whole life being needed. It’s the closest I ever let myself get to being wanted, and I made my peace with the gap between the two a long time ago.
Dressed it up as contentment. Told myself the edge of a warm fire was plenty for a man like me.
Tonight I’m not at the edge. I’m in it. She reached past two men who are, by any honest measure, easier to love than I am, and pulled me into the middle of the bed and the middle of her life, awake, on purpose, sober.
Needed, I earned. Wanted, I never once believed I’d get.
Turns out I was dead wrong about the one thing I was surest of, and I’ve never in my life been so glad to be wrong.
The good part is, it doesn’t stop when the sun comes up.
I keep waiting for that too, some morning-after cooling, the moment the spell breaks and everyone remembers themselves.
That doesn’t come either. It just turns into our life, easy as breathing, out in the open where the whole town can watch.
And me, for the first time in my life, staying for the coffee after, sitting down at the table instead of clearing out before anyone can thank me.
Our first real day out as the four of us, we walk down Main together to the diner for pancakes, and I brace out of habit for the whispers, the sideways looks a town can hand a thing it doesn’t understand.
They don’t come. What comes is Hank at the hardware store lifting a hand off his broom in a wave.
The old fellas outside the barber shop nodding like it’s the most natural sight in the world.
Somebody’s kid asking Cal if we’re all really her boyfriends, and Cal saying yes, buddy, all three, lucky as hell.
The kid decides that’s acceptable and gets back to his ice cream.
Nobody in Ember Hollow is even slightly surprised, which is its own sort of welcome.
Of course, it says. We saved you the spot. What in the hell took you so long?
I still go back to the firehouse most nights, because we haven’t sorted the logistics of four people and two buildings yet.
But it’s quit feeling like going home. Home moved.
Home’s a bakery at the end of a long road with a woman in it who reaches for me last because last is where you put the thing worth the wait, and two brothers who finally look settled all the way through.
Somewhere in the back of my head, for the first time in a long time, I unpack the bag.
I’m not a guest here. I don’t think I ever really was. I just needed somebody to walk into my quiet and tell me I could stop standing at the window.
She did that. Flour on her face, swearing at a tray of scones.
I’m home.