Chapter 27
Jack
Here’s what nobody tells you about crisis resolution: The aftermath is awkward.
Not badly awkward, not the jagged, unresolved kind. Just the social awkwardness of a group of people who have been running on emergency power for twelve hours and are now blinking in the ordinary morning light and trying to remember how to be in the world at regular speed.
I’m good at this part. I’m good at it because I’ve had practice and because it is, genuinely, my favorite part. The part where the weight lifts and there’s a breath and the question becomes: okay, what now? I like what now. I’ve always liked what now. It’s where I live.
So while Ryan is being dependable in the window chair and Tristan is being comforting on the couch and Archer is being stoic at the worktable, I look at Lola sitting in the middle of all of it with her tea and her still-slightly-too-controlled jaw and I think: She needs someone to make it smaller.
Not dismiss it. Not skip over it. Just bring the scale down from enormous to manageable, which is a skill, and it’s mine.
I pick my moment. “Can I say something?” I say, to the ceiling.
“You’re going to regardless,” Archer replies.
“True, but I’m practicing consent.”
“Practice harder,” Lola suggests.
I look at her. She’s looking at her tea but there’s something happening at the corner of her mouth. There it is.
“I just want to note,” I say, “for the record, that Jenny brought a lawn chair. A personal lawn chair, from her home, to the confrontation. She planned for comfort.”
Lola’s mouth quirks. “She had tea.”
“She had tea,” I confirm. “Fully brewed. In a good cup, not a travel thing.” I shake my head. “That’s commitment. That’s someone who knew how this was going to go and decided to be comfortable about it.”
Tristan makes a sound that is definitely a laugh.
“Doris Harrow wore her good coat,” Lola says.
“She only wears that coat for weddings and civic events of significance,” I explain. “Today qualified.”
“That’s…” Lola stops. “That’s a lot.”
“That’s Sweetwater Valley.” I look at her. “You have stayed here for a sufficient duration to grasp that.”
She’s quiet for a moment. I watch the quiet, because her quiets have different meanings and I’ve learned to read them. This one is the good kind, the processing kind, the kind that means something is being integrated rather than rejected.
“Yeah,” she says. “I have.”
The morning finds its rhythm.
Ryan makes calls. To Scarlet, the pack’s legal contacts, someone in the county I don’t have full context for.
Archer processes by doing physical tasks, so he fixes three things around the house that have needed fixing for months and nobody mentions that he’s been aware of them for months and chosen this morning.
Tristan starts cooking for the afternoon, because the cafe needs to be stocked. Tristan’s relationship with preparedness is essentially a religion.
This leaves me and Lola. We find each other in the house. She comes to where the chaos is, which has always been where I am, and we exist in the register that we’ve built, which is somewhere between competition and conspiracy.
I like it there.
I find her at the kitchen counter around eleven, doing cleaning that nobody asked her to do, because she finds useful tasks and performs them before anyone knows it needs doing.
I lean on the counter across from her. “You don’t have to do that,” I say.
“I know.” She scrubs at a stain on a plate. “I want to.”
“Big distinction.”
“I’m aware.” She looks up. “Don’t you have things to do?”
“Probably.” I don’t move. “There are parts of game alley that still need packing up.”
“Then go pack up.”
“I’ll do it later.”
She gives me the look, the one she’s been giving me since the café on day two.
The you are a specific kind of problem look, except it’s different now.
It’s warm. I discovered this this morning and I’m going to be honest about how much it means.
Not out loud. I’m not going to be honest out loud.
But internally, keeping score, noting it.
“What?” she asks.
“Nothing.”
“You’re staring.”
“I’m looking. There’s a—”
“If you say there’s a difference—”
“There’s a meaningful distinction,” I interrupt. “Between staring and looking.”
She puts the dish down. “What’s the distinction?”
“Staring is unfocused. Looking is…” I hold her gaze. “Looking is specific.”
She holds the gaze for a moment, and I watch something move through her expression. I think it ends in being purely delighted with me.
She picks up the dish. “Go check on game alley.”
“In a minute,” I reply.
The corner of her mouth moves.
I help with the dishes.
Nobody asked me to, and my competence in this area is limited compared to Tristan’s, but I can wipe things and carry things. That covers about sixty percent of cleaning, and the remaining forty percent Lola covers. Together we’re actually functional.
Tristan moves around us with the serenity of someone who has noted the development and has decided to let it proceed without comment.
“You’re in my way,” Lola says, about forty minutes in.
“No, I’m not.”
“You’re on the wrong side of the counter.”
“I’m on the side with better access to the—”
“You’re on my side,” she says.
I look down. She’s right. Somehow, over the course of forty minutes of cleaning, I’ve ended up on her side of the counter, which puts us at approximately shoulder-width distance and neither of us has moved to correct it.
“Hm,” I hum.
“Hm,” she agrees.
Neither of us moves.
Tristan makes a sound from the far end of the kitchen that I choose to interpret as a cough.
“Game alley,” Lola says.
“Still in a minute.”
She looks up at me. Close, at this distance, I can see the detail of her.
The dark brown of her eyes, the still-slightly-controlled jaw that is less controlled than it was this morning.
She’s not tracking exits or holding herself at the distance she’s maintained since she walked into Tristan’s café and looked at us like she’d already decided what to do if we were trouble.
She’s just here. Looking at me.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” she replies, a little puzzled.
“How are you doing?”
“I’m standing in a kitchen cleaning.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
She stares at me for a spell. The real answer behind the deflection is visible. I can read it, the warmth of it, the feeling of someone who is, for the first time in a while, okay in the actual sense and not just the functional sense.
“Good,” she replies. “I’m doing good.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Me too.”
We go to the carnival at three.
Lola walks the alley with me during the pack up check, which she does now without being asked, and she spots two things I missed, which I note and correct. She’s going to know this stuff better than I do soon.
We walk the rest of the alley and she deliberately bumps my shoulder at the end of it. The light, casual physical contact of someone who is done maintaining social distance. I bump her back and she laughs. It makes me unbearably happy to hear it.
She came back to us.
She’s going to keep coming back to us.
She’s our Omega.
“Come on,” she says. “You owe me a rematch on the axe throw before it’s put away.”
“I owe you nothing of the kind,” I reply, following immediately.
“You cheated.”
“I have never cheated at anything in my—”
“Jack.”
“In several things,” I concede. “Not the axe throw specifically.”
She laughs.
My heart bursts.