Chapter 9 Matteo
MATTEO
The island is beautiful, but then again it always is.
That's the point of it, the whole carefully constructed point, from the white sand to the water that can't decide between blue and green and settles on both, to the way the light comes off it in the late afternoon like the sun is making an argument for itself.
We bought it seven years ago when the business hit its first genuinely obscene profit margin and Santos said, with the specific glee of a man who grew up with very little and intends to enjoy the correction, that he wanted an island.
I've been here four days and I've read every document I brought twice and reorganized the staff briefing notes for the Nakamura visit until they couldn't be improved further, and now I'm standing on the terrace with a glass of water watching the horizon do nothing in particular and feeling something I'm not accustomed to feeling.
Bored. Flatly, quietly, uncomfortably bored, with nothing to do with my hands and nowhere to put the energy except at the island being beautiful and the water being turquoise and both of them completely indifferent to my situation.
There are six omegas on the island this week.
Staff arranged them, as they occasionally do before extended guest stays, rotation of company, familiar faces, willing.
It's a system that has served its purpose before, uncomplicated, clean, no misunderstandings about what anything means or where it's going.
I looked at them when they arrived.
All of them fine. Carefully selected, professionally presented, willing in the explicit and informed sense of the word.
None of them right.
That is a thought I've been refusing to have clearly for four days, and I'm having it now because four days on a beautiful island with nothing left to organize has apparently worn down my defenses.
They're too thin. Not unhealthily, just assembled, the look of women who have spent years knowing they were being watched and adjusted accordingly.
Nothing soft about them in the way that actually registers.
And the scent.
That's the real problem.
Every omega has a scent. One carries warm peach threaded with black pepper; another is green fig and sea air; a third, bergamot softened at the edges.
The fourth smells of dark cherry and smoke, the fifth of fresh linen over a cool citrus base, the sixth of amber and cardamom, arresting until it isn’t.
None of them arouse me, let alone make me want to spend time with any of them.
I put the water glass down.
Tomas had a point, not that I'm going to say that out loud where he can hear it.
There's a version of me that still believes what I did was the right call. But there's a smaller, quieter version, the one that’s nagging at me, what is the point of all of this if there’s never anyone apart from a pack with no omega, to share it with.
I turn away from the water and go inside.
The knock on my door comes an hour later while I'm not reading a document I've already read twice.
Tomas doesn't wait for an answer, which is his habit in private spaces the same way it's Santos's habit everywhere.
The difference is that when Santos does it, there's an implicit announcement in the way the door opens, here I am, delighted to find you, whereas Tomas enters a room the way he does most things, quietly and with prior conclusions already reached.
He looks tired.
His eyes move around a room without settling, and he’s stood in the doorway for half a second before coming in as if he was deciding whether this conversation was happening today or not.
He sits in the chair near the window.
I close the document and wait.
"After the Nakamura deal closes," he says, "I want to step back."
I'm quiet for a moment. "From the business."
"From this." He gestures, an encompassing gesture that takes in the room and the island and presumably everything we've been doing for the last two years. "The way we're running things. The rotation. The arrangements." He meets my eyes. "All of it."
The thing about the three of us is that we became a pack from such a young age, we didn’t even realize what we were doing. We all went to the same school, and were classed as nerds. Our parents were happy, because neither of us had a friend until that point.
We became friends, best friends then we just molded together. We’d decided that one day we would go into business together and do everything that we’ve done. We didn’t realize that from such a tender age, we’d formed a pack.
"I'm hitting thirty," he says. "Santos too, in March."
"I'm aware."
"You're already there.”
"Also aware."
Because it’s not like him to beat around the bush.
He leans forward with his forearms on his knees, a posture I rarely see from him, the posture of someone choosing honesty over presentation.
"We swore off omegas when we were twenty-six, twenty-seven. We were young and it made sense. Omegas tended to want us for our money, more than anything else. Chiara was a lesson we paid for dearly.” He pauses.
"But how long are we going to keep doing this.”
I say nothing.
"I don't want to be forty-five at the back of some club," Tomas says, "checking scents because all the omegas my age are already settled into packs and the only ones still available are twenty-two and looking for something I should want to give them but can't because I don't know them and I never did.
" He sits back. "That's where we're going. "
I look at the window.
The water out there is doing the turquoise thing again.
"We're excellent at business," I say.
"Yes."
"As a pack," I say slowly, and this is the part I've been not looking at directly, "we're not as good."
Tomas stands. Straightens his collar out of habit. "After the deal," he says.
“We’ll go our separate ways,” I agree.
He leaves the way he came in, quietly and with his conclusions already made, and I hear his footsteps down the corridor toward his own room.
We haven't been right in three months, not since a woman in a red dress looked at us like she was surprised to be wanted and then trusted us with something I took and folded up neatly in a note.
Santos is on the beach.
He gravitates toward water and sunlight like a man with a prior arrangement with both, stretched out on a chair with a book.
He hears me coming across the sand and tips his sunglasses down.
"You have your thinking face on," he says. "The serious one. Not the working one."
"Tomas talked to me."
Santos puts the book down.
"He wants out after the deal. The whole arrangement. The rotation, the island setup, all of it." I stop at the edge of his shadow on the sand. "He wants more than this."
Santos is quiet for a beat.
Then he looks back at the water.
"Yeah," he says.
"You agree with him," I say.
“For about two months." He picks up the book again, but he's not reading it. "I just wasn't sure you were ready to hear it." A pause, his jaw doing something complicated. "I miss her, Matteo. I've been missing her since we left that city and I'm tired of pretending I'm not."
I stand on the sand with the sun coming down and the water going endlessly turquoise behind him.
"The omegas here," I start.
"None of them are right and you know it." He looks up at me again. "Not even close. You felt it the second they arrived and so did I, and so did Tomas, because we've all been walking around this island for four days being politely miserable about it without saying so."
I think about the note I left on a hotel table three months ago.
"We find her after the deal," I say.
"What if she doesn't want to be found," he says. "She may not be the solution. You left the note. So, she may think the three of us did, but in all honesty this feels like history repeating itself."
"What do you mean?"
"I've always felt like Chiara betrayed us, but maybe we betrayed her. We didn't let her get close enough. We pushed her away, because we are safe, the three of us together. We're all we've ever really known. And that feels safe."
He's right, but I can't fix what we broke. I can't relive the past, but I know one thing for sure, we can't repeat the mistakes we made before. Maybe the best thing is for us to go our separate ways, so we can figure out what will make each of us happy, because being together isn't doing that.