Chapter 24 Jennifer
JENNIFER
My omega has been toying with me for the last twenty minutes and I have been ignoring her.
The plan is: go to lunch, eat the food, be professional, leave on the boat at four.
That is a terrible plan, my omega says.
It is a perfect plan, I say.
You pinned your hair up three times, she says. The first time was too severe, the second time had a strand coming down that you decided was accidental and then spent four minutes making look more accidental, and the third time you changed your shirt.
I spilled tea on my shirt, I say.
You spilled tea on your shirt because you were thinking about Santos's forearms, she says.
Well, maybe.
I settled on the green one, and I have been standing in front of the mirror for two minutes pretending I am checking for stains and not checking whether the green brings out my eyes and makes my olive skin look warm and whether the way it sits across my chest is doing what I think it is doing.
It is doing what I think it is doing.
Let's go, my omega says.
The corridor outside the dining room takes me past their kitchen which is equipped, but smaller than the main kitchen of the island.
I slow down slightly because the smell coming through it is garlic and good olive oil and something herby and warm and my stomach has been making its position clear since I got within twenty feet of it.
She kicks, once, which I am choosing to interpret as hurry up rather than turn around and go back to your room.
I stop outside the dining room door.
I can hear them inside. Santos's voice, low and making a case for something. Tomas's response, measured and unimpressed. Matteo saying nothing, which probably means he agrees or doesn't know enough about cooking to weigh in.
I walk in.
Santos sees me first.
He's standing near the window with his arms folded and his dark hair slightly undone and his white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and the ink on his forearm catching the afternoon light, and when I come through the door his arms unfold and his whole expression shifts, as if he's just as surprised I'm here as he is relieved.
The saffron in his scent hits me before he says a word.
Warm and open and spiking in a way that moves through the air of the room and wraps around my strawberry before I've finished crossing the threshold, and my omega makes a sound that I am doing my best to contain.
"You came," Santos says.
"You cooked," I say.
"Carmen supervised," he says. "By phone. From the other side of the island. With diagrams."
I cross to the stove because I can't help myself and also because the garlic is smelling exactly right and my body has been making decisions without consulting me since I walked in.
Santos steps back to give me space, which puts him approximately one foot behind my right shoulder, and his saffron is everywhere and the kitchen is warm and I look at the pan.
The garlic is golden and not burnt. The herbs are fresh, so he probably got them from the herb garden.
"Move the pasta off the heat," I say. "It'll over-reduce."
"I was just about to do that," he says.
I move it myself and adjust one thing and step back and Santos's hand brushes my arm as he reaches past me to get the wooden spoon and neither of us says anything about it but the saffron in his scent spikes sharp and warm and my strawberry does something embarrassing and entirely without my permission.
"It smells good," I say.
"Wait until you taste it," he says, and he is close and his voice has dropped into the register it drops into when he means more than one thing at once, and I turn around and go to the table before my rose decides to make an announcement.
Matteo stands when I reach the table.
The quiet automatic courtesy of a man who wants to be near the person who has just walked in, and he pulls the chair back just slightly, an inch, enough to be an invitation rather than a demand.
His pale blue eyes move over me in the afternoon light, taking me in the way he takes everything in, directly and without advertising it, and they do the thing they do when he has seen something he considers worth looking at.
"You look well," he says.
"I feel like someone who has been caught in the middle of a storm for three days," I say, sitting down.
He chuckles. "We all have."
Tomas is to my left.
He has his glasses on and his gray eyes are doing the warm steady thing they do when he has made peace with something and is sitting in that peace, and he looks at me over the rim of his glasses with the expression that has been doing problematic things to my composure since the first time I walked into his library.
"Are you all right?” he says.
"Fine. Tea and books and Carmen. I was completely fine," I say.
Santos appears with the pasta and sets it in front of me first and the smell of it hits me and every argument I was constructing dissolves immediately.
I take a bite.
It's good.
Not my-tarragon-lamb good, not the duck confit in Paris good, and I pause for a second while eating, then put my fork down and look at Santos across the table.
He has his forearms flat on the table and his warm brown eyes on my face and he is trying very hard not to look like he has been waiting for this verdict and he is failing completely.
"It's good," I say.
The relief that moves through his face is immediate and warm and entirely unguarded, and it starts in his eyes and moves through his whole expression, and the saffron in the air brightens, and I feel it in my chest in a way I am going to attribute to the pasta for as long as that remains even slightly plausible.
"I told you," he says, to Matteo and Tomas, with the specific satisfaction of a man who has been doubted and vindicated in the same morning.
"You told us," Matteo says. The almost-smile. The actual one, brief and real.
"Hmm, the flavors are wonderful. You did well," I say.
Tomas makes the sound, the almost-laugh, and it is brief and genuine and I add it to the collection without looking at him because looking at him when he does that requires a level of composure I don't currently have available.
"I wasn't being sarcastic," I say to Tomas.
"I know," he says. "It is just that Santos takes everything he does too seriously. Everything has to be perfect. He was worried it wasn't."
It's as if I've given them permission to eat too. I nod and carry on eating.
Santos across from me with his forearms on the table and his warm brown eyes finding mine every time I look up. Matteo to my right with his pale eyes steady. Tomas to my left with his glasses and his silver musk sitting around me like something settled.
Santos refills my water without being asked.
Matteo passes the bread before I reach for it.
Tomas adjusts the olive oil closer to my side of the table without a word.
My omega is very quiet in the way she goes quiet when she has gotten what she wanted and doesn't need to say anything further.
"Tell me about Chiara," I say.
I keep eating because I want them to see that I am asking from a place of wanting information and not from a place of insecurity, which is mostly true.
Santos puts his fork down.
"She lost her mind," he says. "Genuinely. In the study. We told her we had moved on and she started taking her dress off."
I look up.
"What?" I say.
"She decided," Santos says, "that the best argument for her case was a physical demonstration of what she was offering." He pauses. "Security escorted her off the island. In a sheet. Carmen arranged it."
My strawberry scent does something open and honest in the air and I can feel all three of them notice it, the subtle shift in the room, and I look at my pasta and take a breath.
My rose does the soft thing.
I can't help but start laughing, and it's as if I open a gateway, because all of them start too.
Matteo demonstrates what she did, and we roar into laughter again.
It's as if in this moment we're no longer uncomfortable with each other, but back to how we were in Vegas.
Laughing. Enjoying each other's company.
And I forget in a split second that I'm supposed to be leaving this island in the next few hours.
"She was never ours," Tomas says, from my left.
Quiet and plain, the way Tomas says things that are simply true.
"We used each other for knotting and heat cycles, but she was never really our omega.
" He looks at me. "We've never had one, thinking that it would come between us.
That an omega won't bring us together but drift us apart. "
I don't tell them that Carmen already told me about Chiara, because part of me feels that by doing so, I'll break Carmen's trust.
We eat for a while in the comfortable quiet of people who have run out of things to be cautious about and are sitting in what's left of it.
Santos eats with the easy pleasure of someone who has always loved food and considers a meal a full sensory experience and not just fuel, and he keeps looking at me like I am the most interesting thing in the room and he is not going to pretend otherwise.
Matteo eats precisely, which is how Matteo does everything, and every time he looks up his pale eyes find mine and hold them for a moment longer than strictly necessary before moving on, and his warmth is sitting warm and dark in the air and my nose keeps finding it before I tell it to stop.
Tomas finishes his pasta, sets his fork down with the quiet care he brings to everything, and turns to look at me.
Santos leans forward across the table with his forearms flat and his saffron warm and his warm brown eyes on my face and he says, "Stay for dinner."
I look at him.
"I'm making dinner," he says.
I'm supposed to be leaving.
But he offered you dinner, my omega says.
I thought she'd stopped talking.
"Santos," I say, not wanting to make this more complicated than it needs to be.
"Dessert too," he says. "I have a recipe. Carmen has concerns about the recipe but I believe in the recipe."