Chapter 29 Jennifer
JENNIFER
One morning you wake up, look at your bed, and decide it is wrong. Not broken, just wrong in a way you can't explain and your omega can't be bothered to explain because she has already moved on to cataloguing everything else in the room that also needs addressing immediately.
The mattress is excellent. I know this for a fact, I have done the research. The sheets are fine. The pillows are adequate. None of that matters because something in me has taken one look at this space and issued a verdict and the verdict is: fix this, fix it now, and do not ask me questions.
I stand there for a minute waiting to feel less ridiculous about it.
That doesn't work.
I go and find Santos.
He is in the kitchen, because Santos is always in the kitchen lately, and he turns when I come in and reads my face with the particular attentiveness he has been applying to my face since approximately day two on this island.
"I need things," I say. "I need to nest, feel as if I'm part of here. So, I want to buy things for the room, my nest."
Santos puts down the knife he was holding. "Do you know what you need?"
"I don't know exactly," I say, which is the honest answer and also the frustrating one.
"Different pillows. More of them. A specific blanket, I will know it when I see it.
The sheets need to be different. The lighting needs to be different.
There is a corner of the room that is wrong and I cannot tell you why it is wrong but it is wrong and it needs a chair or a lamp or something and I need it to not be wrong. "
"Okay," he says. He reaches past me and picks up his phone from the counter. "Matteo."
Matteo appears in the kitchen doorway inside thirty seconds, which tells me he was close. He looks at Santos and then at me and then at Santos again and the pale blue eyes do their reading thing.
"She's nesting," Santos says.
Matteo looks at me. Something moves through his expression that I am cataloguing for later examination, the particular quality of it, careful and warm and certain. "What do you need?" he says.
"I need to go shopping, which means leaving the island."
"We'll take the boat in the morning," Matteo says, as though this is already decided, which apparently it is.
Tomas, who I have just noticed is standing in the hallway behind Matteo, comes into the kitchen and sets his book on the counter and looks at me directly.
"You are the most important thing in this house," Matteo says, from the window. Simple. Flat. The tone he uses for things he has already decided are not up for discussion. “Whatever you need, we’ll get it for you.”
I look at all three of them. Tomas at the counter with his book and his gray eyes and the expression of a man who has run this particular calculation and knows the answer. Santos at the island, patient and warm and not going anywhere. Matteo by the window. I think about arguing further.
Then I cross the kitchen and I kiss Santos first, warm and quick, and then Matteo, and then I reach up and take Tomas's face in my hands and kiss him too, and his silver musk goes very warm and certain in the air around me.
"An omega could get used to this," I say.
"Good," all three of them say, and I laugh.
My omega has nothing to add. She is exactly where she wants to be and she knows it.
The town off the island is small and warm. Santos walks beside me and his saffron is open and easy in the air. Matteo is on my other side. Tomas walks slightly behind, observing before engaging with anyone.
The first shop has a blanket in the window that stops me before I am fully through the door.
Santos watches my face. "That one," he says.
“Yes,” I confirm.
He picks it up and takes it to the counter without further discussion.
The pillows take longer. I am apparently very specific about them, which is new information about myself that I am filing alongside everything else the nesting process has been generating.
Matteo stands in the aisle with me for forty minutes while I work through the options with systematic thoroughness and he does not check his watch or shift his weight or give any indication whatsoever that he has anywhere else to be.
"This one," I say, eventually. "And two of these."
He takes them from me. "Anything else in here."
"The rug section," I say.
We find Tomas in the rug section, standing in front of a deep cream rug with the expression of a man who has already identified the correct answer and is waiting for everyone else to arrive at it.
"That one," I say.
"Yes," he says.
Santos appears from somewhere carrying a lamp, because Santos had apparently already identified that the corner of the room needed a lamp and gone ahead and addressed this independently, and he holds it up with the particular warm expectation of a man who knows he is right.
I look at the lamp. "Yes," I say.
He smiles. The real one.
We go for lunch at a place Santos knows, a small restaurant two streets back from the water where the owner comes out of the kitchen specifically to greet him and where the pasta is exactly what it should be and the bread arrives without being asked for.
I sit between Santos and Matteo with the blanket in its bag at my feet and the afternoon light coming through the window and the combined scent of all three of them warm and settled around me.
Tomas reads the menu with the focused attention he brings to everything, turning it over once, making his decision, setting it down.
Santos refills my water glass. Matteo has his hand resting near mine on the table, close, not quite touching, the specific closeness that is Matteo communicating presence without requiring acknowledgment of it.
I think about the room. The corner that was wrong. The way my omega went quiet and satisfied when we found the rug, the lamp, the blanket, as though a set of requirements had been met that she had been carrying since before I knew I was carrying them.
I think about the guest house three days ago and the way the distance of it felt incorrect, and the way Santos's room, our room, felt like the place I was supposed to return to, and the way all three of their scents in the air of it made my whole body go quieter.
I put my hand on my daughter and feel her shift, the small certain movement of someone completely unbothered by the size of what her mother is adjusting to.
"She approves of the blanket," I say.
Santos makes the sound. The low warm one, the one that started in his chest and comes out already content. "Good taste," he says. "She gets it from her mother."
Matteo glances at me and the pale blue eyes are warm and the almost-smile is there, brief and real.
Tomas picks up his fork and begins eating with the steady unhurried focus of a man who has everything he calculated and is in no hurry to be anywhere except exactly here.
Outside the restaurant window the town goes about its afternoon in the September light, easy and warm and unhurried, and somewhere across the water the island is doing its steady patient thing, the herb garden and the kitchen and the best room with the best view waiting for us to bring the right blanket home.
She kicks.
Once, firmly, the way she kicks when something has been decided and she agrees with it.
"I know," I say, to her, quietly.
"What did she say," Santos asks.
"That she also approves of the pasta," I say.
Santos laughs, and the saffron in the air of the small restaurant goes bright and full and entirely his, and the afternoon light catches it, and Tomas smiles over his glass, and Matteo’s sandalwood settles warm and close beside me, and I sit in the middle of all of it and let myself have it properly for the first time.
No arguing myself out of it.
Not one.