Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
JONAH
Ihave spent my whole life being the one who is useful at the edges, so when her heat breaks I do what I know how to do, which is make myself useful at the edge of it.
It breaks at dusk. I have read about heats my whole life the way you read about weather in a country you do not live in, because betas do not have them and betas are not, in the strict biological telling of the thing, what a heat is for.
A heat is an alpha-and-omega event. It is the body’s oldest math, and the math does not include me.
So when the air in the house goes thick and sweet, when Willa’s scent climbs from the upstairs nest until the whole staircase is honeysuckle and want, when I hear the change in her breathing through the floor and the answering low sounds of my brothers rearranging themselves around her like iron filings around a magnet, I do the thing the contingent man does.
I get water. I check the locks. I make sure Cooper is settled three miles away at the Pruetts’ for the duration, safe and minded and far from a house that is about to become, for two days, a place no child should be.
I stand at the bottom of the stairs with a pitcher in my hand, the help, the stream that came in behind the river, getting ready to be needed for everything and chosen for nothing, the way it has always been, the way I had made my peace it would always be.
Because here is the thing I never said out loud, not even to Della, who knew it anyway: I always understood that if it ever came, if this family ever found its omega, I would love her from the edge of the room.
That a beta in a pack of matched alphas is the one whose name does not get called by the blood.
The alphas are chosen by her body before her mind even votes.
The scent-match does it for them, decides it, seals it, three fated bonds the biology hands out like a verdict.
And the beta stands at the foot of the stairs with the pitcher, useful, indispensable, invisible, loving her with a whole heart that her heat has no instinct to answer.
I knew that going in. I wrote my name on no lists.
I had decided, the way I decide everything, quietly and alone and ahead of time, to be grateful for the edge of her and never ask for the center.
It got worse when Della died, if I am being honest, and tonight is a night for being honest. A beta marries into a pack through the omega; she is the door you come in by.
Della was my sister and Della was their omega and Della was the hinge I hung on, the one person who made my place in this family a fact instead of a favor.
And when she went into the ground she took the hinge with her, and I have spent a year wondering, in the smallest hour of every night, whether I am still kin to these men or only the help they are too good-hearted to send home.
Nobody ever said it. Nobody would. But a man who notices rooms going cold notices his own standing going uncertain, and I had started to suspect that when the grief finally lifted I would find I had quietly aged out of the family, that a brother-in-law without the sister is only a man who used to be related.
I had made my peace with that too, the way I make peace with everything. Alone. Ahead of time.
I am at the foot of the stairs, fully reconciled to my whole small life, when her voice comes down them.
“Jonah.”
Not Beau. Not Sam. Not a low sound or a cry or the wordless pull of a body running its ancient program.
My name. My actual name, in her actual voice, clear, intent, chosen out of the air on purpose, and I go still at the bottom of the stairs because in thirty-some years no heat, no want, no blood-deep biological tide has ever once called a beta by name, it is not how the math works, and she does it again, and there is nothing accidental in it, nothing the chemistry is doing without her: “Jonah. Come up. I want you. You, I’m asking for you, come up here. ”
I climb the stairs like a man climbing out of his own grave.
She is in the nest she built, the one with my name at the top of the list in her own hand, and her brothers, my brothers, are there, and they are not crowding her, they have arranged themselves the way she wanted, present and waiting and good, and she is lit from within with the heat of her and her eyes find me in the doorway and she holds out her hand to me, to me, and she says, so the whole room hears it, so I hear it, so the part of me that has stood at the edge of every room since I was a boy hears it, “I want you first. Before the heat takes the wheel. While it’s still just me choosing.
I need you to know it was me. Not my body. Me.”
And I understand what she is doing, and it takes the legs out from under me.
She is choosing me in the one window where it cannot be mistaken for instinct.
Her body wants the alphas; the math is screaming their names; the fated thing is right there ready to run its course and sweep all of us along in it.
And she has reached up out of the rising tide of her own heat and grabbed the rail and held herself, on purpose, in the last clear moment before the chemistry takes over, just to call the one name the chemistry would never call.
Just to make sure I know that the one bond in this family that the blood did not arrange is the one she reached for first. Not because she had to.
Because she wanted to. Because a chosen thing, she is telling me, with her whole shaking lit-up body, is not the lesser thing.
It is the realer thing. It is the only bond in this room that is pure want with no biology underneath it doing the wanting for her.
“You’re not the help,” she says, when I reach the side of the nest and go down to her like a man kneeling.
“You’re not the stream behind the river.
You’re the one I picked when nobody made me.
Do you understand what I’m giving you, Jonah Boone?
I’m giving you the proof. The others will always wonder, a little, in the back of their hearts, whether it was them or the match.
You never have to wonder. You’re the one I chose blind.
You’re my proof that I’d have found this family even without a single drop of fate in it. ”
I have carried his dead wife’s last wish for a year.
I have been the one who notices the room going cold.
I have loved this woman since the first night she walked in smelling like the answer to a prayer I was too frightened to pray, and I loved her expecting nothing, braced for the edge, reconciled to the pitcher and the stairs.
And she has reached down into the deepest, oldest, loneliest place in me, the place that has always known it came in behind, that it was contingent, that it could be done without, and she has put her hand flat on it and said: not you. Never you. You first.
I am not a man who weeps. I weep.
And then she pulls me down into the nest, into the warm, into the honeysuckle and the want, and the choosing becomes the thing the body does too.
She undresses me first. That is the thing that takes the last of my legs out from under me, that she reaches for my shirt before I reach for anything of hers, that the first hands in the nest are hers and they are on me, the contingent man, the one who wrote his name on no lists.
I let her. I have spent my whole life being useful and never once being unwrapped, and she unwraps me slow, button by button, watching my face the way she watches everything, full on, no armor, and when she has me bare to the lamplight she puts her flat hand on the center of my chest, over the cold place, the year-old draft, and she holds it there until I cannot breathe right.
“I want it slow first,” she says. Her voice is rough already with the heat climbing in her, but the words are hers, chosen, deliberate, laid down on purpose.
“The tide’s coming. I can feel it. But before it takes the wheel I want the part where it’s only us deciding.
Give me that part, Jonah. Let me have you in the clear water. ”
So I take her the way I take everything in this family, slow, by hand, paying attention.
I undress her the way you uncover something you have wanted too long to rush, and she lifts for me, helping, her breath going short and ragged as I bare her breasts, her belly, the soft flare of her hips.
The scent of her rises thick and heady—honeysuckle deepened into something darker, richer, laced with the slick, sweet musk of her arousal.
I put my mouth to her throat first, over the pulse, where I will set the mark later, and I feel her whisper my name against my hair before she says it out loud.
I learn her with my hands and mouth the way I learn the weather, slow, watching for every change.
I take her breasts in my palms, feel their weight and warmth, and when I draw a nipple into my mouth, sucking gently then harder, her back arches and a low moan breaks from her throat.
I trail kisses down the soft curve of her belly, over the trembling skin of her inner thighs, parting them wider so I can settle between.
When I put my mouth on her cunt she cries out my name—broken, needy, entirely hers.
She is drenched, omega-slick coating my tongue, hot and sweet and addictive.
I lick into her slowly, savoring every fold and flutter, then focus on the firm, swollen bud at the top where her whole body tightens and sings.
I slide two fingers into her tight heat, curling them, stroking that sensitive place inside while my tongue works her clit in steady, devoted circles.
Her hips lift, grinding against my face, her fingers fisting tight in my hair as she comes hard, thighs shaking, pulsing around my fingers and against my tongue while she gasps my name like a prayer.