Chapter 18
TRISTAN
Weller has been reading the same condom box for five minutes, turning it now to dissect the fine print along the side.
“It’s not that complicated, is it?”
He looks at me like I’m an imbecile. “I’m checking the ingredients of a product that is going inside Bianca.”
Fair, but she’d agree we’re running out of options and can’t afford to be too picky here.
The tropical shirt belongs on a drunk retiree, not Weller, and I laugh every time it enters my peripheral vision.
I drop the box into our basket and add five more from the shelf.
“Tristan.”
“You did the math while she was threatening to remove our dicks. I was distracted.”
“We don’t need that many.”
“There are four of us, her heat could last several days, and Owen is surely going to break a few in his haste.”
Weller studies the basket. Three boxes remain on the shelf, so I take those too. He retrieves one long enough to trace the specifications with his thumb.
Sand has been grinding beneath my left heel since Bianca and I came back from our morning run. Every step drives it deeper into my shoe, easier to ignore than the scrape across my palm where bark caught it or the tender half-moons she bit into my shoulder when my knot swelled.
Before sunrise, her hand had closed around my bicep beneath the blankets and she’d whispered, Do you want to go for a run?
One blue eye stayed on me over Owen’s arm while she waited for my answer.
I followed her out before he could realize his arms were empty.
I’d never willingly pass up alone time with her.
Weller moves to the next aisle, and I follow far enough behind to catch both ends in the curved security mirror above the pharmacy counter.
His floppy straw hat makes him look like a wealthy tourist. Mine keeps shading the top of my sunglasses every time I look up, but it also breaks the camera’s view of my face, so the indignity survives.
Shelves of travel medication give way to first-aid supplies.
Weller compares electrolyte tablets to the packets already in our basket, checks the ingredients, and takes both anyway.
He adds cooling packs, pain relievers, gauze, skin-safe tape, lubricant, and pregnancy tests Bianca will probably throw at our heads if he presents them too solemnly.
“Her temperature was normal when we left.” He reads over Freddie’s cramped additions to the list while I turn a bottle enough to catch the aisle behind us in its foil label.
An older man in fishing sandals studies antacids.
A teenage girl has been staring at her phone since we came in.
Neither has glanced our way twice. “Her scent is still elevated, but it hasn’t changed again.
We plan as if true heat starts today and lasts the full five days. ”
I take a second bottle of pain reliever. “You have a gift for making the best thing that’s happened to any of us sound like hurricane preparation.”
“Hurricanes might be easier.”
I stare at him through the sunglasses. He’s already moved on to the cooling patches.
Bianca had gone running barefoot, her braid snapping against her spine as she pointed out where the roof disappeared behind the dunes and how easily a man could lie beneath the southern deck.
Then she’d looked at the same stretch of fence and decided it needed flowering vines because the bare wood was ugly.
Weller pockets the list and takes the basket from me before heading toward the drinks aisle.
The reflection in the freezer doors moves with us. Pink flamingos dance across my chest in the warped glass.
The house came with a golf cart and five years of disuse.
Owen spent the morning swearing at its battery terminals until the thing finally came back to life, which is the only reason we won’t be hauling water cases up the lane on foot.
It sits behind the market now, sun-faded to match every other cart in the row, saying nothing about who parked it.
The bottled water comes in heavy cases. I stack three on the flatbed cart and start toward the electrolyte drinks. Weller catches the handle without breaking stride and steers us back.
At the water’s edge this morning, Bianca had stopped so abruptly I nearly ran into her.
Pale light spread over the ocean, the first fishing boat nothing but a dark speck.
She sat down in the cold sand, tugged me down behind her, and settled between my legs with her back against my chest like we’d been doing this for years.
We watched the sun come up. She talked about the vines she wanted for the fence, whether the fishing boat was too far out to see us, what the nest refrigerator still needed, and every third sentence her eyes went back to the dunes.
I let her guard the beach for both of us.
When she’s soft in my hands, it’s easy to forget she’s spent years looking out for herself. But her eyes never stop hunting.
I was mid-sentence when she bolted. One breath she was warm against my chest; the next she was up and running for the tree line.
There was no reason to chase her, but then she looked over her shoulder at me and laughed.
The cart rolls free with a violent jerk.
Weller studies the hand I still have locked around its metal frame. “Problem?”
“Inferior wheel design.”
His gaze drops to my scraped palm and stays there for a moment too long to be casual. We continue to the food.
Eggs require moving half the water again.
Weller fills the newly cleared space with steak, chicken, potatoes, vegetables, fruit, milk, and enough coffee to keep five people conscious through several sleepless days.
I add ready-made sandwiches and cut fruit.
Beyond the front windows, a white SUV idles at the curb until the driver lets out a woman carrying a beach bag, then pulls away without turning toward us.
Weller checks the dates on two packages before choosing the fresher one.
I take salt-and-vinegar chips from the shelf.
By the time I reached the trees she’d slowed, backing deeper with her braid sweat-stuck to her back, glancing through gaps in the dunes while I let her choose the route. Once the trunks closed around us and muted the ocean, she shoved me against the first tree wide enough to hide my shoulders.
Bark bit into my skin. Bianca put one palm over my mouth even though I hadn’t made a sound and pressed her body into mine, warm from the sprint, breathing as though the chase had only just reached her lungs.
Quiet, she’d mouthed.
Her other hand slid beneath my waistband.
I set another box of cereal in the cart hard enough to dent one corner.
Weller looks from it to me. “She needs protein.”
He adds another package of steak.
At the end of the aisle, Weller takes the flatbed toward the registers while I circle past the windows to check the parking lot from another angle.
The white SUV is gone. A golf cart occupies the loading space, keys dangling from its ignition while the owner argues pleasantly with an employee about a leaky cooler. Three bicycles lean against the wall.
The cashier keeps glancing at the condom boxes. By the fourth, color has climbed from her collar to her cheeks; by the eighth, she scans without looking up at either of us. The overhead camera sits to her left. I keep my hat brim angled down.
“Having a party or something?” she asks when another box passes over the scanner.
“Honeymoon,” I tell her.
Weller puts a case of water on the counter, and the woman’s eyes track between us like she’s working it out. We pay in cash.
“Mason’s sent three updates today,” Weller says when we reach the camera display at the hardware store next door.
“They’ve attempted to recover access, frozen what they could, and started moving both assets and personnel.
The ballistics from the man the police arrested appear to match, but Mason found no location for Whitney. He’s still looking.”
I turn over the first camera. Cloud storage. Facial recognition. A helpful application eager to know where we live and send it somewhere neither of us controls. It goes back on the shelf.
“Let them move it. The damage is done.”
Weller unlocks the display cabinet with the key the cashier gave him. “Mason can stop some of the transfers.”
“Which tells them where he has visibility.” I hold the loose cabinet door while he kneels.
Four cameras on the bottom shelf record to local memory cards.
Better. “Every account they touch tells us what they can’t afford to lose, and every person they pull exposes where they no longer feel protected.
Block them now, and they scatter. Watch them, and they make us a map. ”
“I’ll tell him to keep observing.” Weller closes the cabinet and pushes the cart onward.
The sound of waves outside has me thinking about Bianca’s palm flattening over my mouth while her thumb dragged through the precome at the head of my cock. She smiled when my hips moved into her hand, then bared her teeth when I caught her wrist and took it away.
My memory is unhelpfully precise. I keep getting flashes of the way she looked stretched around Freddie and me last night.
“How sore are you?”
“Extra sore.” She rolled her hips against mine.
Then I turned her around.
Weller hands me a motion-light box which creases beneath my grip.
“Three of these,” I agree, barely listening, and grab two more.
Weller removes the damaged box from my hand, checks that the contents survived, and puts it in the cart without comment. I add memory cards, batteries, alarms, a flashlight, a drill, and enough locks to make the place much less welcoming.
We find only two portable fans. Weller checks the shelf labels, then asks the employee whether there are more in the back. There aren’t.
“Until the threats are null, we’ll be more careful with her in public,” he says while aiming those dark glasses directly at me.
The scrape in my palm starts throbbing.
“A sensible general policy,” I tell him.
“It is neither general nor new.”
Bark had dragged over my knuckles when I caught Bianca’s hips, lifted her against the trunk, and pulled her onto my cock.
Her legs locked around my waist, her forehead dropping to my shoulder, while the ocean smothered most of her first cry.
I covered her mouth for the rest, as her heels dragged me closer.
The sun came through the trees, thin gold moving over us. When my knot began to swell, she locked her fingers around my wrist.
My legs surrendered first. I took us down to the ground, knees first, and settled back against the trunk with Bianca in my lap, stuck until my knot let go.
“You’re an asshole, by the way,” she said, punching me softly in the shoulder. “I’ve been meaning to bring that up.”
“And why’s that?”
“You bought me a house, Tristan. Like a really nice one. Who does that?”
“It’s a good thing I did, huh?”
“You’re still an asshole, but I love it...” I rocked into her, making her whimper.
I’ve always been decent with investing, but nothing in my portfolio has ever paid off like her.
She used what was left of our knotted time together to discuss paint colors for her nest.
Her words.
I add a pry bar to the cart.
Weller glances at his phone before putting it away. “Ezra doesn’t have anyone he trusts enough to send. He and Megan will come themselves once everyone at the refuge is clear.”
“So there’s no outside coverage until they get here.”
“I’ll take the perimeter.”
“Even if her heat starts first?”
“I’ll stay outside until someone relieves me.”
“Do you think it’s strange?” I ask while Weller compares fire extinguishers.
“Frequently. You’ll need to be more specific.”
“We asked the man Bianca spent five years with to guard the house while she’s in heat with us.”
Weller checks the pressure gauge on the first extinguisher, rejects it, and reaches for another. By the time he reads that inspection tag too, I may have found the crack after all.
“No.”
I wait while he finishes reading.
“That was disappointingly painless.”
“Ezra has established that Bianca’s best interests come first.” Weller puts two extinguishers in the cart, then selects a third for upstairs. “He’s important to her, and he’s kept her safe. I can resent the circumstances, or I can trust what he’s proven. Only one of those is useful.”
Weller stills and pulls the phone from his pocket, turning it where the cashier can’t see it and reading the screen.
“It’s Mason.”