25. Shepherd #2
“Yes,” she said finally. “I am. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t happen. I’m not going to hide. He’ll figure out the basics from the marks alone. The rest I’ll tell him as it comes up. It’s not like he’s not in a bond himself. He’ll understand.”
“Good.”
I wrote that down. NOA TALKS TO WES. STRAIGHT.
I caught her looking at the notebook upside down.
“You’re really writing this down?”
“I write everything down.”
“That’s very you.”
“Yes.”
BELONGINGS, I wrote next.
“The rental in town,” I said.
“Six months left on the lease. Already paid. Mostly books. Some clothes. Field gear I haven’t replaced. Furniture I don’t care about.”
“Do you want to keep the lease?”
“No.”
“OK.”
“We’ll have to go down and pack up the stuff I do want.”
“All four of us,” Calder said.
I looked at him.
“It’s town,” he said. “If we’re showing up bonded, we’re showing up bonded. We don’t split that up the first time we do it.”
“Agreed,” I said.
Noa was watching him with a soft expression I couldn’t quite name. The bond carried the weight of it. He had just declared something she hadn’t even known she was waiting to hear. We don’t split that up.
“OK,” I said. I wrote ALL FOUR GO DOWN TOGETHER. NO SPLITTING. “Furniture.”
“Donate.”
“Done. We have a guy.”
“A guy?”
“A guy,” Bo said. “Truck. Hauls.”
“Of course we have a guy, why wouldn’t we,” Noa muttered under her breath.
I wrote his name in the margin. James.
“The books,” I said.
“I’m keeping all of them.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
“OK.” I wrote ALL THE BOOKS COME UP. “We’re going to need to think about where to put them.”
“We have the loft,” Bo said.
The cabin went very still.
I looked at him. He was looking at me, his face perfectly neutral, but the bond was loud. I’d been waiting for him to bring it up. I hadn’t known I’d been waiting.
“The loft,” I said carefully.
“Empty. Got the structure already. Could put shelves up. Wide ones. It’s a good place for a library. Quiet.”
“Bo?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you sure?”
He didn’t answer for a long second. Then he reached across the table and took Noa’s hand and looked at her instead of at me.
“The loft was where I was going to go when I gave up,” he said. “I’m not going up there to give up anymore. So we might as well use it for something good. Her books up there sounds good.”
Noa’s eyes filled.
“Are you absolutely sure? Because we could put them anywhere. We don’t have to.”
“I know. I want this.”
She held his hand for a long moment without speaking. The bond was doing something I didn’t have words for. Some kind of resettling. Like a building shifting on its foundations and finding the new center of gravity it should have had all along.
I wrote LOFT BECOMES NOA'S LIbrARY (BO'S CHOICE). I underlined it twice.
“OK,” I said quietly. “OK. Next category.”
We worked through the rest of it. PEOPLE.
Wes, who would know more or less everything within a week of her coming back to town.
The neighbors at the edge of the road that weren’t exactly close but weren’t exactly strangers either.
We talked about what Noa wanted them to know, what she wanted them not to know, where she wanted the line to be.
LOGISTICS. The truck. The road. The supplies we’d need to lay in for the rest of winter once we’d made the trip down.
The fact that we were going to want to build out the bedroom by another four feet before the next heat cycle came, which Calder estimated would be in three to four months.
The way the porch boards were going to need replacing in the spring.
The space we wanted to leave for Noa to make her own.
The loft which was now her library. Where she could get some space from the three alphas that would no doubt want to constantly crowd around her.
HEALTH. Her ankle, which was healing. Her cycle, which would need attention now that she was off suppressants and not in heat.
Whether she wanted to stay off suppressants.
Birth control. The way her cycle would sync with the pack’s rhythms eventually.
The fact that none of us were going to make decisions about that without her, and the fact that she wasn’t going to make those decisions without us.
I wrote it all down.
By the time we were done, the notebook had three pages of small careful lists. The eggs had gone cold. The fire had burned down. The gutters were still running outside.
Noa reached across the table and laid her hand flat on the notebook.
“Shepherd, this is the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me.”
I blinked at her.
“The kindest?”
“This.” She tapped the notebook. “Sitting down and naming all of it. Out loud. With me. Making me a plan that I get to write on too.”
“It’s a list,” I said. “It’s not anything.”
“It’s the thing nobody else would do.”
She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t close to it. But her voice had gone very quiet, and the bond was carrying something fierce and bright back to me.
“I’ve spent my whole life with people who let things happen and called it grace,” she said.
“Nobody ever made me a plan. Not my mother. Not my father. None of the alphas who thought they might get to have me. They just expected me to show up to whatever they were making and adjust. You sat down and made me a list. With my name on it. With my work on it. With my books on it. You wrote Noa talks to Wes. Straight in your serious careful handwriting and you put a category called Belongings and you asked me what I wanted.”
I didn’t know what to do with my face.
“I’m an idiot,” she said, “because I almost cried over a list.”
“You’re not.”
“Shepherd. I love you.”
The words landed in my chest like they had each time she’d said them in heat, and each time she’d said them in the lull, but bigger now because she was saying them in the morning, in the cold thaw light, with no biology pushing her there.
“I love you too,” I said.
She squeezed my hand, then turned to Calder and squeezed his. Then Bo.
“I love you,” she said. To each of them. Not heavy. Just stating it. The way you might state the weather.
Calder ducked his head. Bo grunted his wordless yes, but the bond carried his answer too clear to mistake. Three pulses humming back at her.
I closed the notebook.
I sat there with my pack at the table and the gutters running outside and the cold thaw light pouring in through the window. I felt something inside my chest that I’d been refusing to name for fourteen years.
I wasn’t building a wall.
I’d spent my entire adult life planning so that I’d never be caught off guard, planning as a defense, planning as a way to manage the world from a safe distance.
Today I made a list of what I wanted with the people I loved, and I had written their names down in my own handwriting, and didn’t hide from anything.
I had been planning for it.
For her. For us. For the rest of all of this.
The thaw kept dripping outside. The fire popped. Bo went to refill his coffee as Calder leaned back in his chair and rested his hand on the small of Noa’s back.
“What now?” she said.
“Now,” I said, “we get the rest of the day. And tomorrow we start working through the list.”
“In Shepherd order.”
“In Shepherd order,” I agreed.
She grinned at me. Tired, content, fully here.
I picked up the notebook and tucked it back onto the shelf where it belonged. The plan was made. We had a week, maybe a little less, before the world remembered we existed.
And we were going to use it. Just the three of us. Getting ready to spend the rest of our lives together.