11. Fletcher
FLETCHER
I 'm in the kitchen at five AM because there's nothing else to do with my hands.
The kitchen is mine. It's the only space in the lodge where I'm not running a background process that involves her location, her scent on the air, the soft sounds from the room down the hall that I have been resolutely not listening to and failing completely.
I make bread. Early bread, the kind that takes time—two hours of proving, an hour of baking—because I need the work to take up the whole morning and dough is the only thing I can put my hands on right now that won't turn into something I'll regret.
Ronan comes down at six.
He doesn't say anything. He gets coffee. He looks at me over the mug with the expression that covers everything. He looks well. He looks settled. His jaw is less tight than it's been in days, which is saying something because Ronan's jaw is a read I've been running for three years.
"How is she?" I ask. Even. Curious.
"Sleeping," he says.
I nod.
He takes his coffee outside. I turn back to the dough.
I feed people because it's the thing I know how to do—the thing that takes care, that takes time, that says I was thinking about you before you were hungry.
Fletcher Aldred's entire relationship with love is: make the food, watch the face, learn what they need before they ask.
I've been doing it since I was twelve years old and figured out that my mother was happier when she came home to a warm kitchen.
It doesn't usually take two days.
Usually I take longer—weeks, months, years in the case of the pack. But the pack was already home. Bea arrived and my kitchen reoriented around her in approximately forty-eight hours and I've been trying to find a way to call that something other than what it is.
I can't.
Bea has been in this lodge for nine days and I have been more attentive to her eating than I have been to any guest in five years of running this kitchen.
I have learned: she eats the first bowl politely and the second bowl honestly.
She pretends not to have a sweet tooth and then eats everything sweet I put in front of her.
She takes the coffee black but she drinks the tea with honey if I add the honey before I bring it over, which she knows I know, which she has never mentioned.
She sees me. I know she sees me. I know because she saw me in the same way I see people—from the outside, with attention. That's the thing about people like us: we recognize each other.
I know I'm gone. I've known since the second plate.
I'm just waiting for the rest of her to catch up to what I already know.
Cory comes down at seven. He gets coffee, leans against the counter, looks at me.
"You slept," I say.
"Some." He turns the mug. "Penn?"
"His light went off around three."
Cory nods. His light off doesn't mean Penn slept. With Penn it means the ceiling was darker while he didn't sleep. But it's something.
I shape the bread. Put it in the oven. Start a pot of the soup she mentioned twice—the short-grain rice one, mild, the kind that's right for a body that's been through something.
I'm already planning the whole day in terms of what she'll need when: something light and warm when she wakes between waves.
Something more when the wave passes. Something sweet at the end because she has a sweet tooth she pretends not to have, and I've been pretending not to notice I've noticed.
Penn comes down at eight. Sits at the table. Doesn't speak. His jaw is the Penn version of Ronan's jaw—a different architecture of tension, but I know them both.
"Eat," I say. I put a plate in front of him.
He eats.
I take that as a win.
There's something about feeding people that I've never been able to explain to anyone who doesn't already feel it.
It's not caretaking as a transaction. It's not I made this so you owe me warmth.
It's the other thing: the quiet satisfaction of identifying what a person needs before they know they need it and being the one who provides it.
I've been doing it for a long time. Other kitchens, other people.
The feeding was always there—the right person for it wasn't. I didn't know what was missing until she took the second bowl without being offered it and ate it like it was what she needed, because it was.
No performance. No oh you didn't have to. Just eating.
I've never wanted to feed someone this much in my life.
Ronan never asks. Penn never asks. Cory comes down for his coffee at the same time every morning. I know all three of their plates, their timing, their moods, what adjustments to make.
She threw off my entire system.
Not in a bad way. In the way of a guest who turns out to know which knife goes where and doesn't make a performance of it.
She doesn't ask for things. She notices what there is and receives it.
She eats the second bowl with no commentary and that's more informative than a compliment.
She thanks me every time—not perfunctorily, actually thanks me, like she was raised somewhere that taught her that.
I've been making bread since before I knew her name.
I'll be making bread for the rest of my life.
She wakes mid-morning. I know because the sound of the lodge changes—a small shift in what's audible from the end of the hall, a quality of quiet that means someone newly conscious.
Her scent, when it reaches the kitchen, is different from before.
Still warm, still her, but softer. The acute heat-urgency dialed back for the window.
Between waves.
I carry the tray down myself.
She's sitting up in Ronan's bed with her knees drawn up and her hair everywhere.
She looks like she's been somewhere enormous and come back from it.
She looks—not wrung out. Rooted. That's the word for it.
She looks like someone who has landed somewhere they weren't expecting and are taking a moment to realize they're staying.
I've been looking at her face for nine days.
I know her faces now—the managing face, the wry face, the thinking face she makes when she's about to say half of what she's thinking.
I know the face from night two when she sat by the fire and forgot to manage herself for twenty minutes.
She looked—home. Just for those twenty minutes.
Then she caught herself and the wry came back.
She doesn't have the wry right now.
She just looks home.
I set the tray on the nightstand. Soup—the short-grain, mild, a good amount. Tea, the expensive one. A small piece of the bread I spent the morning making.
"How do you feel?" I ask.
She looks at the tray. She looks at me. Something moves across her face that she doesn't name. "Like I've been through something," she says.
"You have."
"Is it always—?" She stops. Tries again. "Is this normal? This feeling?"
"I don't know. I've never been an omega in heat." I sit on the edge of the bed. "Eat."
She picks up the spoon. She eats.
She eats. I can't not watch.
This has been the problem from the first meal—I can't not watch. She eats the way she does everything: without performance, without apology. Present. She finishes the soup and looks at the tray and then at me, and I've refilled the bowl before she figures out the words for asking.
"You don't have to?—"
"I know," I say. Which is what Ronan said to her the first morning. I heard her tell me about it later—the way she found it funny, or tried to. The way she makes stories out of small things she hasn't figured out how to feel yet.
She eats the second bowl.
She eats the bread. Two bites, then she looks at it more seriously, then she finishes it.
"This is the best bread I've eaten in about a year," she says.
I look away. I have to. I look at the window—the weather from last night broken up, the trees washed clean, the early afternoon light coming through at an angle. I look at it until I have my face back.
"Made it this morning," I say.
"You've been up since five."
"My kitchen, my hours."
She makes a soft sound. Not quite a laugh.
Softer. She turns the empty bowl in her hands and looks at me again, and her expression has that thing it gets sometimes—the warmth underneath the wry.
The part she doesn't always let through.
She's been letting it through more, these last two days. Like the heat has been clearing a path.
"You've been up since five making bread," she says, "so that I'd have something good to eat this morning."
"I've been up since five because I needed something to do with my hands."
She looks at me. She knows what I'm not saying, which is that I needed something to do with my hands other than think about going to the end of the hall.
"And the soup," she says.
"The soup is from scratch. Started it yesterday." I look at the window. "The rice porridge is twenty-four hours, you can't rush it."
A quiet. Her hands around the bowl. "You planned that yesterday. Before I?—"
"Before the heat started. Yes." I shrug. The kind of shrug that says obviously. You were going to need it. "You were going to need something mild and warm. I know how heat works. I know what a body needs after."
She's quiet for a moment.
"Fletcher," she says.
I look at her.
She holds my gaze. There's a question in it she's not asking with words. She's asking with everything else—the warmth under the wry, the full presence, the same attending she's been doing every day from across the table.
I know what she's asking.
I've been waiting for her to ask.
Her scent shifts.
It hits before I fully register it—the soft wildflower warmth of her between-wave giving way to something else. Warmer. Sharper. The heat building back in.
She catches it too. The slight change in her breath, her eyes going a little unfocused and then focusing back on me.
"Fletcher." Just my name.
"I know," I say.
"Are you?—?"
"Yes." I'm already reaching for her face. "I've been yes since the second plate."
She laughs. A real one, short and warm and completely her. "That's a very Fletcher reason."
"It's the only reason I have."
She reaches for me.