“Are you hungry?” I asked, setting the tray of iced tea and cookies down on the bedside table and wiping my suddenly sweaty palms on my jeans. It was really strange to be in a space that smelled so strongly of Cobb’s eucalyptus scent. Normally, his scent was very faint and I had to work to smell it when it was put next to the rest of the pack’s, but here his scent permeated every surface and wrapped comfortingly around me like a blanket.
Cobb, dressed in a pair of gray sweatpants and a dark blue shirt with the FBI emblem across his heart, immediately grabbed a cookie and shoved it into his mouth without answering.
“I take that as a yes?” I couldn’t help the smile that grew on my face as I watched him stuff two more cookies into his mouth as if he hadn’t just eaten breakfast a couple of hours ago. There were some cookie crumbs on the corner of his mouth, sticking to his full lips, and I had to resist the urge to brush them away with my fingers. Instead, I busied myself with looking at the wall that was much easier to look at, now that there weren’t pictures of burned bodies all over it.
The pictures of the compound had all been taken before the night of the fire, and the edges had yellowed with age. Reaching out, I ran my fingers over the smooth surface of one of the photos, easily recognizing the scene pictured. It had been taken the night of the summer social, one of the few happy memories that I had of the compound. Everyone had worked together to pull the tables from the meeting house outside and we had cooked a feast of roasted chicken. Some of the older boys had even played on their fiddles while everyone danced around a huge bonfire. Of course, Hezekiah Jordan was still present in this memory, he had sat in a huge chair drinking a glass of red wine that was the color of blood. He had acted like a king amongst his people, but I could still remember his dark eyes tracing the bodies of the girls that were only a few years older than I was at the time.
“What are you thinking about?” Cobb’s voice made me jump as I’d completely forgotten that he was in the room with me. I turned away from the wall, and met his curious dark brown eyes. I took a moment to think about how to answer his question. How was I supposed to put my complicated thoughts about my childhood into words?
I pointed at the picture that I had been touching before, “this was taken during the summer when I was ten years old.” I brushed my fingers across the different faces until I found my own. I remembered the sunburn that I had gotten the day before the picture was taken, and how my skin had been as red as my hair. Younger me stared glumly at the camera as my mother stood behind me smiling. “It was a nice day.”
“That’s the weird thing about my childhood.” My fingers continued on and touched another photo of Hezekiah Jordan with his wives and some other members of the cult. “It was not a good childhood, by any means. Hezekiah Jordan is a pedophile and a murderer, and my mom was a struggling addict. But, despite all of that, I can still remember some really good memories from the compound.”
Cobb seemed to think about my words, and we stared at the pictures in silence for a few minutes before he finally spoke again, “I can see where you’re coming from. Growing up, my grandma and mom were super poor, I’m talking we scraped to get by every single month. It was rough, but looking back now, even knowing that we were so badly off, I can still pick out really good memories.”
“Like dancing in the kitchen to Marvin Gaye?” I asked, smiling impishly up at him, he’d shared this little fact about himself one afternoon whenAin’t No Mountain High Enoughcame on the radio. I’d been humming along as I kneaded my bread dough when, much to my surprise, the beta had begun to sing the song word-for-word in a voice that was as smooth as Marvin Gaye himself. Apparently, his grandmother has had a long-standing crush on Marvin Gaye since 1973’sLet’s Get it On,and referred to Gaye as her fictional husband. I couldn’t blame the older woman, if I had been born sixty years sooner, I’d have tossed a couple of bras at the alpha songwriter too. Grandma Collins had good taste.
Cobb’s deep chuckle reverberated through the room as he nodded, “yes, like dancing in the kitchen to Marvin Gaye. I’m pretty sure it’s a coping mechanism kids use—hang onto the core happy memories, so the bad ones don’t seem so awful.”
“I think you may be onto something....” I responded, and turned back to the photos once again, looking at them a bit differently than I had before. My eyes landed on one in particular, it was of a group of children who were sitting around the stone well. They were taking a break in between hauling their buckets of water to the main tank, in the middle of the group was a blond boy. He was grinning cheekily at the camera and I couldn’t help the smile that came to my face.
“I’m surprised you even have any pictures of Jamie, I thought that they’d all been thrown out after he left the compound.” I was so busy staring at the picture that I didn’t realize that Cobb never responded to my comment until his fingers came into my line of vision and he plucked the picture off the wall. He held it close to his face, confusion on his face as he looked back up at me.
“Jamie?” He asked, pointing at the picture, “This is someone named Jamie?”
“Uh...yeah? That’s Jamie...?” I was confused, I couldn’t understand why he was staring at the picture as if it was the first time that he’d ever seen it. He and Theo had been staring at this wall for two weeks now, and he had probably looked at the photo a thousand times since putting it up on the wall.
Cobb whirled away from me, rushing towards the desk that was pushed between the wall and the bed. He began to rummage through the papers that were piled on the surface, throwing a few haphazardly over his shoulder until he found the one that he was looking for.
Cobb muttered quietly to himself as he read the paper in his hands and I was two seconds away from calling for Theo, when he turned back to me and held the paper out to me to take.
“There is no ‘Jamie’ on this list.” I took the paper from him and the top of it read: Names of Deceased. There were thirty-two names with their ages and social security numbers listed in clear black ink. Lissy and Olivia were there, and I was taken aback by the fact that Lissy’s legal name had been Bertha—which was definitely not a name that would have suited the blond omega.
“Tibby?” Cobb prompted, pulling me out of my thoughts.
I handed the photo and list back to him. “Yeah, Jamie wouldn’t be on this list. He was Hezekiah Jordan’s son, and his grandma came and took him away the summer we were thirteen years old.” I remembered when his grandma had driven up the dirt driveway, gotten into a fight with Hezekiah Jordan, and then packed up all of Jamie’s things. Jamie hadn’t wanted to go, he’d cried the whole time that his grandmother had thrown his things into a suitcase. Eventually, he had soberly gotten into the car, and they’d driven off, leaving a cloud of dust in their wake.
Hezekiah had been angry for weeks afterward, exploding on the other wives, and punishing the betas who lived on the compound. It had taken Olivia announcing that she was pregnant towards the end of the summer to break him of his violent moodiness.
She had only been six months pregnant when Hezekiah Jordan had poisoned everyone and set the meeting house on fire, killing everyone—including her—inside.
“Tibby, there are no records of a Jamie Jordan ever living at the compound. This is the first I’ve ever heard of him.” Cobb gripped the photo in his hands like it would disappear if he let it go.
“I mean, it makes sense, I guess. Anyone else you could have asked is either dead or in prison. I almost forgot all about him until I saw the picture.” I replied with a shrug.
The beta just shook his head in disbelief, “I’ve been staring at this wall for two weeks trying to figure out what I was missing. I couldn’t figure out what the missing piece in all of this was....and you walk in here and shake a new lead loose in two minutes.”
“Uhh...you’re welcome?” I give awkward jazz-hands, unsure of how to act in response to his surprise.
Cobb’s grin was dazzling and I had to blink a couple of times to focus on his next words. “Tibby, I could kiss you.”
Well, I sure as hell wasn’t opposed to that. “I think that I could be interested in that.” I joked, not really expecting anything to happen.
Then, much to my surprise, he gripped my arms on either side, and crushed his lips down onto mine in a searing kiss that completely knocked me off my feet. Prior to this moment, I could never have pictured the buttoned-up beta kissing me like this. He always seemed to be preoccupied with the rules and keeping our interactions firmly in the FBI agent and protected witness territory. I was pretty sure that he was going to regret this later, so I decided to just enjoy it while it lasted. Nipping on his full lower lip, a little thrill of excitement filled me when I was able to draw a shark gasp from the beta.
“I need to go and tell Theo about this....” He pulled away from me, and his words held a note of apology to them. He looked like he would much rather say here and continue what we’d just been doing, but his eyes also flicked to the door behind me and I knew he was itching to tell Theo all about what he had just learned.
“Go,” I said, waving him off. “Hopefully this helps.”
