Which is the most natural thing in the world. An omega's body warming to her pack. Except mine isn't my pack. Mine is a spreadsheet I built at a kitchen table to fool my family. You're allowed to fall for three alphas at once in this town. You are not, as far as I can tell, allowed to do it to three alphas you recruited under false pretenses for a reunion.
So I do what any reasonable woman does when her body has decided something her brain hasn't signed off on. I avoid everyone. I take a suppressant at noon, and another one at three.
When neither of them does much of anything, I sit at my kitchen table and look at the bottle and feel, for the first time, a thread of real fear under all the wanting.
It's not working. Not the way it used to.
Six years on this pill, and it's never once let me feel what it's supposed to stop. Now I'm sitting in a quiet kitchen with nobody touching me at all, and I can still feel the low warm pull of it. Banked, but not gone. A stove turned down instead of off.
There's a part that comes next, the part I keep shut in the drawer with the bottle, about what it means when the pill stops being enough. I don't finish the thought. I've gotten this far not finishing certain ones, and I'm not about to start now.
It's Finn's night, as it happens. The rotation swings back around to him today, which normally means the diner, a booth, his hand over mine while Dottie tops up the coffee and the whole town takes notes.
I text him to sort out where.Still on for tonight.
The reply comes fast.Off at six. Why, what's wrong.
Notwhat's up.Nothey.What's wrong,immediately, because Finn has apparently appointed himself the man who notices when something's wrong with me.
And the worst part is he's right. Something is wrong. I'm falling for three alphas at once, and my own body's trying to tell me something I'm not ready to hear.
Nothing's wrong,I type, which is a lie, and he knows it's a lie, because instead of the diner, the next thing he sends is his address.
Finn's placeis a small house on the edge of town that's exactly as I'd have guessed and nothing like I expected. All clean lines andnot much stuff, and one whole side of the living room given over entirely to a bookshelf that doesn't match the rest of him at all. Packed and overflowing and double-stacked.
I stand in front of it while he gets me a glass of water I didn't ask for, because of course he does. I run my finger along the spines and find poetry, and dog-eared paperbacks, and a whole shelf of kids' picture books worn soft at the corners.
“Gemma's,” he says, handing me the water, following my look. “The picture books. She was a late reader. I used to do the voices.” He says it flat, like it's barely worth mentioning, and does not seem to understand that he has just handed me the most dangerous piece of information I've collected all week.
“You did the voices,” I say.
“Don't make it a thing.”
“Finn Morrow did the voices.”
“I will put you back outside.”
But there's no heat in it, and the corner of his mouth tips up, barely, that almost-smile I've started watching for like an idiot. We stand in his quiet house with the evening coming down gold through the windows, and I think,this was a mistake, coming here. This is so much more dangerous than the diner.
Because the diner is a performance and this is just his house. His actual life. The books he reads and the picture books he kept and the water he keeps putting in my hand. There's no town here to perform for. There's just us, and the off-duty quiet, and the careful few feet of air neither of us will admit we're keeping.
I pull a book down at random, because my hands need something to do that isn't reaching for him, and it falls open to a poem some earlier version of Finn has strangled in pencil, small blunt capitals crowding the margins.
“You write in your books,” I say. It comes out like an accusation. I don't know why.
“I think in them.” He says it plainly, nothing between the thought and the saying of it. “You want a man who reads a poem once and shelves it clean, you've got the wrong house.”
And that's what keeps knocking me sideways in here. At the diner he gives you three words and a look and makes you do the rest yourself. Here he just answers. Whole thoughts, out loud, unguarded, like the real one lives in this house and never bothers coming into town.
I slide the book back. His forearm crosses my line of sight as he reaches past me to straighten it, and I catch the pale seam of an old burn running up toward his elbow before I've decided whether to look.
He catches me looking. Draws the sleeve down, unhurried, the way you close a drawer you didn't mean to leave open.
“Old one,” he says. Which tells me nothing, and is meant to. The one thing he keeps closed off in a house where he leaves everything else open, and I know that move, because I've got a few of my own. So I don't push.
“You going to tell me what's wrong,” he says, “or are we going to keep pretending you drove out here to insult my bookshelf.”
Any other night I'd have an answer ready. A joke, a deflection, a plumbing emergency at the preschool. Finn doesn't chase; he lets you leave the door right where you found it, which is one of the ten thousand things about him quietly, catastrophically undoing me.
