Garrett: He won't stop smiling. It's honestly kind of creepy. Good creepy though. Happy creepy.
Micah: I hope you had a wonderful evening. Your bowl sounds like a triumph of enthusiasm over technique, which I personally find more admirable than mere competence.
I laughed, the sound echoing in the empty cabin, startling in the silence. But it didn't feel lonely anymore. The silence wasn't empty, it was full of them, full of their voices and their care and their steady, patient presence even from miles away.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Daphne
Sleep wouldn't come.
I'd been lying in bed for two hours, staring at the ceiling where moonlight painted shifting patterns through the curtains. The clock on my nightstand glowed One forty-seven AM in soft blue numbers, each minute ticking by like a small accusation.Go to sleep. Close your eyes. Stop thinking about the way he kissed you.
But I couldn't stop. Every time I closed my eyes, I was back in the pottery studio, surrounded by the earthy scent of clay and the soft warmth of Levi's body behind mine. His hands covering my hands. His breath against my ear. The moment when teasing had shifted into something else entirely, something electric and terrifying and impossibly right.
The kiss.Kisses, plural, because one hadn't been enough, and two hadn't been enough, and by the time we'd finally pulled apart, I'd lost count entirely. My lips still tingled with the memory of it. My hands still remembered the feeling of his hair between my fingers, damp with clay, impossibly soft.
I pressed my palms against my eyes and groaned into the darkness. This was ridiculous. I was a grown woman, not a teenager with her first crush. I'd been kissed before, not often, not in years, but it had happened. I knew what attraction felt like. I knew the flutter of butterflies, the racing pulse, the way your thoughts kept circling back to someone like a compass finding north.
This was different. This was more. This waseverything.
It wasn't just Levi either. That was the part that kept tripping me up, the thread I couldn't quite untangle. Because when I closed my eyes, I didn't just see Levi's face. I saw Oliver's steady gaze, the way he'd looked at me when he handed me that coat hook like he was offering me a key to something precious. I saw Garrett's broad hands, gentle despite their strength, the warmth of his embrace. I saw Micah pointing at the stars, his voice soft with wonder, sharing something sacred without asking for anything in return.
Four men. Four alphas. Four separate hearts, and somehow I was tangled up in all of them.
The logical part of my brain—the part that had kept me alive and safe and alone for five years—kept screaming that this was too much. Too fast. Too dangerous. I was one person, one damaged, careful, terrified person, and they were asking me to open doors I'd spent my entire life learning to keep closed. But there was another part of me. A quieter part, buried so deep I'd almost forgotten it existed. And that part was whispering something different.
What if this is what you've been waiting for?
What if this is what home feels like?
I threw off the covers with a frustrated huff and swung my legs over the side of the bed. Sleep was clearly not happening. Maybe some tea would help. Or a book. Or pacing aroundmy cabin until dawn like the unhinged person I was rapidly becoming.
The floor was cool beneath my bare feet as I padded through the dark cabin, navigating by memory and the faint glow of moonlight through the windows. I'd lived here long enough that I could walk the whole space blindfolded, seventeen steps from the bedroom to the kitchen, four more to the sink, two to the right for the tea kettle.
But I didn't go to the kitchen. Instead, without quite deciding to, I found myself standing in front of the narrow closet at the end of the hall. The linen closet. Three shelves of towels and sheets and pillowcases, everything folded and stacked with the precision I'd developed over years of moving from place to place. When you owned only what you could carry, you learned to keep it organized.
I opened the door.
The towels were wrong. The thought came from somewhere deep and instinctive, a certainty that bypassed logic entirely. The blue towels were on the top shelf, but they should be on the bottom—closer to the bathroom, easier to grab when stepping out of the shower. And the fitted sheets were folded in thirds, but they'd stack better in quarters. And the extra blankets were crammed in the back corner when they should be front and center, ready for cold nights, ready for?—
Ready for what? I didn't know. But my hands were already moving, pulling towels from shelves, refolding sheets, reorganizing a closet that hadn't bothered me yesterday. That had been perfectly fine for five years. That was, by any objective measure, completely and totally fine.
Except it wasn't. It wasn't fine at all.
The fitted sheets came out in a cascade of cotton—the white ones, then the blue, then the sage green I'd splurged on last winter because they reminded me of new leaves. I shook themout, refolded them, stacked them in order of color. Light to dark. Practical.Right.
The towels came next. Bath towels on the bottom shelf, hand towels in the middle, washcloths in the small basket I'd bought at the hardware store. Blue grouped with blue, white with white, the old gray ones that should have been replaced years ago tucked in the back where they wouldn't offend anyone.
Offend who? I lived alone. No one ever saw my linen closet. I still my hands kept moving, folding and stacking and adjusting, driven by an urgency I couldn't name or understand. The blankets came off the top shelf—too heavy, they'd compress everything beneath them, and went into the chest at the foot of my bed instead. The extra pillowcases got sorted by size. The old quilt Margaret had given me, soft with age and faded from years of washing, got moved to a place of honor on the middle shelf where I could see it every time I opened the door.
Whereanyonecould see it. I didn't realize I was crying until a tear dropped onto my hand. I stood there in the dark hallway, surrounded by stacks of linens and the faint scent of lavender from the sachets I kept in the closet, and I had no idea what was happening to me. Why was I reorganizing a closet at two in the morning? Why did it feel so important, sonecessary, so much like something I'd been needing to do my whole life without knowing it?
Why did it feel like preparation? I sank to the floor, my back against the wall, and let the tears come.
By four AM, the linen closet was immaculate. I'd also reorganized the kitchen cabinets, rearranged the pantry, and cleaned out the drawer in my nightstand that had become a graveyard for dead pens and forgotten receipts. My hands had finally stopped their frantic motion, the strange urgency fading into ordinary exhaustion, but my mind was still spinning.
What the hell was wrong with me? I made tea—chamomile, for all the good it would do—and curled up on the couch to watch the sky lighten through the window. The birds were starting to wake, their songs threading through the silence, and somewhere in the distance I could hear a truck engine on the main road. The world was waking up while I sat here, unwashed and wild-eyed, surrounded by the evidence of my midnight breakdown.
