She hums quietly to herself as I climb back into the minivan, trying to take up as little space as possible and talk quietly. Sam pulls out of the parking lot, the poor van dragging over the high spots in the road as we follow Al to the house. “We don’t want to scare away your omega by having the whole family descend at once. Penny can come by and fix you up real quick, no problem. Is it still bleeding?” I pull one of the tissues out and sniff a bit, but nothing starts dribbling.
“Nope, that’s stopped. I just don’t want it to heal crooked. Plus, the sooner I can get the swelling to start going down, the better. I’ll get it iced once she’s done.”
Mom gives another thoughtful hum, and then I hear her call my sister’s name. “Oh, Pen, dear, can you go over and fix your brother’s face real quick? He broke his nose again. Yeah, no,we’ll all stop by soon. He has a girl over, but he wants to get this sorted out before he…Yes, lovely. Thank you.” Then she turns her attention back to me. “She’s on her way out the door now, so she should be there in the next ten minutes or so. We’ll get you fixed up, and they don’t even have to know she was there. We don’t want to risk your handsome face.” I blush even though she can’t see me.
She sounds almost smug, like she’s being sneaky, and I grin at her attempts at covert matchmaking. My family are all awesome, and she and Dad have always been my biggest cheerleaders. I quickly thank her, tell her I love her and Dad, and that I’ll talk to them soon before hanging up right as we pull into the driveway. Al and Paul get out of Nadine and go inside, and I wave Sarah, Greg, and all of Pack Carpenter that way, hopping from one foot to the other while I wait for Penny in the driveway. I could go inside and get the blood washed off, but my nose is probably gonna start bleeding again, so it’s best to just wait. It’s only a few more minutes before her little Honda pulls up in front of me, and she pops out, quick as a flash.
She’s tall for a girl, just over six feet. Which is funny since Mom’s a tiny thing and Dad is barely five-eleven. Tiffany topped out at five-eight and Kay is five-four. Claire is still growing, so she might be as tall as Dad, but she’s about even with Kay right now.
Penny’s grin is huge as she wraps her arms around me. “Damn, bro. I missed you. Wow, she got you good, huh?” She pulls back, looking at my face, scrutinizing my nose. “Yeah, this’ll be easy. It’s not crooked or anything…one second.” Penny reaches up, grabs my nose, and pushes lightly until I feel the pressure decrease. There isn’t the same crunch feeling as when it breaks, but things feel more normal, if still swollen.
She takes a step back, her eyes flicking from me to the front of my house, and her grin widens before she scrutinizes my face.“Well, not much I can do for the rest of it, but that should fix the nose.” Her laughter is loud and raucous as she slaps me hard on the arm. “Call Mom tonight; she’s about to go out of her mind being nosey.” Then she gets back in her car and drives off before I can reply.
I turn my attention back to the house and see the front curtains twitch closed. I’m not sure who was watching me, and I’m torn between hoping it was the sweet omega wanting to make sure I’m ok, and not wanting to look like a freak.
Turning abruptly, I march back inside and up the stairs to my room. It’s really nice having my own bathroom here, and I peel off my shirt before I’m through my bedroom door so I can clean up and get back downstairs to grab some ice. I grab a washrag and run it under the cold water to scrub off the blood and blot around my still tender lip.
Suddenly, Al is standing in my bathroom doorway, looking over the crowded countertop at my various cleaning products. He picks up a bottle of Shake and Wake face scrub, turning it around to read the back before setting it back on the cabinet. “What is this? When did you get all this stuff?”
My nose itches, and I grab a new tissue to stop the fresh bleeding. “I’ve used most of these since high school, but Kay sometimes suggests new stuff for a changeup.” He looks flabbergasted, gaping like a landed trout.
“But…but you never. Neither you nor Paul ever left anything in the shower or on the countertops other than your toothbrushes and a razor. What?”
“Well, that’s because some of us have manners when it comes to sharing bathroom space.” I point to my shower caddy that’s currently sitting on the side of the tub with a bottle of two-in-one shampoo and conditioner, ’cause let’s not get crazy with the manscaping here. “I kept my stuff in Paul’s room when I wasn’t using it.” He still looks flustered, but he was the one who keptleaving his crap all over the counter. I don’t know why he’s being pissy about this.
He stares from the plastic tote to me a few times. “How did I never? What other secrets are you hiding? Is your name really Spencer?”
What a silly question. “Um…sort of. It’s technically Spencer Rafael Baudelaire, or it was. Now it’s Miller.” Sarah snorts laughter as she walks up behind him, and I’m suddenly super self-conscious of my unmade bed and worried I might have left dirty underwear on the floor in my room. Why is she in my room?
“Holy shit! Moose, your parents named you after a fucking cartoon turtle? I thought that the mall store names were good, but damn. I really need to meet them; they sound fucking awesome.”
My fingers run through my hair, scratching my scalp as I think long and hard. “No…No, my dad’s best friend in high school was named Rafael, so I got named after him. But he might have been named after a turtle. I don’t know.”
Alistair huffs out an annoyed breath. “Or, I don’t know, he could have been named after a famous painter from the Italian Renaissance. Just throwing that out there.”
“No…no, he wasn’t real smart from what I remember, but he did have a super hard head, so it was probably the turtle.”
Chapter 47
After Spencer came back downstairs, trailing both Sarah and Al, he went out to unload the little Volkswagen. They had run errands before we met them out and about, so the tiny car was already full before they added anything from the nesting store. Paul and Sam are both in the kitchen, and Al takes off again to show Teddy, Kelly, and their shadows his library. I feel kind of useless just standing here, so I meander out after the big guy to see if he needs a hand. I didn’t realize Sarah had followed him too until I see her trying to help unload—he keeps taking things out of her arms. He finally settles on letting her carry in a small stack of pillows, since they’re light but bulky, but even then he’s hovering like crazy.
Snatching up a couple of cans of paint from the frunk, I follow them back inside and up the stairs as he quietly directs her down the hall to a large set of double doors. She lets out a happy littlesigh when he opens and then flicks on the light switch. Dim light filters down from recessed bulbs set in the four corners of the room. She nearly drops the stack she’s carrying, and he quickly sets his own paint and blankets inside before taking everything from her arms. She wanders farther into the room, and I can see why she’s enchanted. It’s a nest, a nice one. Or it might be.
It’s mostly empty now, except for the low platform bed near one blank wall. The mattress is wrapped in sealed plastic, and there are several drawers on the platform itself. The walls are a bland grey right now, flat and dull, with three other doors—one on the right side, two on the left, and a full wall of curtains directly across from the door we entered through. The big alpha carries all the pillows he took from Sarah and opens the door on the right to what appears to be a closet, carefully depositing all of them safely in the back.
The walls on either side of this closet have several shelves running up each one, and he takes the paint cans from me and deposits them on the bottom of one of them before retrieving his own and setting them together. He’s been pointedly avoiding looking at Sarah as she wanders around the room, checking each of the doors. When she steps through one closest to me, I hear her quiet, “Holy fuck. I want this tub.” Spencer has a huge grin on his face, but still won’t look in the direction she went. My guess is the bathroom is really nice, though he hasn’t tried to show her anything specific, letting her curious nature run its course and explore on her own.
“Hey, Spence. You ok there? How’s the nose?” It should feel awkward just standing in silence in a stranger’s home, but it doesn’t. I don’t have as strong of a sense of smell as Sarah, but this room is mostly free of anything but the big guy’s grass and leather scent, and now Sarah’s strawberry shortcake as she wanders back out of the bathroom and beelines for the last door.The alpha raises a hand like he wants to tell her something, but stops short as she opens the door and steps inside.
Her voice is quiet from the other room. “You ok, Moose? This room smells like you…and sad.” She doesn’t say anything else as she comes back out, walking over to him and wrapping her tiny arms around his huge body. His big hand brushes the hair back from her forehead as she stares up at him, and even though it’s a private moment, I don’t feel like I’m intruding. It’s freaky, really. That this feels so normal. Not the sad look on the big guy’s face, but them, and this place. I don’t feel like a stranger here. Maybe it’s just his exuberance and welcoming personality.
He has to bend way down to press a kiss to her hair before he pulls away. “Lemme show you the best part.” He walks over and pushes a button on the wall beside the door she just left, and the room brightens considerably as the set of curtains along the far wall pull back, showing three large floor-to-ceiling windows. He presses another button, and more light floods in from the ceiling. What I thought was a solid area in the dim light is actually a skylight, shuttered over with a solid panel that slides away. It brightens the room significantly, and I notice long tracks along the ceiling as well that could be used for additional curtains to enclose the space around the bed.
The added light allows me to see that the walls have actually been primed recently, so that explains the paint, though not why there are so many colors. The floor and bed platform are the same pale hardwood, almost the sun-bleached color of driftwood that washes up on the beach close to the omega center. The plastic covering the mattress crinkles loudly where Sarah stretches back on it. Her head faces the foot where she can look up at the now open skylight, watching the clouds skitter by in a high wind.
“This is beautiful, Spence.” The fact that she doesn’t use his nickname sends a pang through my chest, as her emotions must be pressing enough that she’s not her usual playful self.
He stares down at her, his eyes full of a yearning that finally makes me feel like I’m intruding. You can see the internal struggle, and it occurs to me that this man would be a terrible liar and probably has absolutely no filter most of the time. He swallows before setting his shoulders, finally prying his eyes away from my omega to stare at the sky himself. “Yeah, I wanted to try to make the paint look like the sky. Starting out with the floor, that looks kind of like the color of sand and like you’re looking out over the horizon. My parents took us down to the gulf when we were little a few times. Never anything big, just…like short summer day trips. And it always made me feel small to stare out at the ocean. Especially in the evening when the stars were just coming out, and the sky was almost black up high, but you could still see all the purples and blues and stuff on the horizon.” He shuffles his feet as he talks, looking embarrassed.
