Cliff is on the edge of the couch to my left, his elbows on his knees, eyes moving slowly across everything laid out in front of him. Perrin is beside the pack alpha in the same position, reading glasses perched on his nose, turning a folded piece of paper over in his hands.
But Adam hasn’t sat down once since we got home.
He's currently in the kitchen.
I can hear him opening and closing drawers. He reappeared three minutes ago with a pad of yellow sticky notes and a fistful of different colored pens, deposited them on the corner of the coffee table, then disappeared again to get everyone drinks that nobody asked for.
"Adam," Perrin says without looking up. "Sit down."
"I'm getting water," Adam calls back.
"We have water."
"I'm getting more water."
Perrin looks at me over his reading glasses, and I press my lips together.
Adam reappears with five glasses of water on a tray, which is four more glasses of water than anyone needed, and sets them down on the corner of the coffee table.
Then he stands there looking at the mess of papers.
“Sit, Adam,” Cliff says gently, but there’s a slight edge of command running through it.
Adam's body immediately obeys, dropping onto the nearest open spot on the couch like two magnets clicking together. He blinks, looking faintly startled by himself.
"I will never get used to that," he says, staring at his own knees. "It's so weird that my bodycan’tstop."
"I know," I say. "Alpha commands still catch me off guard."
"Does it bother you?" Adam asks, looking at me.
"Not with them," I say simply, smiling up at Cliff as I lean a little further into Raff's chest. "It’s terrifying with the wrong alphas. But with our boys, it’s more annoying than anything else.”
“Hand me the notebook?” Perrin says to no one in particular. The beta is still completely focused on the task at hand.
“Here.” Adam pushes it toward his brother, then he picks up a receipt, reading my messy handwriting along the back. "Okay,” he says to himself as he grabs a sticky note.
He reads in silence for a moment, his dark blond hair falling slightly forward, his brow furrowed. His fingers trace a line of text, moving slowly across the flimsy paper.
"Your handwriting is really small," he says.
"I was trying to fit a lot in," I say.
"It's like reading something written by a very anxious ant.”
Perrin snorts.
"I can read it perfectly fine," I say.
"I'm sure you can," Adam says pleasantly. "You wrote it."
Raff's chest moves beneath me in a silent laugh, and I elbow him lightly in the ribs.
"Hey, Elle?" Perrin says, not looking up.
"Yeah?"
He turns the notebook around and holds it out toward me, his finger pressed to a paragraph near the bottom of a page dated about three weeks after my parents were killed.
