I dig in. Lungs burning, legs burning, everything burning, and it feelsrightbecause at least this is something I can actually chase down.
I close the gap and the winger sees me coming too late. I rip the ball loose at the ten-meter line, tuck it, and I'm running.
"Come on, Mason!" Knox yells, a little behind on my left shouting
I make it past the five-meter line... and dive.
Mud fills my mouth, the ball is down, the try is good. My teammates are shouting, and I'm lying face-first in the dirt with my arms out and my chest heaving.
"She's the one with one foot out the damn door!" I shout into the muddy ground. I roll over. Mud is in my hair and my ear. Thesky is a bruised, weeping gray, and the rain is falling right into my eyes.
Knox's face appears above me, upside down.
"Well," he says. "Guess you needed to get this out of your system, huh?"
23
Knox
"Ahem." Arthur stands on a chair, one hand raised for silence. His eyebrow is caked in dried mud. "On behalf of the Lake's Edge, I would like to present this year's Cup to the team whose captain also controls the beer taps."
"Conflict of interest!" someone from the other team shouts.
"Well, we did actually win, so... ignored." Arthur holds up the pint glass. "To us."
"TO US!" sixteen muddy guys bellow.
The Lake's Edge on a Saturday night is loud on a normal day, but tonight it's at a different level, two full rugby squads crammed into a space meant for maybe forty people, plus the regulars.
Mason's at the bar, laughing at something Julio said. He's got his fifth beer, or seventh (I've lost count), and from the outside you'd never guess he was yelling in the mud about an omega an hour ago.
"—and then his mom calls," Julio is saying, "and she's like, Tony, if you don't pick a caterer by Friday I'm hiring the woman who did your cousin's quinceañera—"
I half-listen, nursing my beer. The bar smells like hops and wet grass and a dozen different alpha scents spiked with testosterone, and I should be fully here. Except there's a part of my brain running a parallel thread... with Beth.
The fact that she might leave... that I don't know what to do to make her stay without accidentally nudging her away.
"Knox." Arthur slides a fresh pint toward me. "Everything alright?"
Mason drops into the stool next to me before I can answer, his cheeks flushed, his hair damp. "Big Terry just beat Adam and Matty at arm wrestling. At thesametime."
"Of course he did," Arthur says.
"Matty looks traumatized."
Right on cue, a thunderous cheer erupts from the corner booth. Two more challengers bite the dust, groaning as their hands hit the wood. Big Terry flexes, and his omega girlfriend climbs into his lap, kissing him.
I drink my beer and let the noise wash over me, and the parallel thread keeps running.
Here's what I know. Beth opened Wildflower and Vine with a loan. The loan is heavy. The buyout offer from that investment group covers it, but accepting means losing the shop, and losing the shop means there's nothing tying her to Lakeview anymore.
So the equation is simple. If the shop financially becomes something she'd be crazy to walk away from, then the math changes. And one of the reasons she tells herself when she's lying awake at three a.m. disappears.
"—getting a caterer is a nightmare," Julio says to our teammate Dustin over his pint, "but the bakeries? Forget it. Every place doing luxury custom wedding cakes in a fifty-mile radius is booked solid through November. It's like everyone decided to get married this exact year—"
"Everyoneisgetting married this year," Arthur, who's apparently also been listening, confirms.
"It's like a virus," Mason mutters.
