We walk the rest of the alley and she deliberately bumps my shoulder at the end of it. The light, casual physical contact of someone who is done maintainingsocial distance. I bump her back and she laughs. It makes me unbearably happy to hear it.
She came back to us.
She’s going to keep coming back to us.
She’s our Omega.
“Come on,” she says. “You owe me a rematch on the axe throw before it’s put away.”
“I owe you nothing of the kind,” I reply, following immediately.
“You cheated.”
“I have never cheated at anything in my—”
“Jack.”
“In several things,” I concede. “Not the axe throw specifically.”
She laughs.
My heart bursts.
Chapter 28
Lola
Monday morning arrives quietly. I know this because I’m awake for it. It’s not the jarring, vigilant waking of the last month, the immediate threat-assessment, the remembering of what I know and where I am and whether I need to move. I wake up slowly.
I’m on the couch. The guys keep offering me a bed but I’m delaying. I love this damned couch.
The pack house is waking up too. The old wood settles, the distant water patters, and from the kitchen the smell that has become the smell of morning. Tristan’s coffee. The thing that starts the day.
I lie still and let myself be here.
Just: here. Present tense, no modifier. The luxury of a morning that doesn’t require a plan.
I breathe in the coffee smell.
I breathe in the cedar and old wood.
I breathe in the pack, which is everywhere in this house, layered and warm. The accumulated scent of people who have lived and eaten and existed in a space long enough to leave themselves in it. And underneath it, or through it, or maybe just—part of it now, I can’t tell anymore where the boundary is—me.
I smell like this place too.
Tristan is at the stove when I finally come in. He looks up and gives me warm smile. “Morning.”
“Good morning.” I go to the counter. My spot at the counter and the coffee is there, already poured, because Tristan knows. I drink it with both hands.
“Sleep okay?” he asks.
“Really okay.”
He nods. Back to the stove.
We exist in the kitchen in the comfortable parallel of two people who have done this enough times that it’s easy. He cooks. I finish the coffee. He puts a pastry and honey beside me at the counter without breaking stride, and I eat it without being asked.
At some point my hand is on the counter and his is near it. His fingers rest over mine the way they did yesterday and neither of us makes anything of it and neither of us moves.
