“So I'm thinking,” Hudson says, pointing the spoon at the room, “we do taco night standing. Every week. Builds tradition. Buildstrust.”
“No,” Finn says.
“You don't even know what I was going to say.”
“It involved the word standing. The answer's no.”
“Logan.” Hudson turns, betrayed. “Back me up. Taco night.”
Logan doesn't look up from the cabinet hinge. “I'd eat a taco,” he says, which from Logan is basically a standing ovation, and Hudson points the spoon at him like he's won the argument single-handed.
“See. Walker's in. It's two against one, Morrow, that's democracy, that's the system working.”
“It's not a vote.” Finn takes a sip of the water he poured himself. “I pull the late shift Tuesdays. If we're doing a weekly, it's not Tuesday, and I'm not eating it standing up after fourteen hours on my feet.”
“He's negotiating,” Hudson tells me, delighted, like he's caught Finn doing something scandalous. “You hear that? He's not saying no. He's just saying not Tuesday.”
Finn doesn't rise to it. But the corner of his mouth twitches, the almost-smile he never quite commits to, and Hudson sees it too, and grins like he's been handed the whole world.
And they've started doing a thing I don't have a defense for. They take care of me in shifts, without discussing it, like they worked out a rotation I was never shown.
Logan puts a glass of water by my hand. Ten minutes later Finn, who's clearly clocked that Logan already did it, tops it back up to the brim without breaking off what he's saying. Hudson slides me the first and best of everything off the stove and watches my face when I taste it, every time, like my reaction is the only review that matters.
Nobody announces any of it. It just happens, a current running under the noise. Three alphas quietly arranging the world so it's softer where I'm standing in it.
I have spent my whole life being the one who arranges the world softer for everyone else.
I do not know how to be on this end of it. I keep waiting for the bill.
“You've gone quiet,” Hudson says, not looking up from the stove, because of course he caught it, he always catches it.
“I'm good.”
“She's doing the face,” Finn says.
“I don't have a face.”
“You've got the one face,” all three of them say, more or less in unison, and then look at each other, startled, because they did not plan that either, and Hudson laughs so hard he has to put the spoon down.
And I stand in my kitchen full of alphas who finish each other's sentences about me.
And I think, with the cold clarity of a woman watching a wave she can't outrun,this is a real pack. This is what it looks like — and it has a return-by date stamped on the bottom.
Later,when Logan's gone home and Hudson's doing the dishes he won't let me touch and Finn's drying because apparently they havealsoworked out a dish rotation, I slip into the bathroom and close the door and take out the bottle.
I've stopped counting how many today. That's its own kind of answer.
I shake one out. Then I look at it sitting in my palm, small and white and useless, and I make myself be honest for exactly one minute, alone, with the door shut.
It isn't holding anymore.
For six years one pill flattened everything. Kept my body quiet and obedient. Kept the three-days-a-season ache at arm's length where it couldn't embarrass me.
Now I'm taking them like breath mints, and underneath it all my body just keeps climbing. Low and steady and certain. A heat banked but very much lit, getting harder to bank every day I spend in arm's reach of three alphas it has decided belong to me.
Nobody warns you what suppressants actually are. Or maybe they do, and you just don't listen, because you never plan to need to know. They're not a cure — they're a lid. And a lid only works as long as whatever's underneath agrees to stay down.
Mine's stopped agreeing.
