Page 12 of The Last Great Omegaverse

“It’s an observation. I don’t make promises I can’t keep track of.” But he holds my eyes a beat longer than the moments needs, and there’s a warmth under the words that his voice won’t quite own up to, nothing like the easy heat Asher trails behind him, sharper somehow for how rarely Silas lets it show at all.

He ducks back under the hood before I can decide what to do with that, leaving me standing there with my pulse doing something unhealthy and my sleeves still pulled down over my hands like they might actually protect me from anything.

I leave him to it.

The festival committee arrives at noon in the form of one very tightly wound woman named Linda Pruitt, clipboard in hand, cardigan buttoned to the throat, driving a car with a bumper sticker that reads I ♡ HOLLOW CREEK HARVEST FESTIVAL like it’s a personality rather than merely a bumper sticker.

“Ms. Calloway.” She surveys the yard, the half-repaired tractor, Silas’s grease-streaked forearms, with the scrutiny of building a mental report she plans to deliver in full to whoever will listen. “I’m here on behalf of the festival committee. We like to check in with our contributing farms this time of year.”

“We’re not exactly contributing yet,” I say. “Unless you want a very small, very confused pumpkin patch.”

“That’s precisely my concern.” She flips her clipboard open. “Calloway Farm has supplied pumpkins to the festival for three generations. It’s something of a tradition. We’d hate to see that lapse, especially given—” she glances, delicately, at Silas, then back at me, “—the circumstances of the property.”

“The circumstances of the property are none of your business, Linda.”

“I’m aware. I’m simply saying the whole town’s watching to see how this turns out, is all, and it would be a shame for the festival’s centerpiece display to go without its usual supplier.” She softens, just slightly, enough that I catch a glimpse of an actual person underneath the cardigan and the clipboard. “Your grandmother used to grow the display pumpkin every year. The big one, out front of the town hall. People bring their kids to see it from three counties over.”

That lands somewhere I wasn’t braced for, and I have to look away for a second, out toward the fields, toward that one strange thriving patch near the fence, before I trust my voice again.

“I’ll have pumpkins for the festival,” I say. “You can tell the committee that.”

“I certainly hope so.” Linda clicks her pen closed with the finality of filing a report in her head. “Fourteenth of the month. Not a day later. We’ll be in touch.”

She leaves the way she arrived, entirely unbothered by the fact that she’s just handed me one more countdown to carry alongside the one already ticking in my chest.

“She’s like that with everyone,” Silas offers, once her car’s disappeared down the drive. “Don’t take it personally.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You were going to.”

“Fine. I was a little going to.”

He almost grins again, and goes back to the tractor, and I go back to my seed catalogs. The two of us work in a silence that’s less hostile than it was this morning and more of something I don’t have a name for yet, something that feels dangerously close to companionable.

By late afternoon I’ve lost track of how many of them are on my land.

Silas is still elbow-deep in the tractor, cursing at it fondly now instead of just cursing at it. Coop shows up around three with a truck full of fence posts nobody asked him to bring and starts replacing rotten sections along the south boundary like it’s the most natural thing in the world to volunteer for. Asher swings by not long after, ostensibly to drop off a bag of seed he swears Eleanor always preferred, though he lingers a great deal longer than dropping off a bag of seed requires, leaning on the porch rail with that easy grin that still makes something low in my stomach turn heated despite my better judgment.

“You’re not even doing anything,” I point out, when I catch him for the third time watching me instead of the field.

“I’m providing moral support. It’s a skill.”

“It looks a lot like lingering.”

“Can’t it be both?” He tips his head, considering me with a heat that’s got nothing to do with the weather. “If you want my opinion, you look good doing spreadsheets on a porch in the middle of a crisis. Very composed. Very in control. It’s doing things to me.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“I contain multitudes.” But his eyes crinkle at the corners in a way that makes it hard to stay annoyed at him, and I find myself fighting a smile I have absolutely no intention of giving him the satisfaction of seeing.

Cal I don’t see up close at all, not the whole afternoon, though I catch him twice at the far fence line, watching the work from a distance the way he seems to prefer. Near enough to be present, far enough to keep whatever wall he’s built firmly in place. Once, our eyes meet briefly across the whole width of the field, and something about the sheer distance of it, the deliberate space he keeps, tugs at me harder than I’d like to admit.

These Alphas are getting under my skin and I shouldn’t let them. But they are just so damned hot it’s hard to remember the rules.

By the time the sun starts sliding low and orange over the barn roof, all four of them are still here. None of them asked, none of them paid, working my grandmother’s failing farm like it’s already something worth saving on principle alone.

I stand on the porch with my seed catalogs forgotten in my lap and watch them, Coop hammering posts and singing something off-key, Silas swearing softly at a bolt that won’t turn, Asher leaning nearby doing very little useful work and a great deal of watching me do the same, Cal a subdued shape at the edge of the field like a sentry nobody hired.