Page 23 of The Last Great Omegaverse

“Nobody’s asking you to favor anybody, Linda.” I lean forward, casual, unhurried, the version of myself that’s gotten me out of more town council meetings than I can count. “I’m asking the committee to sponsor a Harvest Day. Same as you did for the Whitakers’ place, two years back, when their barn burned. Community turns out, lends a hand, everybody goes home with pie and a good feeling about their neighbors. That’s not favoritism. That’s a regular Thursday, around here.”

“The Whitakers weren’t facing a competing claim from another family in town.”

“The Whitakers also weren’t three generations deep in supplying the festival’s centerpiece pumpkin,” I say, and watch that land, watch the older committee members exchange the look people get when nostalgia starts outvoting caution. “You want to be the committee that let tradition lapse over a technicality nobody in this room can even properly explain? Or you want to be the committee that helped save it?”

It takes another forty minutes of delicate maneuvering, some flattery I don’t mean at all, and one genuinely inspired mention of free advertising for local businesses who volunteer labor, before Linda finally sighs and marks something on her clipboard that I choose to interpret as a win.

“One day,” she says. “Community Harvest Day, two weeks out. I’ll circulate the sign-up sheet. If this goes poorly, Asher Reyes, I’m holding you personally responsible.”

“Wouldn’t have it any other way, Ms. Pruitt.”

Nobody in that room knows how many hours this took, or how many favors I’ve spent over the past two weeks greasing exactly this outcome into existence. The three separate conversations with the hardware store, a case of good whiskey quietly gifted to a councilman who owed me from a fence dispute years back, an entire evening spent listening to Linda’s complaints about her sister-in-law in exchange for even considering the idea in the first place. Nobody sees any of that. They just see the version of me that walks in, cracks a joke, and somehow gets the room to agree with him. They file it under charm, like charm’s the whole engine instead of just the part that’s visible from the outside.

I don’t correct them. Correcting them would mean admitting how much I’ve built my whole self around being the guy nobody has to take too seriously, and that’s a harder confession than I’ve got the stomach for on a Wednesday night in a town hall that smells like bad coffee.

I drive out to Calloway Farm after, mostly because the alternative is going home to a quiet farmhouse and sitting with my own head longer than I want to. I find Wren on the porch with a mug of cocoa in her hands, staring out at the fields with the faraway look of somebody turning an answer over in her hands, testing its weight before deciding whether to trust it.

“You look wrecked,” she says, by way of hello.

“Thank you. Very flattering.”

“I mean it kindly. You’ve got the exhausted look of a man who’s spent his whole evening being charming at people who don’t deserve it.” She shifts over on the step, making room, and I take it without needing to be asked twice. “Town hall?”

“Town hall.” I drop down beside her, closer than strictly necessary. Close enough that her rain and candy scent washes over me before either of us has said anything else worth remembering. The restless Alpha in me subdues just from that alone. I let myself feel, for a second, how good it is just to sit next to her without faking anything. “Got you a Harvest Day. Committee’s sponsoring volunteer labor, two weeks out. Should help with the crunch before the deadline.”

“You did that for me?”

“Took a village. Mostly me being irritating until people agreed just to make it stop.”

I expect the joke to land the way jokes usually do with her, a laugh, a return volley, something easy that keeps the conversation skating along the surface where I’m most comfortable. Instead, she turns to study me, and asks a question quietly, catching me entirely off guard.

“What do you actually want, Asher? Not what you’re good at getting other people to agree to. What do you want, for yourself?”

That wasn’t a question I was braced for. I feel the easy grin slip a little before I can catch it and put it back in place. “That’s an oddly heavy question for a porch step.”

“You don’t have to answer it.”

“I know I don’t.” I look out at the dark fields instead of at her, it’s easier that way, the way I imagine Wren herself does most of her hardest talking. “Nobody’s really asked me that in a while. Not seriously. People ask me for favors, for jokes, for whatever mood they need in a room. I’m good at providing it, and somewhere along the way that became the whole shape of who I am to everybody. The fun one. The one who smooths things over. Nobody expects depth out of the fun one, so nobody bothers checking for it.”

“I’m checking.”

That undoes me, which I wasn’t prepared for sitting on a cold porch step with a woman who apparently means the question instead of just asking it to fill silence.

“I don’t know how to answer that without it sounding like a complaint,” I admit. “I like being liked. Really. It’s not a mask I put on. But I’d like, every once in a while, for somebody to need me for something a little more substantial than a good time and a favor called in at the right moment. Cal’s the one everybody trusts with the hard decisions. Silas is the one who keeps the numbers. Coop’s the heart of the whole pack, the one people actually lean on when things get bad. And I’m just the guy who makes the room laugh while the real work happens around me.”

“That’s not true.”

“Feels true, some nights.”

“For what it’s worth, I’ve been sitting on this exact step asking myself some version of the same question the last couple of nights. What I actually want, underneath all the practical reasons I could hide behind instead.” She looks down at the mug in her hands like it might have the answer written on the bottom of it. “Turns out it’s a hard question no matter which side of it you’re standing on.”

“Yeah, it’s hard all right.”

“You spent tonight charming a whole harvest committee, purely so I’d have enough hands to save my grandmother’s farm.” Her voice has gone gentle, none of her usual sharp edges in it. “That’s not nothing, Asher. That’s you doing the unglamorous, unseen work of holding something together, same as the rest of them. You just do it with better jokes.”

I don’t have anything to say about that right now. I’ve spent so long building a personality around deflecting exactly this kind of sincerity that I’ve apparently never rehearsed what to do when it finally hits somewhere I can’t joke my way out of.

“You’re going to make me feel things on this porch,” I say finally, only half-joking. “Fair warning.”