Page 5 of The Last Great Omegaverse

“Thanks,” she says, on the porch, arms crossed against the morning cold, hair still doing the flyaway thing, looking, honestly, better than anyone hungover in a stranger’s borrowed sweater has any right to look. “For last night. The—” a vague gesture again, “all of it. The staying.”

“Anytime.” I mean it more than the word usually means. “Seriously. If that stove gives you trouble, or the fridge starts making noises, or you just want someone who isn’t a dust sheet to talk to—I’m not far.”

“Not far like the next town over, or not far like—”

“Not far like you can probably see my kitchen light from your kitchen window, if you know where to look.”

I say it teasingly, already turning to go, already congratulating myself on threading a needle I’ve been sweating over since one in the morning. It’s vague enough to be true, specific enough to feel honest, nothing she can pin down. I make it exactly to the end of the porch steps before I hear her voice sharpen behind me.

“Wait.”

I turn. She’s not on the porch anymore. She’s come down two of the steps, arms still crossed, and she’s not looking at me. She’s looking past me, out across the field, to where the fence line breaks and the gravel path cuts straight through toward the low white farmhouse and the barn with the crooked weathervane, the one I am, right now, in this exact moment, walking directly toward.

“That’s your house?” she asks. Putting it together out loud, the way people do when they’re realizing something faster than they’d like to. “That’s—you live there? You live right there?”

“I do.”

“You said you help run a farm out my way. You said we’d probably see a lot of each other.” Her voice is climbing, disbelief chasing something sharper underneath it. “You didn’t say next door. You didn’t say you’d been in my grandmother’s kitchen enough times to know her stove has moods.”

“I was going to tell you—”

“When? While you were leaving? Through the fence?”

“Wren—”

“No, this is—” She laughs, short and disbelieving, dragging both hands back through her hair like she’s trying to physically reorganize her thoughts. “I made out with my neighbor. On my first night in town. My neighbor who apparently knew my grandmother, who apparently has feelings about her stove, who let me ramble on for an hour last night about how I don’t even know this town and didn’t think to mention he’s, what, fifty feet from my front door?”

“Technically closer to four hundred feet, but I take your point.”

“Not helping.”

“I know.” I hold both hands up, the universal surrender, and try for something between apologetic and honest, which is harder to achieve than either one alone. “I should’ve said something. I wanted to, believe it or not, I actually did try, a couple times, but you were exhausted, and it felt like the kind of thing that was going to change the whole atmosphere of the night the second I said it, and I liked the atmosphere of the night. That’s the truth. Not a good excuse, I know, but it’s the real one.”

She stares at me for a long moment, arms crossed, jaw working like she’s deciding whether to be angrier than she currently is. The morning light’s doing something incredible to her, catching gold in hair that’s a mess, and I have the distinct, unhelpful thought that I would very much like to kiss her again, right now, mortification and all, and that this is possibly the worst timing I have ever had for a thought in my entire life.

“You’re part of it,” she says finally, hushed. “Aren’t you? The—whatever’s next door. The pack, or whatever people around here call it.”

“I am.” No point lying now, needle already unthreaded, mess already made. “There’s four of us. You’ll meet the rest soon enough, if you haven’t already had the pleasure of Coop showing up uninvited with baked goods, which, fair warning, is basically inevitable by the end of the day.”

“Great.” She says it flatly, but there’s something under the flatness, something that isn’t quite as furious as she’s trying to sound. “This is great. This is a great start.”

“For what it’s worth,” I say, backing down the last step, hands still half-raised, “everything I said last night was true. The parts about you, I mean. Not just logistics.” I nod vaguely, back toward my own farmhouse, back toward the whole complicated tangle of will and land and pack I haven’t even started to explain. “I imagine you’re going to have some questions soon, and I’d rather you hear the answers from me than from town gossip.”

She doesn’t say anything to that. Just watches me go, her expression somewhere between annoyed and maybe curious. I walk the rest of the way home with the unfamiliar sensation of having made a mess I actually care about cleaning up properly.

Coop’s waiting on the porch when I get there, unsurprisingly, coffee in hand, grinning like he already knows exactly where I spent my night.

“So,” he says. “How’d it go, meeting the new neighbor?”

“Don’t,” I warn him, and go inside. I do not tell him a single thing, though I suspect, given the state of my shirt, and my general expression, and the fact that Dot’s almost certainly already told half the county, he already knows plenty.

Chapter 3

Wren

60 Days To Go

Daylight is not kind to Calloway Farm. I stand at the edge of what used to be a driveway and take it in properly for the first time. The barn with its roofline sagging, a fence that’s more suggestion than boundary, and beyond it, rows and rows of pumpkin vines gone to riot, choked with weeds, half the fruit split and rotting where it sits. There’s a farm stand near the road, paint peeled down to bare wood, a hand-lettered sign hanging by one nail: CALLOWAY FARM—PICK YOUR OWN.