Page 64 of Torment Me Knot
Kev slides a section of garlic bread on my plate and winks at me. I pick up the slice and bite into the buttery goodness.
“I have a degree in literature,” Lex replies. “I have read Foucault. I have taught Derrida. I am not wrong about whether garlic bread is a vegetable.”
Beyond the kitchen window, the garden's gone dark. A porch light somewhere outside throws a soft yellow square against the glass. The kitchen's bright. We're inside the bright part.
I’ve eaten half a bowl but it’s all I can manage and I don’t want to be sick. Aubrey isn’t much different, but Ezra speaks as though they’re not waiting for us to push any more food down. “There's a movie night tradition in this house after a carb-laden meal. Usually involves bad action films, too much popcorn, and Kev falling asleep twenty minutes in and then claiming he was awake the whole time.”
“I don't fall asleep,” Kev says. “I rest my eyes. There's a difference.”
Lex rolls his eyes. “It means he has no say in movie choice.”
Ezra glances at us, at Aubrey pressed against my side, at our fingers linked. “Please say you’ll stay and watch a movie with us. Or not. You can go back upstairs, have more alone time, whatever feels right. The offer's there, but there's zero pressure attached to it.”
“What would you like to do, Espie?” Aubrey says.
I think about it. A movie. A couch. Somethingnormal.
“I'd like to watch a movie,” I tell him.
“That's settled. I'll make popcorn,” Kev says, already pushing back from the table. “Fair warning, I make a truly unreasonable amount of popcorn. It's a problem.”
“It really is a problem,” Ezra agrees, getting up to gather plates.
“Any preferences? Classic action? Modern action? Action that's so bad it loops back around to being good?” Lex asks.
The alphas snap into motion as though someone fired a starter pistol.
We stand and Sera takes a step back. A frown crosses Aubrey’s brow. “You’ll be here too, Sera?”
She stills, and again I catch that surprise on her face before she schools the expression. “If you’d like me to, then yes?”
Aubrey nods, and so I do.
Because I want her here too.
It would feel wrong without her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Espie
The living room carries the same worn-in warmth as the kitchen. A leather couch soft from years of bodies dropping into it. Photos crowd the mantel above the fireplace, the alphas younger there, smiling and careless and painfully happy.
One of the photos shows Ezra holding a cat. Small. Striped. He is crouched between Kev and Lex in a garden, and he is the onelooking at the cat instead of the camera, and the cat is looking at him. Kev had black hair then, and now there are streaks of silver at the temples. He’s older than me by more than a decade. Maybe close to forty, but that doesn’t matter. I feel older than him on the inside.
The room is warm. Two pools of soft yellow light spill from table lamps. The layered alpha-scent of three males has settled into the walls and the carpet and the fabric of the couch.
Aubrey pulls me down beside him in the middle of the couch. The alphas spread out through the room, close enough to be present, far enough not to crowd. Kev sets a bowl of popcorn on the coffee table in front of us.
“There’s more in the kitchen if you want it,” he says.
Lex crosses to us, and holds the blanket out to us, thick and pale and soft, leaving the space between us for us to close, or not.
“In case you get cold,” he says.
Aubrey reaches and his fingers close around the edge of the blanket and his whole face changes. The little inhale. The way his pupils expand. I know that look. I'm already doing it. The fabric isplush, deep-pile, the kind of soft I haven't touched since I was a child, the kind that used to live across the back of my parents' couch.
“Oh,” Aubrey breathes. Almost soundless. The smallestohof an omega caught off guard by something kind.
