Page 45 of Match My Alpha
I set the tray down on the long table and Callum appears behind me to take the second tray — the heavier one, the one with the empanadas — out of my hands before I have to ask. He's in an apron that says GRILL SERGEANT across the front, which Marco bought him as a joke and which he now wears without irony, and he presses his mouth to the side of my head as he passes because that's what he does — touches me in small, automatic ways that don't require thought or permission, just the muscle memory of a man who knows where I am in every room.
"Empanadas are going fast," I tell him.
"I'll guard them."
"You'll eat them."
"I'll eat two and guard the rest." He sets the tray down at the grill station and Marco immediately reaches for one and Callum doesn't stop him because Marco is family and family gets empanadas, that's just the rule.
I lean against the patio railing and take it in. Benji is at the corner table with his phone propped against a bottle, scrolling with the expression of a man who is both at the party and reviewing it from the outside simultaneously. Shay is at the bar — he's always at the bar — talking to Declan through the service window about something that has Declan shaking his head with a half-smile, patient and fond, because he's heard this opinion before and he'll hear it again next week. Soren is cross-legged on the bench near the wall with a notebook open on his knee, a pen tucked behind his ear, watching everything with that soft, absorbing attention that means he's filing it away for something he'll sketch later.
Ava drops into the chair next to Benji and steals a chip off his plate and he doesn't even look up, just moves the plate closer to her, which is the most affection Benji shows anyone who isn't blood-related or holding a drink he wants.
Jude is standing on the bench seat of the main booth with a beer in his hand, looking like he's about to do something unnecessary.
"EXCUSE ME," he announces, and Rhys, seated below him with an arm resting along the back of the booth, doesn't even flinch. He's seen this before. He's chosen to love it anyway. "I would like to propose a toast."
"You proposed a toast twenty minutes ago," Benji says.
"That was a DIFFERENT toast. That was to Milo's empanadas. This one is to love."
"I'm leaving."
"You're not leaving, you're holding a full drink and you just sat down. THIS toast—" Jude climbs higher on the bench and Rhys puts a hand on his calf, not pulling him down, just making sure he doesn't fall, the way you'd spot someone at the gym if the gym were a dive bar and the exercise were being Jude. "This toast is to KnotMe, which has now — against ALL odds and its own garbage algorithm — produced TWO lasting relationships."
"Lasting is generous," Shay calls from the bar. "Give it six months."
"Shay, you are cordially invited to shut the fuck up." Jude raises his beer. "To the app. To the accidental matches. To Rhys, who swiped right on my anonymous bio—"
"It was your BIO, not a—"
"—and to Callum, who swiped right on Milo's sweater photo and then panicked about it in a firehouse bunk like a fifteen-year-old. You're WELCOME, both of you, because I built Milo's profile and I picked that sweater and I am basically the ARCHITECT of—"
"Drink your beer, Jude," Callum says from the grill, and he's smiling — the real one, the one with the crinkles — and Jude drinks his beer and everyone raises whatever they're holding and the toast happens the way toasts happen with this group: loudly, with at least one person heckling and someone else spilling.
Benji taps his bottle against Ava's glass without getting up. "At least your brother had the decency to show up the next day," he says, and his voice is light and funny and aimed at no one in particular.
He takes a drink. Ava laughs because the delivery was good, and it was — Benji's always good — but I catch the half-second where his eyes go flat before the joke lands, the beat where the funny hasn't quite covered the real thing underneath. I've known Benji long enough to know which jokes are armor and which ones are just jokes, and that one had a lining.
Nobody else catches it. The conversation moves on — Jude is now interrogating Callum about whether he's going to burn the bratwurst and Callum is pointing out that they're not burgers, they're bratwurst, and Jude is insisting that anything cylindrical on a grill is a burger and Rhys is watching this exchange with his chin on his hand, his expression nothing but fond. He accepted a long time ago that his omega will never stop being the loudest person in any venue.
Rhys catches Callum's eye across the grill. Callum lifts his tongs in a gesture that might be a greeting or might be a surrender.
"You get used to it," Rhys says.
"Do you?"
Rhys considers this. "No," he says. "But you stop minding."
Callum laughs — low, genuine — and flips a bratwurst, and the two of them stand there in the comfortable silence of two alphas who ended up in the same pack by falling in love with the same friend group's omegas and have no complaints about it.
Soren looks up from his notebook. His eyes find mine across the patio and he smiles — something in it a little wistful, the way Soren is always a little wistful, like he's watching something beautiful and hoping he'll get his own version someday. I smile back. He will. I don't know how I know that, but I do.
Ava finds me at the railing when I'm refilling the chip bowl. She leans next to me and we watch the patio together for a second — the noise, the people, the golden light starting to go amber as the afternoon tilts.
"He ironed his apron," she says.
"I know."
