Page 82 of Pack Frenzy
The playfulness softens into something else. Something that makes the air between us feel heavier, warmer. “Is that what you think I do? Perform?”
“I think you’ve had to,” I say carefully. “I think you’ve spent a long time figuring out what version of yourself keeps you safest. What I’m saying is—” I pull her a fraction closer. “You don’t have to do that here. Not with me. Not with any of us.”
“That’s a big promise, Eli.”
“I don’t make the other kind.”
Her thumb brushes my jaw, slow, like she’s smoothing something there or memorizing the shape of it.
“This okay?” I ask because asking is muscle memory with me. It’s not a performance. It’s the point.
She nods, breath catching. “Yeah.”
We keep moving. The radio croons about coming back, about choosing to stay, about hands you can trust. The cabin carries our footsteps like a secret.
“Rowan told me the part about the house. How Meredith loved the smell of sawdust and lemon oil. How she stood inside the kitchen studs and told you the beam was two inches off.”
“We moved it two inches,” I say.
“Of course you did.”
Her hand slides to the back of my neck, fingers threading into short hair at my nape. It’s not possessive. It’s…claim-adjacent.
I lean in a little, then stop just shy. She closes the distance. Her mouth is soft and sure. She tastes like coffee gone sweeton the tongue and something that belongs to the afternoon—salt from the air, warmth from the steam of her earlier shower, a note I can’t name that feels like relief.
It’s not Rowan’s hungry gravity. It’s not Cassian’s wildfire. It’s a door opening into a room that was always there.
Her lips part, a whisper of breath against mine, and I let the kiss go deeper—unhurried, deliberate. My hand tightens at her waist for a second, enough to sayI’m herewithout sayingyou’re mine. She answers with a soft sound that goes straight to my knees.
A slow warmth rolls through my chest. I angle us a fraction, pinning her gently between me and the counter—not trapped, just held.
Her fingers tip my chin up like she wants more access, and I give it, mouth tilting, the slow parting and deeper taste, a low hum I’m not pretending isn’t a little desperate.
I break first because someone has to. I rest my forehead to hers. We breathe the same small square of air until our hearts find a pace that doesn’t feel like running.
“You taste like autumn and cinnamon-flavored hot chocolate,” she whispers, smiling against my mouth.
“Don’t tell Cassian,” I murmur. “He’s been trying to ruin my reputation for years.”
She laughs, softer this time, and it presses into me in all the right places. The sweatshirt hem brushes my thigh. Her legs shift, knees brushing my hips, and for one bright, reckless second, I imagine the back of her knees in my palms, the counter edge biting my hip, the rhythm changing. It would be so easy to let the kiss tip from warm to scorching.
“I want—” she starts, then stops, throat working.
“Me too,” I say, and the two words do a lot of heavy lifting. “We can want and also not rush.”
“Brunch might have killed them,” she says, voice low and amused. “We have time.”
“We do,” I agree, because yes, and also because the sentence tastes like a promise I don’t make lightly.
Another song starts on the radio—something with a little more lift in it, still slow, the kind that makes you sway without realizing you’re doing it. I put us back into motion, a step and a turn, her grin blooming like we just broke a rule and found out the world didn’t end.
We move together through a full rotation before she speaks again, and I can feel her thinking, processing, deciding something.
“You don’t second-guess yourself much, do you?” she asks. “With this. With me.”
“Should I?”
“No, I just—” She shakes her head slightly. “Rowan looks like he’s constantly at war with himself. Cassian acts first, thinks later. But you...” Her gaze searches my face. “You’re very sure.”
