He is in the kitchen, because Santos is always in the kitchen lately, and he turns when I come in and reads my face with the particular attentiveness he has been applying to my face since approximately day two on this island.
"I need things," I say. "I need to nest, feel as if I'm part of here. So, I want to buy things for the room, my nest."
Santos puts down the knife he was holding. "Do you know what you need?"
"I don't know exactly," I say, which is the honest answer and also the frustrating one. "Different pillows. More of them. A specific blanket, I will know it when I see it. The sheets need to be different. The lighting needs to be different. There is a corner of the room that is wrong and I cannot tell you why it is wrong but it is wrong and it needs a chair or a lamp or something and I need it to not be wrong."
"Okay," he says. He reaches past me and picks up his phone from the counter. "Matteo."
Matteo appears in the kitchen doorway inside thirty seconds, which tells me he was close. He looks at Santos and then at me and then at Santos again and the pale blue eyes do their reading thing.
"She's nesting," Santos says.
Matteo looks at me. Something moves through his expression that I am cataloguing for later examination, the particular quality of it, careful and warm and certain. "What do you need?" he says.
"I need to go shopping, which means leaving the island."
"We'll take the boat in the morning," Matteo says, as though this is already decided, which apparently it is.
Tomas, who I have just noticed is standing in the hallway behind Matteo, comes into the kitchen and sets his book on the counter and looks at me directly.
"You are the most important thing in this house," Matteo says, from the window. Simple. Flat. The tone he uses for things he has already decided are not up for discussion. “Whatever you need, we’ll get it for you.”
I look at all three of them. Tomas at the counter with his book and his gray eyes and the expression of a man who has run this particular calculation and knows the answer. Santos at theisland, patient and warm and not going anywhere. Matteo by the window. I think about arguing further.
Then I cross the kitchen and I kiss Santos first, warm and quick, and then Matteo, and then I reach up and take Tomas's face in my hands and kiss him too, and his silver musk goes very warm and certain in the air around me.
"An omega could get used to this," I say.
"Good," all three of them say, and I laugh.
My omega has nothing to add. She is exactly where she wants to be and she knows it.
The town off the island is small and warm. Santos walks beside me and his saffron is open and easy in the air. Matteo is on my other side. Tomas walks slightly behind, observing before engaging with anyone.
The first shop has a blanket in the window that stops me before I am fully through the door.
Santos watches my face. "That one," he says.
“Yes,” I confirm.
He picks it up and takes it to the counter without further discussion.
The pillows take longer. I am apparently very specific about them, which is new information about myself that I am filing alongside everything else the nesting process has been generating. Matteo stands in the aisle with me for forty minutes while I work through the options with systematic thoroughness and he does not check his watch or shift his weight or give any indication whatsoever that he has anywhere else to be.
"This one," I say, eventually. "And two of these."
He takes them from me. "Anything else in here."
"The rug section," I say.
We find Tomas in the rug section, standing in front of a deep cream rug with the expression of a man who has already identified the correct answer and is waiting for everyone else to arrive at it.
"That one," I say.
"Yes," he says.
Santos appears from somewhere carrying a lamp, because Santos had apparently already identified that the corner of the room needed a lamp and gone ahead and addressed this independently, and he holds it up with the particular warm expectation of a man who knows he is right.