I look at the lamp. "Yes," I say.
He smiles. The real one.
We go for lunch at a place Santos knows, a small restaurant two streets back from the water where the owner comes out of the kitchen specifically to greet him and where the pasta is exactly what it should be and the bread arrives without being asked for. I sit between Santos and Matteo with the blanket in its bag at my feet and the afternoon light coming through the window and the combined scent of all three of them warm and settled around me.
Tomas reads the menu with the focused attention he brings to everything, turning it over once, making his decision, setting it down.
Santos refills my water glass. Matteo has his hand resting near mine on the table, close, not quite touching, the specific closeness that is Matteo communicating presence without requiring acknowledgment of it.
I think about the room. The corner that was wrong. The way my omega went quiet and satisfied when we found the rug, the lamp, the blanket, as though a set of requirements had been metthat she had been carrying since before I knew I was carrying them.
I think about the guest house three days ago and the way the distance of it felt incorrect, and the way Santos's room, our room, felt like the place I was supposed to return to, and the way all three of their scents in the air of it made my whole body go quieter.
I put my hand on my daughter and feel her shift, the small certain movement of someone completely unbothered by the size of what her mother is adjusting to.
"She approves of the blanket," I say.
Santos makes the sound. The low warm one, the one that started in his chest and comes out already content. "Good taste," he says. "She gets it from her mother."
Matteo glances at me and the pale blue eyes are warm and the almost-smile is there, brief and real.
Tomas picks up his fork and begins eating with the steady unhurried focus of a man who has everything he calculated and is in no hurry to be anywhere except exactly here.
Outside the restaurant window the town goes about its afternoon in the September light, easy and warm and unhurried, and somewhere across the water the island is doing its steady patient thing, the herb garden and the kitchen and the best room with the best view waiting for us to bring the right blanket home.
She kicks.
Once, firmly, the way she kicks when something has been decided and she agrees with it.
"I know," I say, to her, quietly.
"What did she say," Santos asks.
"That she also approves of the pasta," I say.
Santos laughs, and the saffron in the air of the small restaurant goes bright and full and entirely his, and the afternoon light catches it, and Tomas smiles over his glass, andMatteo’s sandalwood settles warm and close beside me, and I sit in the middle of all of it and let myself have it properly for the first time.
No arguing myself out of it.
Not one.
30
JENNIFER
The last three weeks with my alphas have been magical. It's weird, because I came here single and pregnant, and now I'm in a pack, even though I'm still pregnant.
No more do I have to worry about money. Matteo called the lawyer, to officially make us a pack in case anything happens to them, and they want me to have rights.
Me.
The one who had a taco truck, became a flight attendant, and now I'm going to be a mom and I'm part of a pack.
The morning light comes through the kitchen window at the angle it always comes at this time of day, gold and warm, laying itself across the marble island in a long stripe that I have started timing my prep work around because it is good light to work in.
She kicks, low and rolling, which is her morning greeting.
"Good morning to you too," I tell her, and adjust the way I am standing because she has an opinion about my posture lately that she expresses physically and without ambiguity.