CHAPTER 31 – NOPE
1080 Words
LAYLA'S POV
The fortress held overnight, and I can feel the difference before I'm fully awake.
It's in the sound of the kitchen when I come downstairs - all three of them already there, and the energy between them has shifted from parallel to connected. Rafe is making coffee the way he always does, but when Colt reaches past him for the sugar, Rafe adjusts his position to make room without looking. When Eli walks in with my glass of water - lemon slice, always - Rafe registers his presence with a glance that isn't checking. It's acknowledging.
They've always been brothers. But this is something more specific. A formation. And I'm the centre point.
"Morning, Rowan." Colt kicks out the chair beside him. "You look like you slept well."
"I did."
"Interesting." His green eyes hold mine with that lazy heat. "Wonder why."
"Leave her alone," Eli says from behind me as he sets the glass down. His fingers brush my shoulder on the way past and the touch is brief and deliberate and sends warmth down my arm.
Rafe puts a mug of coffee in front of me without being asked. Made the way I like it - he's been paying attention, the same way they all pay attention, and the fact that he knows how I take my coffee shouldn't make my chest ache but it does.
I sit down and eat and something unknots in me that I didn't know was knotted. This is what I wanted. This is what I admitted to myself last night while I listened through the wall. And here it is - not performed, not announced, just happening. Four people at a kitchen table who have decided what they are to each other.
The day moves differently. I notice it in pieces.
Rafe walks me to the garage for my meeting with Gears and his hand rests on my lower back for exactly as long as it takes to cross the compound. Colt finds me at the bar with Nina after lunch and drops into the seat beside me and his thigh presses against mine and stays there while he talks to Gears about a manifold. Eli is in the common room when I come back from Harper's - sketchbook open, pencil moving - and when I sit on the opposite end of the couch, he shifts so his knee touches mine without looking up from the page.
They're not competing for proximity. They're sharing it. Rotating naturally, without discussion, like they worked out the geometry of this in Rafe's room last night and now it's just how they move.
Harper notices at dinner. She looks at me across the table, then at Rafe beside me, then at Colt across from me, then at Eli to my left. Her eyebrows climb slowly toward her hairline. She mouths "WHAT" at me from behind her glass. I mouth "LATER" back. She mouths "OH YOU BET LATER" and I have to look at my plate to keep from laughing.
That evening, we end up in the common room. Not by arrangement - by gravity. The specific gravity of four people who've decided to orbit the same centre.
I'm on the couch. Rafe is in the armchair to my left with his foot resting against my thigh - just his boot, just the weight of it, but the contact is constant and warm through my jeans. Colt is on the floor with his back against the couch and his shoulder pressed into my knee, and every few minutes his thumb traces a lazy circle on my ankle like he doesn't realize he's doing it. Eli is across the room with his sketchbook closed on his lap - not drawing, just looking at the three of us with an expression I've never seen on his face before.
It might be contentment. On Eli, it looks like coming home.
Someone puts a movie on. Nobody watches it. The room has that particular warmth of people who know exactly what they are and have stopped pretending otherwise.
Colt's hand moves from my ankle to the back of my calf and squeezes once. "This is nice."
"Don't ruin it by talking," Rafe says.
"That's literally impossible. My voice improves everything."
"Your voice improves nothing."
"Layla, tell him my voice improves things."
"I'm staying out of this."
"Eli, back me up."
Eli looks at Colt. Looks at Rafe. Looks at me. "His voice is fine. It's the volume that's the problem."
Colt clutches his chest. "Betrayal. From my own blood."
I'm smiling so hard my face hurts. Rafe's foot presses harder against my thigh and I glance at him and the corner of his mouth is doing the thing - not quite a smile, but the ghost of one, the Rafe version of beaming.
Nina comes through the back hallway. She rounds the corner into the common room carrying a crate of bottles toward the storage closet. She takes one look at us - at Rafe's boot on my thigh, at Colt's head against my knee, at Eli watching from across the room, at me in the middle of all of it looking like a woman who just discovered the meaning of the word "enough."
She says: "Nope."
She turns around and walks directly back out without breaking stride.
The laughter hits all four of us at the same time. Not polite laughter. Not social laughter. The deep kind - the kind that comes from somewhere lower than amusement and fills the room from the floor up. Colt drops his head back against the couch and his whole body shakes with it. Rafe's foot presses into my thigh because he's trying not to laugh and failing. Eli's face cracks open into a full, rare, devastating smile that I've never seen before and immediately want to see again for the rest of my life.
It's the first time all four of us have laughed together. And the sound of it rearranges something in my chest that I think might be permanent.
The laughter settles. The movie plays. Colt's hand is back on my ankle. Rafe's boot is warm against my thigh. Eli's smile is fading but his eyes are still soft.
I look at Rafe's profile in the lamplight, Colt's jaw tilted toward the ceiling with the last of the grin still on his face, Eli's quiet expression that says everything his mouth won't, and I think:
I am so screwed.
- Writer
