Page 68 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

The cooler, the orders, the hoses — the small liturgy of the place, performed while the light bleeds out of the sky and the fields go to shapes and the greenhouse turns the color of a lit coal.

The wanting comes for me after dark, the way it always does, when there's no one left to be gentle in front of.

I sit on the low bench by the misting bay with the greenhouse breathing around me; jasmine, wet soil, and the ghost of iris off my own skin, and let myself remember the thing my body has been holding since my knuckles brushed her collar.

Not the wedding. Before. A greenhouse like this one, a winter night, the season we trained the jasmine.

Abercrombie.

I let myself think the name here, where no one can hear me take it without permission.

She'd come to help and stopped helping an hour ago. She was up on the potting bench in one of my shirts and nothing I'll survive describing, laughing at me for talking to the seedlings, and then not laughing.

The memory arrives whole, and I give in to it, and my hand goes to my belt in the dark.

Her mouth on mine, patient and then not.

Her scent, always the first thing—more than a bouquet, not even a perfume but the way her skin warmed and the apricot rose and vanilla unfurled into the air, thickening it, until you could taste the sweetness from a hand’s breadth away. I used to joke she was a dessert at the end of summer, all amber and honey with a slice of cool melon, but in reality, there was nothing soft about her once she decided what she wanted.

She had a way of looking up, holding eye contact a full second longer than necessary, like she wanted to memorize exactly how you looked at her in that moment—what you did with your hands, whether you trembled, how your tongue pressed against your own teeth when you held back a sound.

She’d wrapped herself around my neck and kissed me so deeply that every nerve in my body misfired.

Her thighs, bare, bracketed me in, and her lips were so soft but so damn certain. I still remember the way her scent broke as she let go: at first careful and controlled, the way an Omega is trained to keep it, but then, in a rush, all the layers she kept hidden came tumbling out. The top layer was always jasmine—rare for a summer Omega, she used to say, but I never cared about the charts. The base notes, the ones she could never hidefrom me, were darker, more carnal than any designer blend: ripe apricot, rose leaf crushed under a boot heel, the finish of vanilla that had aged in the sun until it was nearly smoky.

Back then, I would have done anything to get her to let the real scent out. I used to say, let go for me, just once, and every time she did, she’d look mortified afterward, but then she’d bury her face in my neck and try to inhale the memory back out.

I lift her off the bench, her laugh bright and reckless, and she wraps her legs around my waist, which she always did when she was trying to hide how turned on she was.

She bit down on my earlobe, not hard, but enough to make me hiss and grip her tighter, and when I kissed down her neck, she shivered in my arms like she was made for it. She always liked the idea that I was stronger, but she’d never let herself be bent, not even in bed.

I lay her down on the warm earth, the potting soil still clinging to her calves and the backs of her thighs, and she arched up to meet me, desperate for friction.

If I’m honest, I think we were always a little feral in the greenhouse; there’s something about glass and heat and the smell of things growing that makes people lose their patience.

I always tried to go slow, but she never let me. She’d drag me down until our teeth knocked together, or she’d tangle her fingers in my hair and yank, and I’d kiss her so hard every regret I’d ever had burned away. I remember the texture of her skin under my palms, the way every inch of her wanted to be touched, but only on her terms.

When she said don’t stop, she meant it; when she said wait, I did.

The first time she ever let herself scent for me, I nearly lost my mind. It was so intense, I could taste it in the back of my throat, and for a second I was sure I’d already gone under. Shealways said she didn’t get the point of heat play, but I could tell she liked the way it made her reckless, like she could give in without having to explain why. After, I asked her what it was like for her, and she just shrugged and said it felt like she had a fever, and I was the only thing that could cool it.

Then she’d laugh and get embarrassed, and I’d try to memorize the exact look on her face for the next time she let me see it.

I miss that version of her. The love that we thrive upon. But it was the way she dismantled me that ruined me.

She’d touch me like I was a promise she planned to keep, even if she never said it out loud. She always used to say I was too serious, that I needed to learn how to take a compliment, but the way she touched me made it impossible to do anything but worship her in return.

When I went down on her, she’d muffle the sounds in her own arm, and then pull me up and kiss me like she wanted to taste herself, and when she came, it was always with my name in her mouth, no one else’s.

The memory is so sharp it nearly hurts.

I can still see the way the overhead lights caught on her hair, the flush along her collarbone, the way she arched up and dug her nails into my waist until I let her win. I always let her win. I took my time with her; every touch was careful, every movement exact.

Some part of me always knew it wouldn’t last, so I made every time count.

She always said I was the only Alpha who ever made her feel safe enough to lose control, and I ruined it anyway. That’s the part I can’t let go of.

Worship was the only language I was ever fluent in, but I never learned how to ask for forgiveness in hers.