Sugar Coated

14

Delaney Linwood

Em lead me into the back door and toward the stairwell, I'd never given myself the opportunity to ponder past the barest bones of "the Sinclair pack lives up there". Jackson on the other hand was an ever-present heat at my back as they lead me up the staircase and into the heart of their pack territory.

Jacksons's hand settled on the small of my back halfway up the stairs just when my packless beta senses began to war against me. He didn't push, only steadied me in tandem as Em's hand immediately sought out mine where it had gripped the line of my choker.

Between the both of them, I took my first steps into their den. It was all warm wood finishings that matched the permeating scent of chocolate. It made my mouth water. They made my mouth water.

"—the kitchen is this way," Em ushered me bright like a beacon through the hallway, his fingers slid along the line of chair rail that decorated the wall nearby us.

"And by extension so am I," Andres smirked our way when we turned around the corner. The room was long with what could have amounted to a conveyor belt of countertops. It was the kind of house that catered to someone that loved to cook. I cut my eyes back to Jackson, who watched me with an intensity that had my eyes returning to his Beta, though he watched me just the same.

"Hi, Andres," I'd been through my fair share of awkward first dates before, but never once had I been through an awkward pack trial. I'd never been through a pack trial, though, so if my inner monologue were feeling kind I could have convinced myself this was par for the course.

We'll settle on that.

"Hello, Delaney. I hope you came with an appetite," Andres' eyes cut to the others, that sharp tick of his smile was out in full force, "though if you didn't I'm sure we could find some way to rouse one up."

I could nearly feel the deep warning rumble resonating from Jax where he stood at my back, as much as Em's laughter tried to drown it out.

"And you thought you had to warn me," Em's accusatory glare was more playful than angry as he slipped his arm across my shoulders.

Jax's smile was brilliant if just the slightest hint feral, "Noted."

I committed the weight and the feel of Em's arm to memory, to the shift of it across my shoulders when I shrugged, "Depends on how good your meat is, someone, said burgers?"

I ripped the laughter out of all of them with words I pulled from the cache of "Rosie would say something stupid like this" phrases I had tucked away in the grey matter inside my thick skull.

What was flirting anyway if not spitting out some idea you'd heard somewhere else either on the internet or from the mouths of horny friends.

My best one-liners on dates usually came from Rosie, but to be fair she'd given me permission to use anything she said at the tender age of eleven with our pinky wrapped around the other's. When she was sixteen she kindly added the caveat "preferably on a date" and "most definitely if it ends with me in a bed, car, or even a linen closet". We'd pinky promised that one as well with the same giggles we had at eleven.

"Sure, burgers, of course," Andres drawled while wearing a frilly pink apron that was at least a couple inches too short for his six-foot and some change frame. He looked at me for just a second too long before his voice deepened, "come here, Delaney."

Jax's hand sat warm at the small of my back. He didn't press me forward or steer me into the middle of his packmates.

Em was his opposite one arm across my shoulders the other snuck down to the hand pressed cleanly between us and wrapped tightly around my fingers to pull me with him, nestled firmly against his side.

I went easily into the warmth of their kitchen and the heat that rolled off of the three men, literal or metaphorical — I was an equal opportunist.

Andres watched my movement in that hungry calculating way, with that same stillness of a predator tracking prey.

The room was charged —the tingle of it spread up my arms teasing the hair up on end until even the slightest brush of Em's sweater felt like electricity. I'm sure the whole exchange only lasted for a handful of seconds, but the 8 steps it took me to get from the hallway to standing just in front of Andres felt like 50 years. And each and every year of it wound me tighter and tighter until I could barely even breathe without it coming out in a rabid pant. He was more than anyone had a right to be and it made me believe that I could be too.

Andres had an uncanny magnetism --the same kind that took the world by storm while the internet pondered at how it even worked.

I liked the sharp cut of his smile, wanted to know the feel of it in any way I could.

"Later," he husked out the promise, making me believe he could read my mind in the way I fantasized his eyes could do. The warm press of his hand against my cheek and the lingering smell of red pepper flakes and a hint of lime was the chaste affection that had me hotter than anything else before, all bundled in between the auras of the three men. "Fill you up now and then we'll consider filling you up later," the quirk of his smile matched the dark slash of his eyebrow as it changed his features into a smirk.

"If you can't be on your best behavior, Andres, at least be better," Jax growled out the words but they rolled over me without any bark in them.

"I don't know I think this is the best I've ever seen him," Em radiated heat at my back and enveloped me in the silky scent of melted chocolate. His hands roamed more and more: up and down the curve of my waist and hips, spreading that heat along the profile of my silhouette until his hands quested farther down to cup the curve of my ass.

That garnered a warning from Jax in the form of the stern use of Em's name --not Em, but Emil.

All it earned was a pout that didn't go reprimanded. I imagined Em likely rarely was reprimanded within his pack, by the way they doted on their omega. It made my chest ache and the palms of my hands tingle to be wanted like that: not necessarily in the physical way —because I'd been wanted by the lovers that had come by, but to be wanted in that simple way of just existing in a shared space. What would it feel like to have a place in a world meant just for you? What was it like to be something notable..someone worth noticing?

What did it feel like to know that someone saw something missing in that space beside them and decided that you were exactly the right person to fill that space?

"Come here, Doll," Jax voice was firm coaxing never quite a command just a tantalizing suggestion.

Em had approached Andres in the time that I'd been feeling maudlin about things I'd long since told myself to be proud of. It shouldn't have made a difference —anyone's thoughts but my own, but it made it a little bit easier to be happier about who I was when this pack made a space just for me, right in the middle of all of them.