Page 10 of Witchbane
“They’ll be fine. It’s not a pack issue. It’s a them issue. We can only fix so much,” Liam assured me.
“I want to fix everything.”
“Mhmm,” Liam agreed. “That’s the omega part of you. But even you don’t have that power.” He smoothed the blanket over us, adjusting my head to lie on his chest. “Let’s focus on getting you some rest, okay?” We snuggled up under the new quilt Stacey had given us as a bonding present. It was a giant king-sized thing with blue rings intertwined, and spent more time on the bed of the camper than it did on Liam’s in the house. Mostly because I retreated here often. I realized then that we were sort of already married. The whole bonding thing tying us together in ways that a marriage mandated by human laws could never replicate. Did my mom have a right to be mad then? Would I have invited her to a wedding if I’d had one?
“If we had a wedding, who would you invite?” I asked Liam as I tucked myself into the curve of his body. My face near his shoulder, and his chin resting against the top of my head.
“You. My daughter. The pack,” Liam said.
“I hope I’d be there. Unless you were marrying someone else,” I joked.
“You’d be up there with me or no wedding. I’ve already played the marriage game for the outside world. For us it’s family and pack.”
“You’d invite the whole pack?”
“They are family. I’d do a night thing. Us under the moon and stars. Doesn’t have to be a full moon. But we would have an old-school bonfire, fresh food and drink. They can change and howl at the moon if they want. Dancing and fresh air for us.”
“I don’t dance,” I said.
“You sway with me. That’s enough. Sex under the stars.”
“I’d have sex with you just about anywhere. As long as we’re mostly alone.” I glanced at the distant doorway where I knew Toby slept. If I focused on the pack bonds hard enough, I could single him out. Any of them really. I tried not to. Those first few days with the bonds feeling like real ties to me and I’d spent a little too much time focused on them, worried that I’d mess something up, which had made the pack agitated. An agitated omega made an unsettled pack.
“Who would you invite? What would you plan?” Liam prodded. “If it was for us and not about human laws.”
“Oberon.Apa. The pack. Korissa. Sean. But I’d do a bake-off. Best cake wins… I dunno. More cake maybe? Can never have enough cake.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m craving cake all of a sudden. I’m going to go in with you tomorrow morning if that’s okay.”
“If we sleep now, I can wake you up early for sex before we go to the bakery. You can bake as many cakes as you want. No weddings required,” Liam kissed my cheek. He wrapped his other hand around the end of my braid. The rope of my hair looked like blood beginning to dry next to his tan. He’d never be as dark-skinned as me, but that was okay. I had complained about my hair on more than one occasion, saying I should cut it, but he liked it too much. Didn’t matter that it was that odd shade of brown-red, a rusty sort of fox fur shade, indicative of my other half.
Thinking about marriage made me think of the social construct of it. It meant family. Which technically we were—Korissa, pack and all. With or without any official paperwork. I liked that idea.
“If you had another child, what would you name it?”
Liam looked thoughtful and ran a hand over my hair. It seemed to calm him. “I don’t know. What about you? Do you have a name in mind?”
“No.” Not really. I sort of wanted it to be something like Liam. To remind me of him. Because he was my everything. “How did you pick Korissa?”
“I didn’t,” Liam admitted. “I never thought I’d have a child. She is my first. I let her mother do most of that sort of thing. Pick her name, choose all her clothes. We even hired a nanny. For the first few years of her life, I felt very disconnected from her. It wasn’t until after the divorce, when Korissa chose to live with me, that it changed. Turns out she felt more connected to me than her mom, and yet…” He’d been floundering to connect to her.
“You treated her like pack?”
“She is pack,” Liam said firmly. He did not allow his pack to treat her differently. The few who did got a rare glimpse of Liam’s wrath. “Same as you. Any child we had would be pack.” He said that like he expected to have more. But I was the wrong gender for that. It didn’t stop me from imagining what we would create together. How insane was that?
“I can imagine a baby fox with your eyes. Dark and bright at the same time, a world of curiosity and light.”
“Mischievous,” I said, thinking back to my youth. “Trouble. I could never get enough answers. Always in trouble because I couldn’t leave well enough alone.”
“Children are that way. It’s how they learn. It’s our job as parents to keep them safe as they explore and discover.”
My childhood hadn’t really been that way. It had been isolation mostly. Those first few years withApahad been the best. Free. Able to shift whenever, taught basic survival skills as a fox and a human. For that short time, I’d thought the world very big and open. Until Felix had attacked, giving rise to the monster inApa. It was then I’d been dragged back to the pack and locked up like some sort of damsel in distress. Exploring only through reading.
Was it sad to think I wanted more for any child Liam and I had than that? And how odd a thought. It wasn’t as if either of us could have a child. Not without elaborate planning.
“We would never lock them away,” Liam promised. His touch made me sleepy. “You should rest.”