Page 12 of Omega’s Fold

I had not anticipated how comprehensive his scent would be. The scent is in the walls.

It is in the fabric of the coat on the hook and the rag rug at the door and the wood of the floor. It is not strong. It does not have to be. It is simply the scent of every room in this house. Everywhere. My body has been responding to it since I stepped out of the rental car and will apparently continue to respond to it for the foreseeable future.

I can feel the prime match. Wyatt Briggs is strange, but he is also the most attractive thing I have ever come across. Something about him makes me desperate to reach over and touch him, skin to skin and never let go.

I’ve never had that kind of visceral reaction to anyone. Still, he is strange. And he clearly does not want me here. It’ll make the two-week cohabitation period easy, if so.

Caleb is halfway down the hall already. “This way.”

I follow. He takes me past an open doorway that shows a bathroom with a chipped clawfoot tub, past a couple of closed doors, and stops at the last door on the left. He opens it and steps back to let me through.

“Here you go,” he says.

I step inside.

The first thing that registers is that no one has been in this room in a long time.

It’s not dusty. Someone keeps it clean. But every object in it is arranged as if the person who used it last is going to come back in an hour and resume her day.

A dressing gown is draped over the arm of a chair in the corner. A brush sits on the dresser with a few long, dark hairs caught in the bristles. On the nightstand, there’s a paperback with a bookmark around a third of the way.

The bed is made.

I stand in the doorway and do not step any further in.

Caleb has not come in. He stands in the hallway with one shoulder against the jamb and watches me take it in. His face is unreadable in a way that is, I am beginning to understand, the house default.

“Bathroom’s next door on the right,” he says. “Hot water’s slow. You’ve got to let it run a minute before it gets hot. Wyatt’ll be back in at supper. If you need something in the meantime, the kitchen’s where you came in. Help yourself.”

“Thank you.”

He makes a small sound, and then he is gone down the hall. The back door opens and closes and I hear his boots on the porch and then on the drive. He has gone out to the barn. He has gone, I suspect strongly, to join his brother.

What am I even doing here? The surrealness hits me suddenly. I’m in what I suspect is Wyatt Briggs’s dead mother’s bedroom on a ranch in the middle of nowhere because I am supposed to be matched to a man who appears to primarily communicate in grunts.

Eli would be loving this.

I close the bedroom door behind me. It closes heavily. Nothing in this house moves without its weight.

I set the suitcase on the floor and look at the room.

There are three windows. One faces the yard where my rental car sits parked, the other two face the pasture beyond.

I do not open the wardrobe. I don’t need to look to see that it will be filled with clothes. I am not going to be here that long. I can live out of the suitcase.

I lay the suitcase flat on the rag rug at the foot of the bed and unzip it. I had packed efficiently for what I had expected to be a single night in a motel and a quiet flight home.

I have a single change of clothes, my toiletry bag, and my laptop. The rest of the suitcase is filled with designs. If I am going to be stuck here, I am going to need clothes. I presume the co-habitation order will allow me to leave here long enough to go into town and buy whatever passes for fashion around here.

My mouth is dry. I get up, walk to the window, look out at the yard. Beyond the yard, the land opens out in low, dry grass with patches of sage and juniper and, somewhere past that, the dark line of a ridge.

I have never stood in a room that has such a long view out of it. My apartment has a view, but my view is of other buildings, which is a different thing entirely.

There’s a truck coming up the long drive. It’s white and battered, snaking back and forth over the ruts in a way that indicates the driver knows the road very well.

The truck pulls up outside and a boy of around eight gets out, waves at the driver and runs into the house. The truck turns around and starts meandering back over the ranch road.

I hear a voice call out, “I’m home!”