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Liam is well acquainted with the smell of leaving.
Before he became a beta, before his broad shoulders of youthful exhaustion took up the load of every life in Beacon Hills, long before the fangs of an alpha sunk into the flesh of his wrist to bless him with a curse, he knew what leaving smelled like.
It smelled like this: like the normalcy of the rickety coffee pot brewing at seven in the morning. The waft of bubbling body wash and dandruff shampoo from his parents' ensuite bathroom. The tug of day-old, rough-worn flannel from the hamper onto his father's shower-slick shoulders and the drift of stale English muffins going too crisp in the oven toaster as they always do in the mornings before his father heads to work.
Leaving smelled like the breath of fresh-cut grass from the neighbor across the street as his father squeaked the front door open and stepped out into the July morning and walked to his car and started up the engine with a clear of his throat, as he always did, and swerved to avoid the mailbox on his way out, as he always did. And never came back home. As he'd never done before.
Leaving smelled like the punch of realization in Liam's chest and the inexorable burn of worthlessness in the corners of his eyes half a week later.
Jenna didn't smell like leaving. She doesn't smell like leaving, never has, really, except for that one Saturday morning a month after Chase left that Liam shuffled into his parents' room--Jenna's room, only his mother's room now--to fall face first onto the mattress next to her as they usually did, and he jolted to full awareness when he couldn't find her anywhere.
He didn't have the power to reach into the air for heartbeats and detangle the scents around him, back then. All he knew was the high and irrational clawing of panic at his throat and the taste of ugly, childlike tears choking him as he scrambled through the rooms of the house calling her name. He knew the pounding of that panic at the base of his skull, could feel it, could smell it, couldn't take the churn of it in his gut, and as he shouldered the back door open and spilled onto the back porch and finally sighted his mother's figure hunched smaller than ever at the furthest bounds of their property, studying the trees, Liam came to know the smell of stinging relief.
Almost-leaving was almost worse, in some ways. It smelled to Liam like all the people he loved most and distrusted the least.
All the people who could hurt him to his core because he would let them.
And now Liam has come to recognize that engulfing scent of almost-leaving on the newest person he's learned to trust, against every instinct in him that screams of Chase, that takes him by the shoulders and shrieks at him to remember the normalcy of the coffee and the muffins and the fresh butter and the sprinkled grass on that day his father left him open and bleeding and not worth even a backward glance in his wake.
Theo has one arm slung over Liam's belly and the other grafted into the pillow beneath Liam's head, and Liam's one with him in this moment in the spilling illumination of the gibbous moon, rubbing a thumb over the valley between Theo's thumb and second finger. Here Liam smells him, the scent of pine and untamed wandering that can only be hidden so long by fresh soap. Here Liam has the chance to draw deep breaths and take in gulpfuls of Theo's scent that has always been most complex around him, and around him alone: calm with an undercurrent of a storm; hope tangled inextricably with guilt; a trembling normalcy constantly poised to be broken. A boy who's been trained to infiltrate and leave, and who's defying every instinct hammered into him by fist and scalpel and deprivation to never look back.
Liam wonders how he can ever calm the scent of almost-leaving from this boy he's accidentally come to love.
Because Theo pulls away from him, always, before the yawning of the dawn, as if the things he dares to lay bare before Liam are too egregious to be left exposed into the daylight, and he doesn't know, can't possibly know how it drives another knife into Liam that even this must be a secret between them by natural consequence of the fact that everything else about Theo Raeken is a secret even to himself.
And Theo pulls open the window and clambers out over the windowsill onto the groaning shingle of the roof outside Liam's bedroom gable so he can drop down with terrible grace onto the balls of his feet on the fresh-sprinkled grass below and slip into his truck to leave.
Sometimes Liam is awake and pretends to still be asleep when Theo leaves, because the secondhand humiliation is almost too much to bear when he and Theo lock eyes between the bed and the window and the waves of guilt roll off in tides from Theo's shoulders. Other times, Liam is selfish, Liam is hungry, spent too many years of his life with the snapping maw of loneliness and worthlessness inside him, that he lets his eyes fly open at the dip and spring of Theo on the mattress detangling himself from his boyfriend, and on those days--on those half-mornings, those almost-leavings--he has to look at Theo and wait until Theo looks back so he knows that Theo knows he's holding him to the tacit promise to be back.
After the war, too many people never came back. Some from death, others from a fate far worse: the discovery of a world outside Beacon Hills and the chance of a lifetime to cast off its shackles for good.
And Liam--Liam is still here.
It's on the unusually bright waking of the sun on a morning in July, the seventh anniversary of Chase's leaving, that Liam wakes to the familiar scrape of the window in its track as Theo pushes the pane up with gritted teeth.
The sound sends Liam hurtling back to the squeak of the front door. The squeal of the hinges on the back door when he burst barefoot onto the porch calling for his mother. The grate of the engine of Stiles' Jeep roaring, the teasing lilt in the rib you're the alpha now, the kind and burning trust in Scott's eyes as he laid a heavy hand of responsibility on Liam's shoulder, and mostly, cruelly, the sound of stewardesses' heels clicking and robotic announcements overhead in the airport the day Mason's mother was going to separate from her husband and take Mason away forever to Texas before she changed her mind.
The sound of the window and the smell of Theo's guilt are too much like the true scent of leaving that Liam flings back the covers and trips to his feet, heart pounding inside him like it'll break, like he'll take one more step toward the boy he doesn't know how to unlove and he'll come completely apart.
He rushes to the windowsill and grips the flaking paint there under his palms. "Don't leave," he says in the pressure of his morning voice. Says through the rasp of not knowing how to say this without an ounce of desperation.
Theo stops and turns. He's already crouched on the roof in his smiling-soled sneakers. He swivels, gets down on one knee first on the shingles and then the other. He leans the entire upper half of his body back through the open window, into Liam's space.
"I need to get to work," he says.
Liam swallows. He doesn't know what else to say except the same words again, "Please don't leave."
Don't leave me.
Theo's gaze trails down from the sudden moisture in Liam's irises to the wild pulsing in the side of his throat, to the gentle rise and fall of his chest that belies the monstrous ache that threatens to devour Liam whole like it should have seven years ago.
Theo's gaze fixes there--on the invisibility of Liam's heart and how it beats uncontrollably, bravely on, despite how it shouldn't be alive after everything, should be manufactured and transplanted there just like Theo's own--and Theo flits his eyes back up to meet Liam's and he understands.
"I'm not leaving you," he murmurs. "I'm coming back."
For you.
Liam doesn't ask, you promise? Doesn't waste his breath on things that are easily lied about like always?
Instead he asks, for the first time, "Come back for lunch?"
He swallows and licks his lips and follows that up with: "Come back and meet my mom?"
And Theo--he doesn't make the moment more than it has to be. He nods and says, "I'll be there," and then he leans further in with his warm palms laid over the back of Liam's hands on the windowsill between them and he presses his lips softly to Liam's.
He pulls away to find Liam blinking at him. Liam finds his own pulse slowing steadily to the hum of a creek that may dry up upon the arrival of July but will always come back to life at the turn of autumn.
Liam nods. Theo squeezes his hands once, twice. Smiles a little like a devil and a lot like the boy Liam loves. He slides down the roof again and jogs to his truck, starts up the engine with a rumble. But he doesn't pull away immediately.
And then Liam hears it, Theo's voice speaking to him across the distance from the cabin of his truck.
"I promise I'll be there, Li. Just wait for me."
The last traces of the fist of anxiety around Liam's heart finally unclench. He breathes back a wordless sound of hope in response, and Theo peels away from the curb a block away and roars down the street.
Hours later, the doorbell sounds for the first time in months, possibly years, and when Jenna yells cheerily at her son to get it, he treads to the front door wondering if he'll find a ghost on the other side.
He pulls it open, and standing there, looking perfectly roguish--scent like an untamed coyote ready to run, but pawing at the ground and dipping its head to concede that right here, right now is the time to say he's found something like home--is Theo Raeken.
"Hi," says Theo.
"Hi," says Liam.
And he thinks, maybe the smell of fresh-cut grass wafting in from behind Theo doesn't have to remind him anymore of leaving.
Maybe, just maybe, the pine and wandering under the fur-bone-split-skin of Theo's body can start to smell like staying.