4. Josie
Josie
Wednesday morning, I make a tactical error. I go to Dottie's first.
I'm running on fumes, because I passed out on the couch before nine and woke at six to my phone convulsing, my mother polling all the relatives on dietary restrictions “for the caterer,” and there is no caterer, there has never been a caterer, the reunion is potato salad and a banner.
I need coffee before I can recruit anyone, and Dottie's has the coffee.
It also has Pete.
“Josie Porter.” He's out of his booth before the bell over the door finishes ringing, which for Pete is a dead sprint. “You were on the phone yesterday.”
“I'm often on the phone, Pete.”
“You were on the phone walking past this window yesterday afternoon, and then you went into the fire station.” He pushes his reading glasses up his nose like he's presenting evidence. “And you came out eleven minutes later walking fast.”
“I had business at the station.”
“What business does a preschool have at a fire station?”
“Fire safety, Pete. The leading kind of safety.”
Dottie materializes between us with my cup already poured, oat milk, too much cinnamon, because the woman has a sixth sense and a sense of timing that should be studied. “Pete, your eggs are getting cold.”
“My eggs are fine.”
“Your eggs are getting lonely, then.” She hands me the coffee and steers me toward the door with one hand and a look I can't read, which worries me more than Pete's whole investigation, because Pete guesses loud and wrong and Dottie guesses quiet and right.
“Tell Lily her order's ready at eight. And Josie.” A beat.
The coffee pot gestures, vaguely, at all of me.
“Whatever it is you're up to this week, honey, eat something first.”
I escape with my coffee and most of my secrets and walk the two blocks to Hollow Creek Outfitters in the morning sun, rehearsing the pitch a second time. The pitch went sideways with Finn inside of a minute. But Finn is a locked door. Hudson is a different animal entirely.
Hollow Creek Outfitters smells like juniper and rope and the kind of competence I do not personally possess outdoors.
It opens at seven, for the fishermen, and at seven forty on a Wednesday it contains one wall of carabiners, Hudson Grant up a ladder hanging a kayak from the ceiling like it weighs nothing, and Beckett Fletcher at the counter signing for what looks like a quarter mile of new rope.
“Morning, Josie,” Beckett says, in that low flat way of his, already coiling the rope over one big shoulder.
I know him the way you know everyone here after five years, by face and by reputation, his being mountain rescue, the man they send when somebody's done something stupid above the tree line.
We've maybe exchanged forty words, total, and thirty of them were the time he fished my keys out of a storm drain and made it sound like a personal failing.
“Beckett. Restocking?”
“Always. People keep getting lost.” He says it like the people are doing it on purpose, to spite him.
He nods at Hudson, drops some bills on the counter, and heads for the door.
“Tell Scarlett I'll settle the tab tonight, I'm headed to the Tipsy Berry after my shift,” he says, to Hudson, and then he's gone, and the bell jangles behind him.
I have forty minutes before twelve children expect me on the alphabet rug, which means this pitch has a hard out.
“Josie Porter,” Hudson says, still without turning around, because apparently no alpha in this town will ever let me announce myself. “You smell like good news.”
“I smell like what?”
“Cinnamon roll that wants a favor.”
He racks the kayak, drops off the ladder without using the last three rungs, and lands in front of me with the crooked grin already loaded. Sandy hair shoved back. Flannel sleeves rolled. The whole catalog page of him.
“Last time you came in here in person, you needed forty kid-sized life vests by that afternoon. I'm on the edge of my seat.”
So I tell him.
I've gotten better at the speech since yesterday.
I keep my voice level and my hands still and I lay it out like a project plan.
The lie. The reunion. The month, the three alphas, the acting requirement, the rehearsal schedule, the absolute secrecy.
By the end, I'm almost proud of how sane it sounds.
Hudson doesn't say anything for a second.
Then he reaches over, very slowly, and rings the little brass bell on the counter. The one that says RING FOR SERVICE.
“Best day of my life,” he says.
“Hudson.”
“Yes.”
“You haven't even—”
“Yes. Obviously yes. What's my name?”
“Your name is Hudson, that's not—”
“My fake name. My character.” He's already moving, rounding the counter, snagging a legal pad from beside the register like a man who's been waiting his whole life for exactly this.
“Am I the one who saw you first? I feel like I'm the one who saw you first. Farmers market, you dropped a peach, I caught it.
No. Too cute. You'd never drop a peach. You have teacher reflexes. You caught my peach.”
“There's no peach.”
“There's always a peach, Josie. The peach is what sells it.” He writes PEACH on the legal pad and underlines it. “Okay. Logistics. How'd we meet, who fell first, where was our first date, what's my song. Couples have songs. Packs definitely have songs.”
“I need you to take this seriously.”
“I am taking this seriously.”
He looks up. The grin's still there, but it's banked, and underneath it is something steadier that people miss about Hudson because the grin does such good cover work.
“Forty-some relatives. A mother with high hopes.
A cousin who finds you the most interesting person at every family event.
That's a hostile audience and a month-long prep window.
You don't need three guys standing around you eating potato salad, Josie.
You need a show. Lucky for you, I'm great television.”
“You impersonated your own twin for forty minutes.”
“Against Pete,” he says, with the quiet pride of a man citing his championship season.
“A professional. Forty-year record. And here's the thing nobody appreciates about that day.
Pete wasn't mad. Pete tells that story better than I do. You know why? Because I committed. A bit half-done is a lie, Porter. A bit fully committed to is a gift.”
The bell over the door jingles. A tourist in brand-new boots wants bear spray and wants to discuss bears generally, and Hudson handles the whole transaction in ninety seconds flat without ever fully taking his attention off me, ringing it up one-handed, answering the bear questions with the practiced patience of a man who has answered every bear question that exists. The door jingles shut.
“Where were we.” He picks the legal pad back up. “Right. The con of the summer.”
“There are going to be rules,” I say. “Real ones. About how this works, what we do, what we don't. I'm not getting into all of it standing here.”
“Rules.” He says it like I've offered him dessert. “Love a rule. Lay them out.”
“Friday. Planning session, my place. Everyone at once, so I only have to say it all one time.” Because I'm going to have to say some of it out loud, the part about who touches me and when and how much, and I would rather do that once, to a room, than three times to three faces.
“Just know going in there's a line, and I draw it, and it doesn't move.”
“Wouldn't dream of moving your line.” And the grin banks for a second, that steadier thing under it surfacing, the part people miss about Hudson.
“You're in charge, Porter. I just do what I'm told, and I do it well.” He flips the legal pad shut.
“Save the rest for Friday. I'll come early. I'll bring the good pens.”
“It's a planning session, not a craft fair.”
“Everything's better with the good pens.”
He leans on the counter, chin in hand, and for a second the grin gentles into something that's just looking at me. The juniper in the air turns warmer. Rounder. Like the sun coming around on a trailhead.
I remind myself firmly that this is a man treating the whole thing as the world's best community theater.
“For the record, Porter, your family's going to take one look at you and believe every word. You're very easy to—” He stops. Recalibrates, with visible effort. “It's going to be very easy to act.”
“Friday,” I say, gathering my coffee and what's left of my composure. “Planning session. My place.”
“Who else have you got?”
“You're the first to say yes. I asked Finn and he turned me down. Logan's this afternoon.”
And Hudson Grant goes still. The grin comes back slow, the size of a man who's just been told Christmas is coming twice.
“Oh,” he says. “Oh, Josie. He's going to say yes so fast it sets a record. You know he's been fixing that preschool fence for a month? A month. On a fence that takes a weekend.”
“It's a structural fence.”
“It's a fence, Josie. He just likes the view from your playground.”
I leave before my scent can say anything else on the subject, and walk the two blocks back fast, because the rug waits for no woman.
My scent editorializes the whole way anyway.
Brown sugar gone warm and stupid in the morning air.
I make it through the preschool door at eight eleven, four minutes before the first drop-off, which Lily clocks with one raised eyebrow and files for later.
The afternoon takes a hundred years to arrive.
I teach. I referee. I supervise a craft involving more glitter than judgment. And the whole time, through the window, I can see the back fence line, where at two o'clock sharp a familiar truck pulls up and Logan Walker unloads lumber like the fence emergency continues into its fifth week.
The kids notice him before I do. They always do. There are six of them lined up along the inside of the fence, supervising, and Logan's crouched on the other side of it, dimple out, listening to Bodhi explain something at length and nodding like it matters.
He hands Bodhi a wood scrap, sanded smooth, the way he always does, because a kid with a wood scrap is a kid with treasure. Bodhi takes it like a knighthood.
And when I step up to the fence the maple-and-cedar of him reaches me, warm and steady, and some quiet part of me I keep a firm lid on leans toward it before I haul it back.
He's crouched with his sleeves shoved up and his forearms are doing something distracting in the afternoon light, all that quiet competence.
I have a brief and extremely unprofessional thought about what those hands would be like, and shelve it immediately, because I am at work, surrounded by four-year-olds, and there are limits.
“You're staring,” Lily says, appearing beside me with the snack tray.
“At the fence,” I say, with dignity.
“Mm.” She doesn't argue. She just stands there and watches with me, which is worse.
Out at the fence line, Logan laughs at something Bodhi says, head tipped all the way back, the whole sound of it carrying across the yard, and his sleeves are shoved up past the elbow, and the early sun is doing something frankly irresponsible to his forearms.
“Hudson texted me,” Lily says. “He says, and I quote, 'tell her the fence has been done for a month.'“
I take the snack tray. I don't have a comeback. That's new.
“Pickup's in an hour.” She pats my shoulder, gentler than she needs to. “Then it's just you and a carpenter. Go get number two, Miss Josie.”
One down. One to go, if he says yes. And a third I don't have at all, because the third already said no and went back under his truck.
Through the glass, Logan glances up like he can feel the attention, finds me in the window, and raises one hand. Not Finn's grudging two fingers from the fire truck. The whole hand, and the whole smile underneath it.