6. Finn
Finn
It's been two days and I have not thought about Josie Porter once, which is how I know I've thought about almost nothing else.
Seven minutes later we're on scene, and it's what I figured. Quarter acre of June grass going up lazy, more smoke than threat, creeping toward a fence post like it's got all morning. Old man Smith's out there swatting at the edge of it with a wet feed sack, which is how men his age get on the news.
“Sir.” I take the sack out of his hands and steer him back by the shoulder, gentle, the way you move furniture you respect. “We've got it.”
“It's barely a fire.”
“Then it'll barely take a minute.”
It takes eleven. Gus runs the line, I cut the edge, the June grass goes from orange to black to steaming, and the whole time my hands do the work clean and my head is two days back, in my own bay, watching a small flammable woman walk out with her chin up like the no hadn't landed.
That's the thought that shows up in the middle of a working fire line. Not the wind. Not the fence post. Her.
“You good?” Gus asks, coiling hose.
“Fine.”
“You've been fine all week. It's unsettling.”
“Inspecting the grass.”
“Sure,” he says, and lets it ride.
Smith makes us take a jar of pickles. That's the job, some days. You put out a quarter acre and you leave with pickles, and the truck smells like brine and char the whole way back, and your partner eats a sandwich in the passenger seat like it's a dining car.
Back at the station, I decide the truck needs a new gasket. It doesn't. I've checked it twice this week. I'm checking it a third time, because if my hands stop moving I'm going to think about Josie Porter, and I have a system, and the system is the truck.
The system has not been working.
The system stopped working two days ago, when she walked into my bay smelling like burnt sugar and bad decisions and asked me to stand in a backyard and lie to her whole family, and then, when I said no like a sane man, told me the thing about the wave.
She wasn't supposed to know about the wave.
Nobody's supposed to know about the wave. The wave is between me and twelve preschoolers, and that's where it stays.
“You're going to strip that bolt,” Gus says from the kitchen doorway. He's on sandwich four of the shift. “It's been tight for an hour.”
“It's fine.”
“You're fine, the bolt's fine, everything's fine.” He chews. “She got two of them, by the way. Your teacher.”
The wrench stops.
“What.”
“Grant and Walker. Both said yes.” He says it around a mouthful, watching me a little too closely for a man this invested in a sandwich. “Which means she's got two of the three she needs for that thing she came in here asking you about on Tuesday. While I was in the back room. With the door open.”
I look at him.
“Walls are thin, Finn. I heard the whole thing. The reunion, the fake pack, the three alphas, all of it.” He takes another bite, unbothered.
“Relax. I'm not telling anybody, who would I even tell.
But I'll say this part for free.” He points the sandwich at me.
“She walks in here, hands you a month of being hers and nothing to lose, and you said no.”
“It's fake, Gus.”
“Didn't say it wasn't.” He takes another bite. “Said she needs three alphas, and she asked you first, and you said no, and now she's out there asking everybody else.” He shrugs. “None of my business. Just seems like a strange thing to say no to, is all.”
“She needs a third,” I say, because it's the only part my mouth will form.
“She does. Found two without much trouble.” He looks at me, way too casual about it. “She'll find the third too.”
I look at the tool wall. It's alphabetized. I don't remember doing that.
But the favor didn't start on Tuesday. It started two months ago, in a closet, and nobody knows that part.
The Spring Fling. My mother introduced me to a visiting omega. Perfectly nice. Genuinely, no complaints. And that was the problem, the no-complaints, the way I stood there running down a list of reasons it was fine and felt nothing tick over.
My mother beaming like she'd already picked a date.
A perfectly nice omega scent in the air, pleasant, forgettable, not one thread of my biology sitting up to notice it.
The omega laughing at something I hadn't said.
And somewhere in there I walked very calmly out the side of the community tent and into the first unlocked door I could find.
The preschool. Specifically, the craft closet.
A grown man. A public servant. Folded onto a stool built for a five-year-old, wedged between a bin of pom-poms and a shelf of construction paper while his mother's voice worked the crowd outside.
Josie found me in four minutes. Opened the closet door and looked at me.
She didn't laugh.
That's the part I keep coming back to. She had every right to laugh.
Instead she said, “Scooch,” took the other tiny stool, and sat down next to me like a craft closet was a perfectly normal place for two adults to be.
Didn't ask why. Didn't make me talk. After a minute she pulled a coffee can off the shelf, tipped half of it into my hands, a thousand loose buttons, and set a divided tray between us, one little compartment for each color.
She started sorting. So I sorted. Two grown adults filling tiny compartments with buttons on tinier stools while my mother worked the crowd twenty feet away.
She smelled like a kitchen in December, and somewhere between the reds and the blues my shoulders came down off my ears for the first time all spring.
I've thought about those twenty minutes more than I'd ever say out loud, to Gus, to my mother, to her. I've also decided, more than once, that it didn't mean anything. Somebody's kind to you in a closet, you remember it. That's all it is. That's all I let it be.
And when my mother's voice came down the hall, Josie slipped out and pulled the door not-quite-shut behind her. Through the gap, I watched her lie.
Worst lie I've ever heard. Voice up two octaves. Ears red as a hydrant. Something about a sensory table that didn't exist. My mother, who can smell a fib through drywall, tilted her head, looked at this small omega vibrating with dishonesty, and decided to let it stand.
To this day I don't fully know why. I think it might've been mercy. I think they might've understood each other in some language I don't speak.
Anyway. I owe her. “Anything, name it,” I said, like an idiot, drunk on freedom and felt-glue fumes.
The woman waited two months and named the one thing. And I said no, fast, before the part of me that wanted to say yes could get its boots on. Told myself it was about my mother. The lie. The principle of the thing. Told myself a lot of things.
The phone rings at four. I know before I look. There's a specific dread.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Finnegan.” Clippers going in the background. Salon noise. Which means I'm on speaker, which means whoever's in the chair is now part of this. “Don't make plans for the second Saturday of July.”
“What's the second Saturday of July.”
“Marie Hartley's niece is coming through town.” A pause. Weighted. Professional. The woman could land a plane with her pauses. “An omega, Finn. Works in veterinary pharmaceuticals. She raises those dogs, the clever ones.”
“I'm working that Saturday.”
“You don't know which Saturday it is.”
“I work all of them.”
“That,” my mother says, “is exactly the problem.”
Her voice changes. Salon-bright to just-us quiet, even with half the town in her chairs.
“You're thirty-two, sweetheart. You work, you fix that truck, you come to dinner once a week and you look at your phone twice the whole meal. I'm not trying to run your life.”
“You're trying a little.”
“I'm trying a medium amount, and you know why?” The clippers stop.
“Because your sister at least pretends she's looking, and that buys her a year at a time.
You won't even pretend. A mother can take a lot of things, Finn, but watching her boy build a life with nobody in it is not going to be one of them.
The Hartley girl will be at the Tipsy Berry on the eighth. Seven o'clock. Wear the blue shirt.”
She hangs up. She always hangs up first. Tactical.
I stand in the engine bay holding a phone and a wrench, and I can see exactly how the rest of the year goes.
The Hartley girl on the eighth. Whoever it is at the Huckleberry Festival.
The visiting cousins, the friends of friends, the setups.
My mother's face going hopeful and then, when it doesn't take, going quiet. Over and over. Every month. Forever.
Because she's not going to stop. Stopping would mean giving up on me, and the woman has never given up on anything in her life, including a 1996 Buick.
I put the phone in my pocket and go back to the gasket that doesn't need me.
It doesn't take.
The bay's quiet. Late sun coming through the doors, dust hanging in it. And I think the thing I've been not thinking for two days.
She found two without me. She's going to find a third.
That's the part that's got the wrench going cold in my hand, and it's not a thought I'm proud of.
Some other alpha is going to stand in that backyard and hold her hand and learn her coffee order and be the thing I said no to, and Gus is going to watch me hear about it, around a sandwich, and not say a word, which is worse.
And the rest of it, the part I actually can't argue my way out of.
If I had a pack, even a fake one, even for a season, the calls stop. The setups stop. My mother's face stops. It's the same trade Josie's making. Same scam, same kind of mother. Hers cries about it. Mine schedules about it. Same animal.
That's the reason I'd give if anyone asked. It's a good reason. It's even true. It's just not the whole of it, and I leave the rest where it is.
It's still a terrible plan. Her family will be a minefield, somebody will ask how we met, and Josie will blurt out some story with a timeline that doesn't survive a follow-up question, and the whole thing could come down like a barn in a wind.
I list every reason it's a bad idea. The list is long and good and I believe all of it.
And I put the wrench down anyway.
Gus is watching me from the kitchen with sandwich five. “You're doing a face.”
“I don't do faces.”
“You're doing one right now. It's new. I've never seen it.”
I pick up my keys.
“Cover the radio,” I tell him. “I have to go fix something.”
“Take the pickles,” he calls after me. “Lead with the pickles.”
I do not take the pickles.
The preschool's lights are still on when I pull up, everyone else long gone, the lot empty but for her little car.
Late-afternoon sun coming gold through paper snowflakes that are five months out of season.
Through the window I can see her stacking tiny chairs onto tiny tables, one at a time, talking to herself, or rehearsing something. Knowing her.
I sit in the truck for one full minute.
There's a thought in here somewhere with my name on it, something about her and a month and how bad an idea this is for reasons that have nothing to do with her family. I don't pick it up. I've gotten good at not picking it up.
I think about the rest of it instead. How people in this town are nice to me the way you're nice to weather, careful, from a distance, hoping it passes.
How she walked into the storm, sat down on a tiny stool, and kept my secret for two months without once holding it over me, until the day she finally needed something back.
And how, when she asked, I sent her up the block alone.
She found me in a closet and didn't laugh. I told her anything, name it. She named it. A man pays what he owes.
That's the reason. I'm going with that reason.
Then I get out, and I knock on the door of a preschool at the end of the day like a man turning himself in.
She opens it. Blinks up at me. Hope and terror have a fistfight on her face, and her scent does something warm and complicated that I am not going to think about in this doorway, except I am, because it's the thing that's been wrong with me since Tuesday.
One conversation through an open door and I've been able to smell brown sugar in rooms she isn't in.
A grown man, a firefighter, undone by a preschool teacher and a salad order.
It's undignified. It's also not stopping.
Standing here in her doorway with the after-school light going gold, close enough to catch it clean, it's worse than undignified.
It's a low pull that's got nothing to do with a favor or a deal—jaw set, hands in my pockets, running the same discipline I run at a working fire.
Flat face, steady voice, the want locked down where it won't show.
Twenty years I've spent keeping my face still.
She's the first thing that's ever made the keeping-still cost me.
“I owe you. I don't like owing people.” I make myself say the rest. “I'll do your fake pack thing. I have conditions.”