7. Josie
Josie
By six o'clock Friday my house smells like garlic and roasting chicken, I've got two alphas in it and a third on the way, and it's dawning on me that I did this. On purpose. To myself.
Hudson got here first. Of course he did. He arrived at five forty with a six-pack, the legal pad from the shop already half full of notes in his own handwriting, and a tote bag he won't explain, and the expression of a man who's been looking forward to this all week.
“I made a list,” he says, waving the pad. “Things your family's going to ask. How we met, who fell first, whose idea the third date was. We should have answers before we need them.”
“You actually prepped.”
“I'm offended you're surprised. I prep for everything. You should see my fishing tackle.”
Logan's in my kitchen, which is a sentence I did not expect to think today.
He showed up at five fifty holding a dish of something that smells like garlic and roasting chicken, said “it's nothing, just had stuff in the fridge,” which is a lie because nobody has this in the fridge.
He set it on my counter, found my oven on the second try, and has been keeping it warm and staying out of the way ever since.
Every so often I catch him looking around my house the way he looks at the fence, like he's noting which things he'd fix. He hasn't offered. He just notices, quiet, and goes back to the green beans.
So that's two. Two alphas, in my house, behaving themselves, here because I asked.
And one empty chair, because the third turned me down on Tuesday and went back under a truck, and I have spent the days since not letting myself hope about the dent he left in the doorway when he caved.
Because he did cave. He showed up at the preschool last night, said I'll do your fake pack thing, I have conditions, and then left before I could do anything embarrassing like cry or thank him twice.
Which means he's coming tonight. Which means all three of them are about to be in one room for the first time, and the only thing they have in common is me.
The knock comes at six on the dot.
I know it's him before I open the door. Not the scent, though that's there, woodsmoke and clove, the evening coming in with him off the porch. It's the knock. Two raps, exactly. A man announcing himself to a building he'd rather not enter.
“You came,” I say, which is not what I meant to say.
“I said I would.” Finn steps past me into the house, and the whole room rearranges to make space for him, because he's the biggest and least comfortable person in it.
He takes in the casserole, Hudson on my couch with the legal pad, Logan in my kitchen doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder, and something in his jaw goes tight. “All of us. At once. Great.”
“Morrow.” Hudson lifts his beer in salute. “He showed. You're late, though.”
“I'm on time.”
“Spiritually you're late.” Hudson's grinning, but his eyes do a quick thing, flick to Finn, flick to me, flick back, like he's already adjusting the script. “I had you at maybe. Logan had you at no. Josie wouldn't take the bet.”
“I wasn't going to bet against him showing up,” I say.
Logan steps out of the kitchen, dish towel still over his shoulder, and puts out a hand. “Good to have you, man. Genuinely.”
Finn looks at the hand for half a second longer than is polite, then shakes it, one firm pump. “Walker.”
So that's the picture. The three of them in my living room, sizing each other up the way alphas do, friendly enough on the surface and underneath it doing math about each other I'm choosing not to translate.
Logan open, Hudson delighted, Finn braced like the room might ask something of him. Three alphas who could not be more different, and the only thing they've got in common is standing here holding a list.
Nobody warned me about this part when I cooked it up at my kitchen table with a marker and a list. On paper, three alphas was a math problem. A staffing issue. In my actual living room, three alphas is something my body has a much older and stupider opinion about.
Because Logan's got his sleeves rolled to the elbow over my stove, doing something useful because he physically cannot stand in a kitchen and not, and his forearms are a problem I'll be taking up with management later.
Because Hudson's sprawled on my couch like he was poured there, all easy shoulders and that grin he keeps aiming at me. The grin is a public utility, he aims it at everyone, and it still does something to the backs of my knees.
And because Finn is just large in my space, taking up more air than any one alpha should, and every time he reaches for something his shirt does a thing across his back that I have decided, as a matter of policy, not to witness.
The policy is not working. I have three alphas in my house, each one a different flavor of problem, and somewhere between Logan's forearms and Hudson's grin and whatever Finn's shoulders are doing, my body has quietly concluded that this is the best idea I have ever had and is casting a vote I did not authorize.
It's a lot of want for a Friday. I came up with this plan to avoid being humiliated at a reunion, not to spend an evening damp-palmed and distracted in my own living room.
I made this pack out of a spreadsheet. Nobody told the rest of me it was supposed to be hypothetical.
“Okay,” I say, before the silence can set. “Sit. Eat. We have a lot to get through, and I want to do the hardest part first.”
We eat first, because Logan's food refuses to be ignored, and because it gives four people who barely know each other something to do with their hands.
Hudson talks the whole time, mapping out a meet-cute involving a farmers market and a dropped peach that I shoot down twice.
Logan mostly listens, putting in a quiet line here and there that lands better than anything Hudson's said all night.
Finn eats like a man refueling between tasks and watches the other two like he's still deciding whether this is real.
Then the plates are stacked, and I stand up, because if I stay sitting I'll lose my nerve, and I pull the folded sheet of construction paper out of my back pocket.
Lily's list. PACK CANDIDATES across the top in grape marker, three names underlined, and underneath, in my own hand, the thing I added last night at my kitchen table when I couldn't sleep.
“Before we plan anything,” I say. “Before the peach, before the songs, before any of it. There's one rule, and it's not up for a vote, and I need to say it out loud to all three of you at once so nobody can tell me later they didn't hear it.”
The room goes quiet. Hudson sets the pad down. Logan goes still, all his attention arriving at once. Finn watches me with those gray-green eyes giving away nothing.
“Whatever we do to sell this. The touching, the hand-holding, the kissing, all of it.” My ears are already hot.
I keep going anyway, because that's the whole point, because a woman who can't even say it isn't a woman who gets to set it.
“I'm not going to script every second of it.
That'll look fake, and my family will smell fake from the porch. So, honestly? Surprise me. Do what sells it. Make it look real.”
I make myself hold their eyes for the next part. “And if one of you goes for something and I'm not feeling it, I'll say so, and I already know you'll back off, because you're not the kind of alphas who need telling twice. I trust you to read me.”
A beat, while my own nerve catches up with my mouth.
“Don't make me regret saying that.”
I'm not done, though, because the people-pleaser in me can't leave it lopsided. “And it goes both ways. If I do something and one of you isn't into it, same deal. Say so. I'm not going to be wounded that you don't want to hold my hand by the potato salad.”
Hudson opens his mouth, presumably to declare himself a very willing participant, but it's Logan who answers first, quiet, not looking up from the pad.
“You won't have to worry about me.” Then, like he's heard how that sounded, he adds, “I mean, I'll tell you.
If it's ever a problem. Which it won't be.”
“Smooth,” Hudson tells him.
“I wasn't going for smooth.”
Hudson lets it go, but he's grinning now, slow and entirely too pleased, and he turns that grin on me. “You said surprise you, by the way.”
“I said if it sells it.”
“You said surprise me, I was there, three witnesses.” He's writing something on the pad and I cannot see what and I already don't trust it. “For the record, I'm an excellent reader of a room. You're in extremely capable hands, Porter. Some of them mine.”
“This is already a mistake.”
“Too late. Page one.” He turns the pad around. HER CALL, in his neat block capitals, underlined twice. “See? I made it official. The whole thing hangs off that line. Surprise included.”
And then it's Finn, and the room sort of turns toward him without moving, because he's the one nobody can predict.
He doesn't do the thing I expect, which is make it difficult.
“You'll tell us if you're not into something,” he says. Not a question. The voice is flat. The eyes aren't.
“I'll tell you.”
“Then we're fine.” He holds my gaze one beat longer than is comfortable. “And if either of these two can't read a room as well as they think they can, I'll handle it.”
“I can read a room,” Hudson says, wounded.
“We'll see.”
I sit back down, a little unsteady, and Hudson claps his hands once to break the moment, which is the most useful thing anyone's done all night.
“Beautiful,” he says. “Rule one, locked. Now. Logistics. How does a pack of four operate, for four people who have never done this before, fake or otherwise?”
It turns out planning a fake pack is mostly arguing about details that don't matter while avoiding the one that does.
The coffee order's easy, because Logan already knows it. “Oat milk, extra cinnamon, and you hold it with both hands even when it's not cold,” he says, not looking up from the pad, like he's reading it off the side of the cup.
Hudson stops writing. “How do you know that?”