11. Josie #2
There's a big quiet man at the far end with a beanie and a beard and forearms like he wrestles the kegs personally, nursing a half-pint and watching Scarlett the way Logan watches a level come true, like the most important thing in the room is whether the line sits right.
Rowan. I crossed his name off a list last week for being hung up on somebody.
I am abruptly, deeply certain I know who the somebody is.
“He's not even pretending,” I say.
“Nobody here is pretending,” Lily says cheerfully. “Except you.”
Scarlett slides Rowan a fresh half without being asked, and doesn't look at him while she does it.
He says something low. She says, clear enough to carry, “It's a beer, Rowan, not a love letter, drink it before it judges you,” and turns away, and the back of her neck goes the smallest bit pink, which she would deny under oath.
And I sit there watching the whole slow, ridiculous, tender thing of it. This woman behind her bar insisting with her entire body that she hasn't noticed a thing, while the big quiet brewer orbits her like she's the only warm thing in winter.
And I think, oh. Look at her. So sure she's fine. So busy not feeling the thing she's obviously feeling. I'd find it a lot funnier if I hadn't spent all week doing the exact same act in a different costume.
“She'd sooner die,” Lily says, following my look.
“Than what?”
“Than admit any of it. That man's been quietly in love with her since the day she hired him.
Brings her coffee she doesn't drink, fixed her walk-in cooler twice this year for free, and she stands there telling the whole bar it's not her problem.” Lily sips her beer, content.
“It's the best show in town. Better than yours, no offense. Yours has a deadline.”
“Mine has a deadline,” I agree, and the word catches on something on the way out. Deadline. Because that's exactly what it is.
When I started this, the reunion was a month off and safely theoretical.
Now it's about two weeks out and closing fast. Term ended today, the chairs are up on the tables, and soon I take three alphas I'm not allowed to want to a reunion and perform a family.
And then come home and un-perform it, and give them all back, and go back to being the easy one, the funny one, the one who doesn't make a fuss.
Across the bar, Scarlett catches me staring and holds it for a second, one eyebrow going up a precise, unimpressed degree. And then , because I must look as caught as I feel , something in her face eases, just slightly, one professional to another. She slides me a second beer I didn't order.
“On me,” she says, when I try to wave it off. “You've got the look.”
“What look?”
“The one where you're in something deeper than you planned and the whole town's watching you swim.” She's already moving down the bar. “Welcome to the Hollow. Nobody drowns quiet here.”
And then she's gone, back to the taps, back to pretending the brewer at the end of the bar is exactly as invisible as every other customer.
I sit with my free pint of solidarity, the second handout this place has pressed on me this week, and think that I came here to stop thinking about Finn Morrow's hands and have instead spent an hour watching somebody else's love life like a soap opera.
Which is at least a nice change from starring in my own.
That lasts right up until the door opens and Hudson Grant walks in.
He spots me from clear across the room, and his whole face goes bright, this big easy grin like I'm the exact thing he came here hoping to find, and the bottom drops out of my stomach in a way I do not authorize.
He's still in his shop clothes, sleeves shoved up.
He cuts straight through the Friday crowd toward me, and people notice.
Heads turning, the room going quieter around us.
Because everyone in here has spent three days chewing on me and Finn, and now here comes Hudson Grant looking like a man with somewhere specific to be, and in a town that loves a pack, that adds up fast.
“Sorry I'm late,” he says, and bends down, and kisses me.
For a second my brain just stops. Because late, late for what, we didn't, I wasn't waiting for, I didn't even know he was coming.
And then the rest of it lands. The packed room.
The watching faces. The three days of gossip.
And I get it. This is the bit. He saw a bar full of the entire Hollow and a perfect opening and he took it, the absolute professional, and I'm two seconds behind because nobody warned me practice could walk through a door.
So I kiss him back. For the audience. That's the whole reason.
Except his scent comes down around me, juniper and rain and something warmer underneath, and his hand finds the back of my neck like it's been there a hundred times.
The kiss goes from a peck to something with a low pull in it that I feel everywhere I'm not supposed to. And the part of me that keeps forgetting this is fake forgets it again, harder this time, with witnesses.
When he pulls back he's still grinning, easy as anything, like a man who just said hello. I am not grinning easy as anything. I am holding the edge of the bar.
And the room lights up. Not loudly. Worse than loudly. In whispers, the happy kind, the kind that spreads like warmth through a cold room.
I can feel it move through the place. That's Hudson Grant, that's two now, she was just at Dottie's with the Morrow boy on Monday, she's building it, she's actually building her pack.
Delighted and nosy and thrilled, the way this town gets about exactly one thing more than a scandal, which is a love story with more chapters coming.
Somewhere behind me a voice says who else, not scandalized, just greedy for it. Another one's already running through the eligible alphas in the Hollow like a racing form.
And I realize, with the lurch of a woman who told a small lie at her kitchen table and is now somehow several hundred feet up holding the string of it, that I've just handed the most well-connected room in three counties all the proof they will ever need.
They've taken it and run. The lie isn't just holding. It's thriving. And I have absolutely no idea how to land this thing.
“Hudson,” I say, very quietly, into his collar, still close, still selling it. “I didn't know you were coming.”
“You looked like you could use a co-star.” His voice is low, just for me, warm with something I decide not to examine.
“Lily texted Ethan that you were spiraling at the bar.
Figured the pack could use a second showing while the town's all in one room.” He pulls back just enough to look at me, and the grin softens at the edges for half a second, there and gone.
“You're doing great, by the way. You went a little cross-eyed, but you recovered.”
“I did not go cross-eyed.”
“You went a little cross-eyed.”
Behind the bar, Scarlett is watching us with one eyebrow up and the faint, fond, deeply unimpressed expression of a woman who handed me a free beer twenty minutes ago for being in over my head, and has just been proven extravagantly right.
She catches my eye. She does not smile, exactly. But she lifts Hudson a fresh pint he didn't order and slides it down the bar to him, and that, from Scarlett, is practically a wedding toast.
Two weeks. Two alphas, a whole town that has decided to love this, and one small complication I absolutely did not account for when I opened my mouth at that kitchen table, which is a body that has stopped listening to a single word I tell it.
I drink my beer. It's going great. That's the problem.