14. Josie
Josie
Wednesday is Logan's turn, and Logan's turn is becoming my favorite kind of quiet.
He comes by in the morning and we don't do anything, which with Logan is the whole point. Doing nothing together is somehow the most we ever do. He brings coffee. He fixes the cabinet hinge I mentioned once, in passing, weeks ago, and that he apparently never forgot.
We sit on my front step and he tells me about the beam he's setting today, the long one, the one that has to go up while he's got two guys free to help him hold it. His whole face changes when he talks about building, gone soft and certain at once.
“You could come watch,” he says, and then immediately, “you'd be bored. It's a lot of standing around measuring.”
“I like watching you measure.”
It comes out before I think about it, and it lands somewhere it wasn't aimed. He goes still. Not pink yet, just still, his coffee halfway to his mouth, and he looks at me for a second longer than the nothing-morning has any right to.
“Yeah?” he says. Quiet. Like he's tucking it somewhere safe.
“Yeah.”
He sets the coffee down on the step. Doesn't say anything for a moment, just looks at me with those steady eyes, and the space between us on the step gets very small and very loud, and I become aware of his hand resting on the wood a hand's width from mine, and the maple-and-cedar of him, and the fact that if either of us moved at all this would stop being nothing.
Neither of us moves the inch. But he turns his hand over, palm up, an open thing on the step between us, and after a second I put my fingers in it, and he closes them, careful, like he's holding something that might spook.
We sit like that. Not talking. His thumb moving slow over my knuckles.
A whole conversation neither of us is brave enough to have out loud.
Then his phone buzzes in his pocket, and the morning lets go of us, and he clears his throat.
His neck goes pink. He stands up like the step got too warm.
“I've got to get over there. The guys are waiting and the light's only good till about two.” He pauses at the bottom of the step, turning his coffee in his hands, like he's looking for a word that's bigger than the ones he lets himself use.
“This was. Yeah. I'll, ah. My turn comes back around.”
“Go set your beam, Logan,” I say, gentle, letting him off the hook of the sentence he can't finish. “I'll be here.”
Something eases in his face. He nods, goes pink one more time, and retreats to his truck, and I sit on my step a while after, warm in a way I am choosing not to examine.
I can still feel his thumb on my knuckles.
That's the part that gets me, sitting there in the morning sun after his truck's gone.
Not the wanting, the wanting I could maybe explain away.
It's how easy it was. How a man can hold your hand on a step and not say one word and leave you feeling more seen than people who've known you for years.
And then he's gone for the day, off to wrestle a beam into place, and I am alone with the afternoon and a problem I do not have a tidy name for.
Because the situation is not a good one.
It is not just Hudson, and a tailgate, and the weight of him under me Tuesday night.
It is also Logan, and a hand turned palm-up on my front step this morning.
And underneath both of them, steady and impossible to ignore, it is Finn, and a thumb dragged once under my ear at the diner Monday like he had a right to, and the way I have not stopped feeling it since.
It is three of them now, lodged somewhere under my ribs, and a body that has apparently decided it doesn't see the conflict the rest of me does.
So I make a plan, because a plan is a thing I can hold.
The plan is simple. I keep my hands busy and my mind emptier.
I do not relive a single overlook or a single front step.
I am a functional adult with a whole summer of empty days, and I think about all of it approximately every ninety seconds, which I have decided does not count as long as I don't do anything about it.
I execute the plan with discipline. I deep-clean a kitchen that did not need it. I alphabetize the spice rack.
I take a second suppressant barely six hours after the first, which is sooner than I've ever needed one, and I do not think about that either.
The plan survives until approximately four in the afternoon, which is when Hudson texts.
Forgot to give you something. Two minutes, I'm close.
Give me what, I type, because I am a fool.
Open the door and find out, Porter.
I should say no. I'm a grown woman with a paperwork pile and a runaway biology and a suppressant bottle I've already been into twice today. The correct, adult, self-preserving answer is no, leave it on the step.
I look at myself in the hall mirror on the way to the door. The woman looking back has already fixed her hair. I hate her a little, and I open the door anyway.
He's leaning on the frame with that easy grin and a paper bag, and the second the door's open his scent comes in with him, juniper and rain, and the low restless heat I've been fighting all day lifts its head like it's been waiting to be called.
“Sutter's,” he says, holding up the bag. “The sourdough. You said it ruined you for all other bread. I was out that way.”
He was not out that way. Sutter's is forty minutes in the wrong direction and we both know it.
“You drove eighty minutes round trip to bring me bread,” I say.
“Seventy-five,” he corrects, easy as anything, like we didn't have this exact argument two days ago. “And I drove it to see your face when I hand you the bread, which is a different thing and a better one. You going to let me in, or are we doing this on the step for the neighbors.”
I let him in. Tactical error. The list of my tactical errors this week could paper the hallway.
It's fine for about ten minutes.
That's the lie I tell myself, anyway, while it is very much not fine. We stand in my kitchen and he unpacks the bread like it's a delivery of state secrets, and I make tea I don't want so my hands have a job, and the whole time my body is conducting its own quiet betrayal three feet to my left.
Because he fills a kitchen, Hudson. Sleeves shoved up, forearms I have opinions about, that easy loose-limbed way he leans against my counter like he was poured there.
And his scent is everywhere now, juniper and clean rain, winding through my small kitchen and curling low into me, and the part of me I've kept on a leash for six years lifts its head and leans toward it before I can haul it back.
My skin's too warm. It's been too warm all day, the suppressants barely holding, and standing this close to him is pouring fuel on it.
We're talking, easy, the way we're always easy, and I am not hearing a word of it.
I'm watching his mouth move. I'm thinking about that mouth at the overlook, the sound he made, the weight of him.
I'm aware of every inch of the space between us and exactly how little of it there is, and my heart is going like I've been running, and somewhere under all of it my body is making a low insistent case I am trying very hard not to listen to.
Then I turn around with two mugs and he's closer than I thought, and his scent floods me at this distance, and the talking just stops.
He looks at me. I look at him. The kettle ticks as it cools.
“I've been thinking about that kiss since I dropped you off,” he says.
Not grinning now. “You in my lap on that tailgate.
I want to do it again, Josie. I'm done pretending I don't.” His eyes drop to my mouth and come back up, slow.
“Your move, Porter. I'm not going to be the one who decides this for you.”
“Then stop talking,” I say. My voice comes out low, unsteady.
He grins, just for a second. Then he takes the mugs out of my hands and sets them down somewhere behind me without looking, and his hands come back empty and settle light on my hips, asking, not taking.
“I've been trying to be a gentleman about this since a kayak, and I'm starting to think you don't actually want me to be.”
“This is a terrible idea,” I tell him, with my hands already flat against his chest, not pushing.
“The worst,” he agrees, and kisses me.
It's not the slow careful thing from the tailgate.
There's no audience to perform restraint for, no truck, no cold to drive me home from.
Just my kitchen and his mouth and the wall he walks me back into, gentle, one hand cradling my head before it can meet the cabinet.
Taking care of me even now. Even like this.
Whatever I've been holding down all day stops holding.
It's every suppressant I swallowed losing an argument it was never going to win.
And I should be scared of that, and instead I'm fisting my hands in his shirt and pulling him closer, because for once in my life the thing my body wants and the thing I want are the same thing, pointed in the same direction, and his name.
“Josie.” He pulls back an inch, breathing hard, his forehead on mine. His thumb strokes my cheek. “Tell me to go home and I'll go home. I mean it. Say the word.”
The out. He's handing it to me on purpose, the way he hands me everything, easy, no pressure, a door held open in case I want to walk back through it to the version of this where I'm still pretending.
I think about being the easy one. The fine one. The one who never makes a fuss, who keeps everybody else's glass full and goes home to an empty one and calls it the deal. I think about a man who drove eighty minutes to watch my face.
“Don't go home,” I say.
He kisses me like I've handed him something he didn't think he'd get.
Then he kisses my jaw, and my throat, slow, taking his time, and I feel him smile against my skin when my breath catches, and he murmurs, “There she is,” low and warm, and sinks to his knees on my kitchen floor like it's the most natural place in the world for him to be.
“Hudson.”