16. Finn
Finn
Here's what I know about Sunday dinner at my mother's house. You show up at five. You bring nothing, because she'll be offended, and you bring something, because she'll be offended either way and at least this way you tried. You eat too much. You let her fuss. You go home.
I have done this every Sunday I've been in town for thirty-two years. It has never once made my hands sweat in the truck.
They're sweating now.
Because three days ago Josie Porter turned around in my living room and kissed me, and I let her, and I kissed her back like a man who'd been waiting his whole life for permission.
Then she called it practice and left before I could get a word out.
And I have not been right since. The wall I spent two months bracing came down in about four seconds, and I have not figured out how to put it back, and I'm starting to think I don't want to.
And now I'm about to watch her sit at my mother's table and pretend.
That's the part. That's the whole problem. The pretending was fine when it was a diner booth and a held hand for an audience. It was a job. I was good at it.
But Thursday wasn't pretend, whatever she called it, and Thursday's still in my mouth. And in about ninety seconds I have to walk into my childhood kitchen and perform a fake relationship with a woman I'm no longer faking anything about, in front of the one person on earth I can't let see the seam.
My mother misses nothing. My mother has been waiting for this exact thing for fifteen years.
I get out of the truck.
Josie's already there when I come in. Of course she is. She's standing in my mother's kitchen holding a bowl of something and laughing at whatever Gemma just said, and the sight of her there, in that room, easy, like she fits, does something to me I do not have a category for.
And then her scent reaches me across the kitchen, brown sugar and toasted oat, warm and unguarded, and every alpha instinct I own stands up at once and pays attention. It's been doing that all week. I've stopped pretending it's going to stop.
My mother is on her immediately. “Finn. You're late.”
“I'm four minutes early.”
“You're late in spirit. Josie's been here twenty minutes, she brought a trifle, she's a delight, sit down.” She takes the bottle of wine out of my hand without looking at it and steers me toward the table like I'm furniture being rearranged. “Gemma, your brother's here, stop hiding.”
“I'm not hiding, I'm getting the rolls.” Gemma comes out of the pantry with the rolls and a look she aims straight at me, the one she's had since she was nine, the one that means we're going to talk later and you're not going to enjoy it.
My sister is a small dry person who spends her days elbow-deep in other people's animals and misses even less than our mother does. “Hi, Finn.”
“Gem.”
“So.” She sets the rolls down. “Josie.”
“Don't,” I say.
“I didn't say anything.”
“You said Josie.”
“It's her name.” Gemma's mouth twitches. “Am I not allowed to say the name of the woman my brother's apparently building a whole pack with? The pack I had to hear about from Mom, who heard it from the entire damn town, because apparently you'd sooner die than mention a thing yourself.”
“Language,” my mother says, sailing past with the roast.
“Sorry, Mom.”
Josie's watching this with the wide, careful eyes of a woman who's realized the ground has rules she wasn't handed. I catch her eye, and something passes between us, quick, just ours, the same look we've traded across a diner booth all week.
And then I remember it isn't a look across a diner booth anymore. It's Thursday. It's her hands in my shirt. Whatever's on my face must shift, because hers does too, color coming up under her freckles, and she looks down at her trifle very fast.
Gemma sees it. Of course Gemma sees it.
I watch my sister clock the whole exchange in about a second and a half, the look, the color, the way neither of us is breathing quite right, and I watch her tuck it away somewhere for later, and I know with total certainty that I'm going to be hearing about this in the pantry before the night's out.
Dinner is loud, because my mother runs a loud table, and I let it wash over me and do the one job I came to do, which is sit next to Josie and be her alpha and not let my mother see the truth of any of it.
It's easier than it should be. That's what's wrecking me.
I don't have to act. I put my arm along the back of her chair and it's just where my arm wants to be.
She leans into it without thinking and I feel it land all the way down, her scent warming where she's tucked against my side, settling something in me that's been restless for days.
What's not settling is everything else. Her knee is against mine under my mother's table, and every few minutes she shifts and it drags, and I have to keep my face doing normal things while the rest of me keeps a running tally of the exact warm pressure of her leg against mine.
Three days ago she had her hands in my shirt and her mouth on mine, and I have thought about almost nothing since. Now she's sitting at my childhood table eating my mother's roast, and all I can think about, like a man with a problem, is how fast I could get her out of here.
It's a low, steady pull that's been running under everything since the tailgate, and it doesn't care that we're at my mother's table.
Her knee drags mine again and I have to breathe through it, jaw tight, keeping my face on the conversation while every animal part of me tracks the warm press of her leg like it's the only real thing in the room.
Careful. I've always been careful. Nobody's ever made careful cost this much.
When my mother asks how we met and Josie freezes, deer in headlights, I step in smooth with the version we agreed on. The playground fence. The slow thing. Josie picks it up and runs, and we build the lie together like we've done it a hundred times, because we have.
Under the table her knee is against mine and neither of us moves it.
“I knew it,” my mother says, for the fortieth time tonight, misty over the green beans.
“I have been telling people for years, that boy is not cold, that boy is waiting. And here you are.” She reaches over and pats Josie's hand.
“I'm so glad it's you. I did your hair the week you moved here, did you know that?
Five years ago. I told Marie that day, there's a sweet one, somebody's going to be lucky.”
“Mom.”
“What? It's true. I have an eye.” She dabs at said eye with her napkin. “Don't begrudge me. I waited a long time for this.”
And that's the one. The thing I came here braced against and got hit by anyway.
She waited a long time for this. She's so happy she keeps tearing up over root vegetables.
And in six days I'm supposed to take this away from her, quietly, no fuss, she gets to stay happy, that's the price, except the price keeps going up, because every day she gets more invested and the more invested she gets, the more it's going to hurt her when it ends.
Except it's not going to end. Not for me. I know that now, sitting at my mother's table with Josie's knee against mine. I'm just the only one at this table who knows there was ever a lie to dismantle, and I'm starting to wonder if I'm dismantling anything at all.
“You've gone quiet,” Josie says, low, just to me, while my mother and Gemma argue about whether the goats count as grandchildren.
“I'm fine.”
“You're doing a face.”
“I don't have faces.”
“You have one face. It's doing it now.” Her voice drops further. Her hand finds my knee under the table, light, there and gone. “Hey. You okay?”
And that's the part that gets me. Not the lie holding. Not my mother's joy. The fact that in the middle of a table full of people she's supposed to be performing for, Josie Porter looked over and saw that something was wrong with me, and the first thing she did was check.
Nobody checks on me. I'm the one who checks. That's the whole arrangement of my life.
Her scent shifts when she's worried, I've learned that this week, goes a little sharper at the edges, and it's doing it now, on my account, and the only thing in my head is putting it right. Everything else can wait. That one can't.
“I'm okay,” I tell her, and for once it isn't the flat deflection, it's just true, because she asked. “Eat your trifle. You made it, you should suffer it with the rest of us.”
She laughs, surprised, that real one, and across the table Gemma's eyes flick to me, sharp and knowing, and I don't even care.
Gemma corners me in the pantry while I'm getting the second bottle of wine, exactly as forecast.
“So that's real,” she says. Not a question.
She says it low, the way she used to tell me which kids at school were lying.
“I watched her all through dinner, Finn.
The way she turns toward you without checking first. The way she goes looking for your face every time something's funny.
That's not a woman on her best behavior for the family.
That's a woman who's already gone, whether she's said it to herself yet or not.”
“Gem.”
“I've watched you hold her hand in public all week like it's a press conference, Finn, all stiff and careful, the whole Hollow taking notes.” She crosses her arms. “That, in there, tonight? That wasn't careful. You couldn't take your eyes off her, and you didn't even know you were doing it.”
“I don't know what that means.”
“You do.” My sister, who has spent ten years being unreadable about exactly one subject, looks at me with more tenderness than she usually spends in a month. “I know what it looks like when somebody's in it and won't say. I see it in the mirror most mornings.”
And there it is, the thing about Gemma nobody in this family says out loud.
My little sister, who reads every animal and every anxious owner who comes through her clinic, who missed her calling as a mind reader by about an inch, has been carrying something for years and set it down for exactly no one.
“Gem.” The big-brother thing comes up my throat before I can stop it, the one that's been getting me in trouble with her since she was born. “In the mirror. Is there something you're not telling me?”
“Nope.” She holds up a hand, flat and final, the Morrow move, the one she learned off me. “We are not doing mine tonight. Mine stays in the mirror. Tonight's about the woman out there who's gone for you and hasn't figured out you're gone right back.”
I don't have a flat last word for that. Because she's right, and because I just watched my sister do to me the exact thing I've been doing to everyone for six years, and it's a lot uglier from this side.
“Does she know?” Gemma asks. “How far gone you are?”
“It's complicated.”
“It always is, with you.” She takes the wine out of my hands, because apparently nobody in this family trusts me to carry beverages tonight.
“Tell her, Finn. Whatever the complicated thing is. Tell her before the complicated thing tells her for you.” She heads for the door, then stops.
“She's good. I like her. Mom's not wrong, which I will deny saying.”
She goes back out to the warm loud kitchen and leaves me standing in the pantry holding nothing, in the house I grew up in, having just been told to do the one thing I have spent my whole life not doing, by the one person who'd know.
Through the door I can hear Josie laughing at something my mother said. Easy. Like she fits.
Six days. And I'm starting to think the clean exit I bargained for is the stupidest deal I've ever made.