20. Hudson
Hudson
Nobody warns you about the real danger of pretending to be somebody's alpha for a month.
At some point you forget you're pretending.
I clock the exact second it happens to me, and it happens in the Porters' backyard, under a hand-painted banner, with a paper plate of somebody's aunt's potato salad going warm in my hand.
We've been here an hour. Josie's across the yard being passed between relatives like a dish everybody wants seconds of, and I'm supposed to be running the play.
That's my job in this operation, the one we never wrote down but all understood.
Finn holds the line. Logan does the quiet devastating sincerity.
And I work the room, because working a room is the one thing I've never in my life had to fake.
The grin. The easy hand on the shoulder.
The name I remembered from an introduction twenty minutes ago.
I'm good at it. I've charmed her Uncle Ray, who came in wanting to hate me and instead spent twenty minutes telling me about the trout stream that runs through his property and the one fly he swears by.
By the end of it I'd promised to come out and fish it with him before summer's done, and meant it.
I've complimented her mother's brisket to the exact degree that reads sincere and not strategic. I've told her Aunt Deb, and I quote, that I couldn't choose between her two pies if my life depended on it, which was a lie, because the pecan was better, but some lies are just good manners.
And the entire time, under the performance, I'm watching Josie.
That's the part they don't know about me. The whole town's got me filed as the loud one, the one who's not really paying attention, and I've spent years making sure they keep me filed there. A man who's always joking is a man nobody looks at too close.
But I see everything. I always have. It's just that I do it with a grin on so nobody feels watched.
So I'm the one who sees it.
She's over by the drinks table with her cousin Cara, the extended family orbiting her, and she's not performing anymore. That's what gets me.
All day she's been on, giving them the bright bulletproof Josie they came for. And here, tucked in next to Cara with a plastic cup of lemonade, she's just — her. Head tipped back. Laughing at something with her whole body, the real laugh, the one that gets away from her, the one you have to earn.
Cara says something else and Josie shoves her shoulder and laughs harder, and for a second every guard she owns is just gone, and she's wide open and easy and completely, unguardedly happy.
I'm too far to hear a word of it. I don't need to. I could pick that laugh out of a stadium.
And watching her have it, watching her be that easy and lit-up and unafraid, thinking nobody important is looking, something in the center of my chest just quietly falls over.
Because I want that. Not the party, not the performance, not the version of her that works a room the way I do. That. The laugh she doesn't decide to give. I want to be someone who gets to be in the room for that, on purpose, for a long time.
And that's the exact moment I stop being able to pretend I'm pretending.
I've been pretending for weeks. Longer than the plan.
I dressed it up as the job, as being a good teammate, as Hudson being Hudson, because Hudson flirts with everybody and it means nothing, that's the whole brand, that's the shield I've carried since I was fifteen and figured out that if you're everybody's friend you never have to risk being one person's anything.
I put her hand on my knee that first fake-date and told myself it was for the mission.
I brought her a coffee she didn't ask for every morning and told myself it was for the mission.
I lay awake three nights ago running through everything she said at the bar, word for word, in her voice, grinning at my ceiling like the idiot I apparently am now, and I told myself—
Yeah. I didn't have a lie left for that one, honestly. I just stopped telling myself things around two in the morning and let it be true in the dark where nobody could see.
But here, in the daylight, in the Porters' backyard, barbecue smoke in the air and her loud family roaring around me, there's nowhere dark left to hide it. Whatever this is, it stopped being the plan a long time ago, and I'm standing in her mother's yard finally out of excuses for it.
I set the plate down on the nearest table before I do something stupid with it.
“Now, you.” Aunt Deb has me by the elbow.
Round, determined, a paper plate in one hand and the particular gleam of a woman collecting stories for the group chat.
Deb of the two pies, back for more. “Nobody's told me the good part yet.
How'd you meet our Josie? A girl doesn't just turn up with three of you. There's a story.”
And the old reflex loads up before I've even decided to fire it, the fast easy version, the one that sells.
“Farmers market,” I say, grinning, hand to my heart. “She dropped a peach. I caught it. Our eyes met over the stone fruit. Birds sang. A nearby fiddle started up out of nowhere. I knew right then, Deb, I'd found the woman I was going to spend my life pretending I wasn't obsessed with.”
Deb swats my arm, delighted, exactly the transaction I built the line for. And Josie's all the way over by the drinks with her grandmother now, well out of earshot, not close enough to hear a word of it or to see my face while I say it.
Which is the only reason the next part happens.
Because Deb tips her head, still smiling, and says, “No, but really,” and I open my mouth to hand her another joke, and what comes out instead is the truth.
“She unspooled forty feet of my rope,” I hear myself say, and I'm grinning already, because this is one of my favorites.
Deb blinks. “She—what?”
“Five years ago. Her first week in town, before I knew her name, before anybody did.” I lean in, because it's a good one and I know how to tell it.
“She came into the shop in a rush. Brand new teacher, needed rope for some classroom thing, a web she was stringing up for the kids to climb through.
I was ringing somebody up, told her I'd be two minutes. She did not have two minutes.”
Deb's already smiling. Everybody smiles at this part.
“So she went to the wall and found the rope herself and gave it one good pull to measure off a length. Now, you have to understand how those spools are hung. You pull one wrong, they all go.” I shake my head, delighted all over again. “And she pulled one wrong.”
“No,” Deb breathes.
“Forty feet of climbing rope came off the wall in about four seconds.
Then the spool next to it. And she's down there grabbing at it, trying to reel it back in by hand, making it ten times worse, until she's standing in the middle of my shop buried up to her knees in the stuff. This brand-new stranger. Red clear to her ears.”
I'm laughing now, the memory of it too big to hold.
“And she looked up at me over the top of this catastrophe she'd made of my whole rope wall, dead serious as a judge, and said, 'I would like to buy one yard of rope, please.'“
Deb hoots. I'm grinning ear to ear.
“I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the counter,” I say. “Helped her wind every foot of it back. She apologized about nine times, bought her one yard, and left. I never even got her name.”
And that's where the grin catches.
Because I hear myself say it. I hear the detail of it. The exact color of her cardigan. The way she said please. The precise degree of red her ears went.
It's been five years, and I've kept all of it. Taken it out and looked at it more times than a man has any business looking at a memory of a stranger he never got the name of.
I never got her name that day. Didn't need it. I just kept her. For five years I have just quietly kept her, and never once asked myself why.
“Oh,” Deb says, very softly, watching my face do whatever it's doing.
“Yeah,” I say, and my voice comes out strange. “Yeah. Oh.”
I'm in love with Josie Porter.
Not the bit. Not the play. The actual woman who counts trucks when she's scared and forgets to drink water and once brought down my entire rope wall and then asked, so politely, to buy one yard of it.
Her. All of it. The whole ridiculous stubborn tender disaster of her, and I've been gone since a rainy Tuesday I never even told her I was in the room for.
Every wall I've ever built comes down, quiet and total, the way a boat goes over in the shallows. Lazy and inevitable and always heading this direction the entire time.
“She's something,” Deb says, patting my arm, and wanders off toward the pie table with a look on her face I decide not to think about, because a man who just came apart over potato salad and a five-year-old memory of some rope can only handle so much.
Then her mother's voice rings out over the crowd — ”JOSIE, baby, come sit, we're eating!” — and the reunion starts folding itself toward the long tables, and Josie looks up and finds me through the crowd, the way she does, first face she looks for, and she gives me a small helpless save me face about her family, and grins.
And I grin back, easy, like my whole world didn't just tip over into a potato-salad bowl, and I cross the yard to go be the alpha she thinks she's only borrowing.
I pull out her chair. I drop into the seat beside her. I steal the pickle off her plate because that's our bit and she smacks my hand because that's her half of it, and under the table, where nobody can see, I let my knee rest against hers and leave it there.
She doesn't move away.
She has no idea. She thinks I'm playing a part.
And I let her think it, because I know her. Because she runs. Because she's decided somewhere deep down that she's the funny one, the easy one, the one nobody picks when it's for real.
And if I tell her now, in the middle of her family's reunion, that somewhere between a peach joke and a rainy Tuesday I stopped pretending entirely, she'll bolt so fast she'll leave a Josie-shaped hole in the fence.
So I'll wait. I'll be patient, which I have never once been about anything.
But I'm not pretending anymore. Not for one more second of it.
Down the table, Uncle Ray sets down his fork and laces his hands over his stomach, settling in with the satisfied look of a man who's decided he likes at least one of us and is about to make it everybody's business.
“So,” he says. “Three of you.”
Here we go.