21. Josie
Josie
My family cannot leave a good thing alone. They have to hold it up to the light and turn it over in their hands. They have to make sure it's real, and then, because they can't help themselves, make sure all over again.
It happens at the long table, of course it does, because that's where it always happens, somewhere between the brisket and the inevitable moment my Uncle Ray decides it's his turn to have a word with the three alphas I brought home.
We're all seated by then, the whole loud sprawl of us, and I've got Finn on one side and Hudson on the other and Logan across from me being slowly adopted by my grandmother, and for a while it's just good.
It's the best reunion of my life and I'm trying very hard not to notice that, because noticing it means noticing what it costs.
Then Uncle Ray leans back in his folding chair, laces his hands over his stomach, and turns the full weight of his attention on the three alphas beside me.
“So,” he says. “Three of you.”
“Ray,” my mother says, half a warning and half a laugh, because she knows exactly what's coming.
“It's not a question, it's a public service.” Ray points his fork down the table at the three of them, one at a time, unhurried.
“You three. I have known this girl since the day Frank carried her home from the hospital, and I'm going to tell you the same thing I told every fella who ever came sniffing around, which was a short list, because she's particular, and good for her. You will not find a bigger heart than the one sitting right there. So you cherish it. And if any one of you ever gives her a reason to cry, her daddy and I are going to take a nice long drive out to that Hollow and have ourselves a real friendly conversation. You hearing me?”
And the old reflex comes straight up my throat, the one I've had since I was four.
Make it a joke. Get there first. Not because anyone's coming for me.
Because Uncle Ray just called me the biggest heart in the room, out loud, in front of everyone, and I have never once in my life known how to sit still inside something that tender.
My whole life I've reached for the joke first, turned myself into the punchline before the love could land, because a laugh I can survive. Being looked at like that, I'm less sure about.
I've already got something light teed up, something that breaks the moment gently, before it can break me.
And before I can say it, Finn sets down his fork.
“You don't have to worry about that.” To Ray, but really to the whole table. Four words. From Finn, that's a filibuster.
Logan clears his throat, ears already going pink. “She's the best thing that ever happened to that town,” he says, to his plate, “and it doesn't know it yet. We're just the ones who noticed.”
“What he's trying to say,” Hudson adds, leaning back, thrilled to have the floor, “is you can leave the truck in the driveway, Ray. Nobody's making that drive. Now. Is that potato salad spoken for, or is it a free agent?”
The table breaks open, warm and loud, Aunt Deb gone frankly misty, the potato salad starting its slow journey down toward Hudson.
Uncle Ray gives one slow nod, the kind he gives a fence post he's decided will hold, says “Good answer” to nobody in particular, and goes back to his plate, the whole matter settled to his personal specifications.
And Finn, who kicked the whole thing off with four words and considers his part in it closed, picks his fork back up and says nothing else, because that's Finn.
But I'm looking at him.
Finn, who felt me winding up to make myself the punchline and got there first, flat and plain, before I could, and then let Logan and Hudson carry the rest, and went back to his food like he hadn't just rearranged my entire nervous system.
He feels me looking. Glances over. “What.”
“You didn't have to do that.”
“Somebody did.” He picks his beer back up.
“That wasn't on the script.”
He drinks, eyes on the table, giving me nothing. “There's no script for Ray,” he says, which isn't an answer, which is the most Finn non-answer there is, and leaves it to me to decide whether he means Ray or means us.
And maybe that's the version I'm meant to take. The easy one. Finn being a good fake-boyfriend, saying the right thing in front of my family because that's the job and he's good at the job.
I could take it. I've taken every easy version on offer for four weeks.
But the thing I've spent four weeks and three-a-day suppressants not looking at has finally gotten too big to walk around, and sitting there with my brisket going cold, I let myself know it, once, in the privacy of my own skull — it's real. For me, it's real. And I am all out of road.
I get up. I have to. I mumble something about the bathroom and I get up from the table and walk out across the yard toward the side of the house, past the coolers, into the strip of shade by the garage where I used to hide as a kid when the family got to be too much family.
I put my back against the warm siding and try to remember how breathing goes.
It's too much. It's all too much. Not the reunion. The other thing. The realizing.
I hear his footsteps before I see him. I know them by now, which is its own catastrophe. Finn comes around the corner of the garage, not hurrying, hands in his pockets, and stops a careful few feet away, reading me the way he reads everything, fast and quiet.
“Hey.” His voice drops, low and even, the tone you'd use on somebody standing too near an edge. “It's holding. Nobody out there suspects a thing. Your mother's about to start planning a wedding.” A beat. “You don't have to run.”
He thinks I'm scared the lie is cracking.
And it's so far from it, so completely the wrong catastrophe, that I can't even correct him. I open my mouth and nothing usable comes out, just a shaky breath and the hot sting behind my eyes, and I press the heels of my hands against them and try to get my body back under some kind of control.
It doesn't work. It hasn't worked in weeks.
Four weeks of failing suppressant and a whole day pressed up against three alphas and now this, cornered and cracked open in the shade, and I can feel my scent spike sharp and sweet and desperate off my own skin, broadcasting every single thing I can't say.
I see the exact second it reaches him.
His nostrils flare. Whatever easy, steady, talk-her-down thing he came around the corner to do just walks off the job. His pupils blow wide. The clove and woodsmoke of him floods the little strip of shade, answering something in me before I can stop it, and my knees go unreliable.
“Josie.” My name comes out rough. Not flat. Not careful. A warning, maybe, or the last of one.
I don't heed it. I can't. I sway toward him half an inch, the smallest tell, an omega leaning into the only thing that's felt safe in a month.
And it undoes him.
He crosses the last of the space between us and takes my face in both hands, tips my head up, and kisses me.
And it is not fair, the way he kisses. There's nothing careful in it.
His mouth is warm and certain, his hands hold my jaw like I'm something worth being sure about, and the heat I've been drowning under for four weeks comes up so fast and so total that my knees quit and I have to fist a hand in his shirt just to stay standing.
I kiss him back. I kiss him back like I mean it, because I do, and for one long stupid second there is nothing in the whole world but Finn Morrow's mouth and the woodsmoke and clove of him and the wild, ruinous idea that I might get to keep this.
Then somewhere across the yard a screen door bangs and a kid shrieks and the whole loud reunion comes roaring back in, and we are not in a sealed-off moment anymore. We're pressed against the side of my parents' house in the middle of the afternoon, in reach of anyone who wanders past the coolers.
And Finn steps back.
Not slow. Not reluctant. He steps back and puts a careful foot of daylight between us like a man who's caught himself off-book, and his face goes flat and shuttered, the door I've watched him brace shut a hundred times swinging right back into place.
“That shouldn't have happened.” Low. Rough. Not quite looking at me. “You were coming apart back here. I shouldn't have put my hands on you like that.”
And there it is. The whole thing, handed to me in a couple of flat sentences.
He kissed me because I was falling apart at my own reunion, and he is a decent man who does what needs doing to hold a cracking thing together. That's all it was. Steady the omega. Stop the spiral. Keep the day from coming off its rails.
Crisis management. A hand pressed flat over a crack in the plaster.
I reach for the light thing, because the light thing is the only tool I've ever trusted. “It's fine,” I say, and I get it out almost even. “No harm done.”
His jaw works. His mouth opens like he might argue it.
“JOSIE.” My mother's voice, bright and carrying, from over by the banner. “Baby, where'd you get to? Cara's hunting for you!”
And whatever he was going to say, he swallows it. Hands in his pockets. Flat and unreadable again.
“Go on,” he says. “They're waiting on you.”
So I go.
And crossing the grass toward my mother, I do the only thing I've ever known how to do with a wound. I get organized about it.
One more week. That's all that's left of this. One more week of being his in public, so my mother stays happy and Cynthia never finds out her son handed her a ready-made family and then quietly took it back.
And then I do the last thing on the spreadsheet. The part I built in from the very start, back when it was all still hypothetical and nobody could get hurt.
I end it. Me. I'm the one who calls it off, gently, somewhere people can see, so the story tells itself. Sweet Josie and her nice alphas. Just didn't work out. Nobody's fault, no harm done. Clean. Kind. Deal honored. Everybody walks away fine.
Everybody except me.
Because I'm the idiot who forgot it was fake. I kissed him back like it was the last thing I'd ever get to do, while he was being decent about a woman who couldn't keep it together at a barbecue.
He kissed me to keep me from falling down. I kissed him because I've fallen for all three of them, and I'm the only one who did.
I don't let myself finish the thought past that. I don't have to.
I already know how it ends. I wrote it into the plan myself.