22. Finn
Finn
The sun's going down over Pine Valley when we finally hit the highway, and Josie's asleep against the window before we clear the last stoplight.
Out cold. Forty-one relatives, ten hours of smiling, and the second the road smooths out she's gone, cheek on the glass, one hand still curled around the water bottle Logan refilled twice today without being asked.
Twice. I counted.
I don't know when I started keeping track of what she drinks, but I can tell you she's had coffee, two lemonades, and half a beer she abandoned when her uncle started his toast, and if anybody asks, it's professional habit. Hydration awareness. Very common among firefighters.
Hudson's driving. Logan's in the back with me. Nobody's talking.
It isn't the quiet from the drive up. That one had a shape to it. Four people, one plan, everybody rehearsed. This is the other kind. Something happened today and everybody felt it and nobody wants to be the first to touch it.
I'm not thinking about the side of the house.
I've been not thinking about it for an hour now. It's a full-time job with no breaks and terrible pay.
Her mouth under mine. Her hand fisted in my shirt. The small sound she made when I tipped her chin up, a sound I'm going to be hearing at two in the morning for the rest of my natural life. There was no audience on that strip of shade. Nobody to sell it to. I know exactly what that kiss was.
And then a screen door banged, and I stepped back, and out of every sentence in the English language, I went with that shouldn't have happened.
I heard it land, too. Watched her take it and fold it up small and hand me back a no harm done, ears going red the way they do when the words don't match the omega saying them.
I told a woman I'd wanted to kiss since a craft closet in April that it was a mistake. Because her scent was coming apart and mine was answering it, and being careful is the only skill I've ever fully trusted.
No harm done. Sure.
We haven't said a word about it since, and we're sure as hell not starting now. Not in a truck. Not with witnesses.
The plan says the reunion was the finish line. Her side's done. Mine winds down slow, because my mother doesn't get a clean break, she gets a soft landing. I set that condition myself, at Josie's kitchen table, a month ago, back when I thought the hard part was going to be the pretending.
The pretending turned out to be the easy part. Turns out you don't have to pretend anything if you just go ahead and mean all of it. Nobody warned me about that. There should be a pamphlet.
“Anybody else starving,” Hudson says, to the truck in general. “I ate at the reunion, but it was performance eating. Doesn't count. You can't taste anything with a great-aunt watching you chew.”
“You had three plates,” Logan says.
“Three performance plates.”
It gets nothing. Hudson drums the wheel, checks his mirrors, tries again.
“Good brisket, though.”
Silence.
“The potato salad was a war crime, but the brisket...”
“Hudson,” I say.
“What. I'm making conversation. Somebody has to. You two ride like furniture.”
Logan goes back to his window. I go back to the dealerships. Hudson holds out for half a mile, then puts the radio on low, and the radio is worse, some love song from twenty years back filling in everything we're not saying, so he shuts it off again.
This is the loudest alpha in three counties. A man who narrated his own kayak capsize while it was still happening. And even he can't find a safe topic, because every road out of this silence runs through today, and today runs through her.
And she's asleep six inches from his elbow with all three of our jackets in reach and a foil-wrapped plate of her mother's leftovers riding in the cooler like a hostage.
Four of us and the windows up, and the cab's gone warm and close the way a truck does on a summer night with too many bodies in it. And her scent has loosened up in her sleep, the way it never gets to when she's awake and managing everybody.
Brown sugar and toasted oat. I could find her blind in a burning building.
Except it's not quite right tonight. It's sweeter. Deeper, like the sugar's gone molten, sitting warm at the back of my throat with every breath, and some low alpha part of me leans into it before I get a vote.
It's doing things to me it has no business doing in a truck with two of my packmates and the woman herself asleep an arm's length away.
I sit with it, jaw tight, hands at ten and two. I don't shift in my seat. I don't let my breathing change. The one skill I've always had is holding a line no matter what's happening on the other side of it. Doesn't mean the line's not costing me. Tonight it's costing me plenty.
I make myself look at the mile markers.
Long day. That's all that is. Ten hours performing for family, a June afternoon, adrenaline burning off. An omega runs herself empty, her scent goes soft. That's biology. That's nothing.
Or it's the kiss, still on her the way it's still on me, and that answer I'm not examining at seventy miles an hour.
I crack my window an inch and breathe highway instead. It helps the way a screen door helps in a flood.
“My mother called,” I say. “While you two were loading chairs.”
Hudson's eyes come up to the mirror. Logan turns from his window.
“Dinner tomorrow. Sunday. All four of us.” I keep it level. “Her words were bring the pack. I've been feeding half a set, I want the whole thing on the table.”
“I've met her a hundred times at the store,” Hudson says. “I sold her the good rain jacket.”
“You've never eaten at her table. Neither has Logan. Last week it was Josie and me, and apparently that format's expired.”
Logan nods, slow, already somewhere else. He'll show up with something he made. The man is constitutionally incapable of arriving anywhere with empty hands.
“So we go,” Hudson says. “One more dinner.”
“One more dinner,” I say. “And after that we start... “
I don't finish it. Turns out I can't. The end of that sentence has been in the plan for a month, in my own handwriting.
After the reunion, we let my mother down gently.
A week or so. Fewer appearances, cooler answers, let it come apart slow so she never feels the seam.
Simple. Kind, even. I built that exit myself, brick by brick, to protect her.
“Right,” Hudson says, when it's clear I'm done. No joke on it. Nothing.
“Okay,” Logan says, quieter.
And that's all of it. Three alphas agreeing to a plan we already agreed to, and the word okay has never sounded less like okay in its life.
Somewhere underneath my ribs, uninvited, a thought clears its throat.
Nobody ever said how slow slow is.
I put it with everything else I'm not thinking about. It's getting crowded back there.
Josie stirs against the window. A frown, a shift, some small sound that never makes it to words, and her hand tightens around the water bottle like it's load-bearing.
I've never seen her sleep before. Now I know what her face does when she's dreaming, and I've got no idea where a man's supposed to put a thing like that.
All three of us look over at the same time.
Nobody says anything about that, either.
She wakes up at the Hollow town line, the way people do, some deep-down part of her clocking home before her eyes open.
“Did I sleep the whole way,” she says, thick, scrubbing at her face.
“You drooled on Hudson's window,” I tell her.
“I did not drool.”
“There's a whole situation over there. He's going to have to get it detailed.”
“It's character,” Hudson says. “The truck has character now.”
“I hate all of you,” she says, with no force behind it whatsoever, and stretches, and stops stretching halfway like her body just caught up with the day all at once. She rolls her window down a couple inches. June air comes in off the valley, cool and pine-heavy.
“Hot in here,” she says.
It's not. My window's been cracked since the highway, and the June night coming off the valley has teeth in it.
Her color's up, too, high on her cheeks, and that molten-sugar edge is still riding her scent even now that she's awake to police it.
She catches me looking.
And for one long second she doesn't deflect. Doesn't joke, doesn't get there first the way she always does. She just holds my eyes in the dark of the cab, color climbing, and the air between the back seat and the front pulls tight enough to hum.
I'm on the side of that house again with her chin in my hands, and I'd bet the truck she's standing there too. I just can't tell which part she's hearing. The kiss, or the stupid sentence after.
Then she packs it all away. Sits up straighter, folds her hands in her lap. An omega closing the register for the night.
Long day, I tell myself again. It holds about as well as it did the first time.
“Dinner tomorrow,” I say instead, because it's the one safe piece of news I own. “My mother's. She wants everybody.”
“Everybody,” Josie repeats.
“Bring the pack. Direct quote.”
“Great,” she says, one beat too fast and two shades too bright. “That's... yeah. One more. Sure. I love your mom.”
That last part isn't a performance, and everybody in this truck knows it. That's tomorrow's problem in four words. She loves my mother. My mother is planning a future around a pack with a demolition date, and every person at that table tomorrow knows the date except the woman doing the cooking.
“She's making the roast,” I say, because it's true, and because it's easier than the rest of it.
“With the little potatoes?”
“With the little potatoes.”
“Okay,” she says, softer, watching Main Street come up dark and familiar through the windshield. “Good.”
The roast, for the record, happens every Sunday.
Has for all thirty-two years I've been alive.
Rain, shine, house fires, Gemma's emergency calls, a truly unfortunate year where she experimented with lamb.
Every Sunday there is a roast, and every Sunday there are chairs around that table, and I have spent fifteen years dodging the question of who's going to sit in them.
I'm just saying. The roast is a standing event. It doesn't expire tomorrow.
I don't know why I'm telling myself that. I do know. I'm ignoring it.
We walk her to her door. All of us. It's ridiculous, three alphas escorting one omega up a porch she's climbed alone five years running, and it doesn't occur to a single one of us to do it differently, and if somebody suggested it, I'd have opinions about them.
At her door she turns around, keys in hand, and looks at us crowded onto her porch, the swing nobody's ever seen her sit on hanging still behind us.
This is where the line goes. I know, because I wrote it. Well. That's a wrap. Thanks, everyone. Handshakes, or whatever the version of handshakes is for this. Clean cut, no loose ends.
“So,” she says. “Dinner tomorrow.”
“Five,” I say. “She'll tell you five thirty. Come at five.”
“Noted.”
“I'm bringing her a cutting board,” Logan says.
“You... “ She blinks at him. “You already have a cutting board?”
“Walnut. It's in my truck.”
“Why is there a cutting board in your truck?”
“There's usually a couple. I make them from the offcuts.” He shrugs, like this is a normal thing to have on hand, riding around town with gifts. “You never know when somebody's going to need a board.”
She laughs, tired and cracked at the edges and completely real, and for a second the porch is easy, the four of us are easy, and it would take so little. One sentence. Any of us. Four words and this stops being an arrangement with a countdown on it.
The second passes. Nobody spends it.
“Goodnight, Josie,” I say.
“Goodnight,” she says, and her eyes go over the three of us, one at a time, careful. Like she's counting us. Like she's making sure the count comes out the same tomorrow.
Three, sweetheart. The count's three.
I keep that behind my teeth, where it lives with everything else.
Then she's inside. The door shuts. The lock turns. The three of us stand there a beat too long, not looking at each other, before we head back down her porch steps like a crew leaving a call none of us wants to write up.
Hudson starts the engine and doesn't pull out right away.
Nobody takes her seat. It rides home empty, and the cab still tastes like brown sugar, and the low alpha part of me that's been leaning toward her all night has nowhere left to lean.
“Tomorrow, then,” Hudson says.
“Tomorrow,” I say.
He drives. I lean my head back and I finally let myself look at the thought that's been riding in the truck with us since the highway.
The plan says we let my mother down gently. The plan says a week, give or take, and I wrote it, and I'll tell you what I left out of it. In hindsight, maybe on purpose.
A definition of gently.
Because nobody lands a plane in a week. Not softly.
My mother notices everything, she'd clock a one-week exit from a mile out, and then the whole point of the soft landing is shot.
Gently isn't a week. Gently is Sundays. Plural.
Any alpha with basic tactical sense could tell you that, and I'd know, because I plan to be the alpha telling everyone that.
Next Sunday there's a roast. The Sunday after that, there's a roast.
I'm not saying anything. I'm saying the exit's a long hallway, and I'm the one holding the map, and there's no rule about how slow an alpha's allowed to walk.
A window goes gold in the little blue house, and Hudson watches it in the mirror half a block longer than driving requires, and beside me Logan's got his hand resting on the back of her empty seat like he's steadying something, and none of us says a word.
Five o'clock tomorrow.
I tell Hudson to drive faster, and I don't examine why.