26. Josie
Josie
Iwake up warm for the first time in five years, and my omega body knows exactly why before my brain catches up.
Not sun-through-the-curtains warm. Not extra-blanket warm.
Warm from the outside in. A furnace at my back, a heavy alpha arm across my middle, a hand splayed flat over my sternum like it got there on purpose and decided to stay. And for one long, stupid, perfect moment I don't remember why this is a problem.
Then I remember all of it, and I still don't move.
Finn Morrow is asleep in my bed. Dead to the world, breathing slow against the back of my neck, woodsmoke and clove gone soft with sleep and all through my sheets now.
At some point in the night his knee came up under mine and his body curled around me like punctuation at the end of a sentence I didn't know I was writing.
He runs hot, the way alphas do. Everything about him that looks cold up close turns out to be the opposite.
I should get up. I have a garden to not-plant and a plan to panic about and a body doing something no suppressant is supposed to allow. I should slide out from under this arm, make coffee, be a person.
I stay exactly where I am and watch the light come up gray-gold on my ceiling and let myself have four more minutes of a thing I'm going to have to give back.
Five minutes.
Okay, ten.
Behind me, the breathing changes. A hitch, a slow inhale, the arm over my waist going tight as the rest of him surfaces.
He doesn't startle. Finn wouldn't startle if the house came down. He wakes the way he does everything, all at once and complete, and I know the exact second he remembers where he is, because his hand flexes against my sternum and goes still.
“Morning,” I say, to my bedroom wall, because I cannot look at him yet.
A pause. Then, gravel-rough with sleep, close enough to stir my hair, “Morning.”
“So this is my ceiling. You've seen it now. There's a water stain shaped like Ohio if you look.”
“Josie.”
“I'm just orienting you. Hospitality.”
His arm tightens, drawing me back into him, and he presses his mouth to the top of my spine, unhurried, like there's no version of this morning where he's in a rush to be anywhere. “Stop narrating.”
“It's a compulsion. I've been to doctors.”
I feel the huff of his laugh against my skin more than hear it, and my heart does a slow, dangerous thing behind my ribs, because I have made Finn Morrow laugh in a bed, in the morning, and I would burn my careful plan to the ground to do it again, and that is exactly the problem, isn't it.
That's the entire problem in one sentence.
He gets up before I have to invent a reason to make him. Finds his jeans. Doesn't do what men do in the after, the awkward retreat, the sudden checking of a phone.
He moves through my small house like he belongs in it. Uses the bathroom, comes back with his shirt in his hand and his hair a catastrophe, and stands in my bedroom doorway looking at me tangled in the sheets like he's deciding something.
“I've got shift at eight,” he says.
“I know. Firemen. Fires.”
“Josie.” He crosses the room. Sits on the edge of the bed, and takes my face in one big hand, and looks at me long enough that I forget three separate jokes. “Last night wasn't the arrangement.”
Every rule I wrote screams at once. This is the part where somebody names it. This is the seam in the arrangement, right here, and one wrong word tears it.
But he doesn't say it was real. He doesn't hand me the sentence I could argue with, could deflect, could file under kindness.
He just says the smallest true thing and lets it sit there, unpushable, and then he kisses my forehead like a man setting something down carefully, and gets up, and pulls his shirt on.
Then he walks out of the bedroom, and I hear him in my kitchen, the tap running, and I think, good, water, he should hydrate, firemen and fires, and I lie back against the pillows and start the long private work of not falling apart before nine a.m.
The tap shuts off. A cupboard. The specific rattle of my ancient coffee maker, which sticks unless you know to lift the lid a half-inch, which he apparently knows, because a minute later the whole house smells like coffee and there's no cursing.
He comes back to the doorway with two mugs.
Hands me one. It's the good mug, the one I hide at the back so nobody chips it. And it's not just coffee, it's my coffee, too much milk and the cinnamon I keep by the stove, the way I made it in front of him exactly once, weeks ago, and never again.
“You watched me make this one time,” I say. It comes out unsteady.
“Mm.” He leans against my doorframe with his own mug, in yesterday's clothes, unhurried, like there's nowhere a Tuesday could possibly need him to be. “You take it like a dessert. It's alarming.”
“It's a valid beverage choice.”
“It's a milkshake in a coffee costume.”
I laugh, and he watches me do it over the rim of his mug, and something about the whole picture, Finn Morrow in my doorway in the morning, having found the good mug, having remembered the cinnamon, undoes a stitch in me I did not know was load-bearing.
He finishes his coffee. Sets the mug in my sink, rinses it, because he's Finn. Then he crosses the room one more time, tips my chin up, and kisses me properly, slow and certain and unhurried, nothing like a goodbye and everything like a promise he hasn't figured out how to say in words yet.
“Eat something,” he says against my mouth. “Not just coffee.”
And then he's gone, actually gone, truck coughing to life outside, and my house is too quiet.
I sit up holding a coffee made exactly the way I like it by a man who signed up for a favor, and I conduct a brisk, professional assessment of my situation. The assessment takes about four seconds and concludes that I am in an enormous amount of trouble.
I decide to appeal the finding. I have always been good at appeals.
I make it forty minutes before I call Cara.
“It's seven forty on a Tuesday,” she says, instead of hello. “You're either dying or you did something. Which.”
“Can it be both.”
“Josie.” I hear her sit up, hear a door close, hear my cousin shift from half-asleep into the particular focus of a woman who plots disasters for a living. “Talk.”
So I talk. Not all of it. I keep the shape of last night to myself, because some things are mine, but I give her the load-bearing beam of it. Finn stayed. An alpha who signed up for a favor stayed the night, and I didn't want him to go, and I don't know how to do the next part.
She's quiet for a second. Cara's quiet is never empty. It's a woman turning a plot over, looking for the piece you can't see because you're standing on it.
“Here's what I'm hearing,” she says finally. “You built a fake pack to get your mother off your back. And somewhere in the last month it stopped being fake for you.”
“That's not—” I start, and stop, because I can't lie, and because she's my cousin, and because it's seven forty in the morning and I'm too tired to perform. “Yes.”
“And you're going to end it anyway. On your little schedule. Because you've decided it's one-sided and you'd rather pull the pin yourself than wait for them to.”
Everything in me goes very still. “I didn't say that.”
“You didn't have to, baby. I've known you since before you could walk. You'd rather break your own heart on purpose than let somebody else do it by accident. It feels like control.” A pause. “It's not. It's just breaking your heart with extra steps.”
I don't say anything. Out the window, the yard I keep meaning to fill with a garden sits in the morning sun, dew still on the grass, waiting for a plan. Something to tend. Something to still be here for me in August, when the rest of it isn't.
“Have you considered,” Cara says, gentle now, “that a man like the one you're describing doesn't stay the night for a bit? That maybe you're not the only one in this pack who forgot it was fake?”
“They're alphas doing me a favor, Cara. That's the whole arrangement.”
“Mm.” She's unconvinced in the exact key my family specializes in. “That's what the plan says.”
I get off the phone before she can be any more right, and I stand in my kitchen in yesterday's shirt, and I do not eat something, because Finn's not here to make me, and that thought is so pathetic I have to go take a shower to escape it.
The shower is where my body reminds me, again, that it has stopped taking suggestions.
Because I'm not cold and I'm not fevered, but I'm humming. Low and constant, a pull that's stopped waiting for a reason.
My skin doesn't fit right. The water's too much and not enough. I stood in this exact shower yesterday and the day before and it was fine, and today my body is a rung too tight, restless in a way no amount of hot water touches.
And then the slick comes, without warning, a slow warm rush between my thighs that has nothing to do with the water and everything to do with the fact that he slept in my bed and his scent is still on my skin under six years of suppressant.
I catch myself with both hands flat on the tile like a woman being frisked, breathing through something that has no business happening for weeks yet, and I say, out loud, to the grout, “Absolutely not. We are not doing this. I have a schedule.” My body, which has never once respected the schedule, declines to comment.
In the mirror on the way out I catch my own face, cheeks gone pink and hot, eyes too bright, a woman looking back at me who is very obviously not fine and doing a terrible job pretending it.
Six years, one pill a day, and I never felt a thing. The pill was a wall and the wall held and I built a whole life behind it.
Now I'm taking suppressants like breath mints and the wall's not a wall anymore. It's a stove somebody turned down instead of off, and lately not even down. Lately just lit, and climbing, my biology quietly overriding six years of chemical common sense.
And there's a name for what happens when the suppressants stop being enough and a body picks a pack and starts getting ready for it.