26. Josie #2
I turn the water cold and I do not think the name.
I've kept that streak alive for four weeks. I can make it to lunch.
I cannot make it to lunch.
Not because of the heat. Because of the man in the garden center.
I've come to Petal & Stem for tomato starts and drainage rock and to prove to Cara, and myself, and a heartbreak crop, that I am a functioning adult who does normal Tuesday errands and not a woman unraveling one degree at a time in the seedling aisle. I have my diagram. I have my zones. I am fine.
And then I round the end of the aisle with an armful of tomato starts and there is Logan, twenty feet away by the mulch, in a park ranger's uniform, with a beard.
My body reacts before my brain does. That's the terrible new fact of me these last few days, that some deep-down animal part has started throwing itself at the sight of my three before the rest of me gets a vote, and it does it now, warm and immediate and stupid, an omega body lunging toward a shape it has decided is hers.
And then his scent reaches me, and everything stops.
Because it's wrong. Close, but wrong. Cedar, yes, but cut with cold river stone where Logan's is sweetened with maple. My body catches the mismatch a full second after it committed, and the warm rush curdles into something confused and off-balance, a hand reaching for a stair that isn't there.
Not Logan.
The disappointment is so immediate and so total that I have to look at the tomato starts for a second and get my face in order, because I refuse, absolutely refuse, to examine the fact that my body went looking for a specific alpha in a garden center and came back bereft that it guessed wrong.
I file that under things I am not going to think about. The file is getting full.
By the time I look up, my brain has caught all the way up to what Logan told me weeks ago, on a job site, fitting a board and fighting a smile like he was enjoying knowing something I didn't. He'll walk into the diner one day and you'll think I lost my mind and grew facial hair on the drive over.
Not the diner. The garden center. But otherwise exactly, unnervingly, as advertised.
Because it is the same face. The exact set of the shoulders, the exact careful way he's reading the back of a soil bag like it might contain instructions for his entire life.
Just with a beard, and four years of extra sun, and something looser in how he holds it, taking up his space instead of apologizing for it.
He looks up. Catches me staring. And grins, wide and immediate and nothing like Logan at all, a grin that arrives with its whole chest, and says, “You've got the face.”
“You must be Nolan,” I say, and I'm proud of how level it comes out, given that my whole nervous system just tried to hug the wrong man. “Logan warned me. He said you'd throw me.”
“He warned you.” Nolan presses a hand to his chest, delighted, wounded, delighted.
“That's slander. I'm a joy. I'm the best thing that's ever walked into this garden center.” He abandons the soil bag and comes over, unhurried, and shakes my hand, and up close it's not quite the same face after all.
Four years of extra weather. A crook in the nose Logan's doesn't have.
Eyes that hold yours instead of dropping.
“Though I'm touched he mentioned me. The man doesn't volunteer his own name, let alone his brother's.”
“He said you were the loud one.”
“He got the patience, I got the personality. We agreed it was a fair split.” He considers. “I lied. I got both. Don't tell him.”
“And you already know who I am.”
“Josie, I've heard your name more times in six weeks than I've heard my brother volunteer information in his entire life.” He leans on the mulch display like we've got all day, like a stranger's garden-center errand is the most interesting thing to happen to him in a month, and maybe out at the basin station it is.
“So the day he calls me, actually calls me, on the phone, voluntarily, which he does approximately never, and spends four full minutes describing a woman's potato salad, I think, okay. Okay. Somebody's finally done it.”
“Done what?”
“Gotten in.” He says it simple, and the grin gentles into something that's just fond. “Cracked the vault. We'd about given up. Mom lit a candle.”
I laugh, surprised out of me, and try to ignore the fact that my body is still sulking about the scent mix-up like a dog that ran to the wrong door, and he points at me like I've proven a theory.
“There it is. That's why he likes you.” Then, because apparently he cannot leave a silence the way his brother cannot fill one, “He built you something, didn't he. Don't tell me what. Let me guess. It's small and it's stupidly well-made and there's no reasonable occasion for it.”
My whole face gives me away.
“Ha.” Pure joy, no smugness in it, a man happy for his brother and not remotely surprised. “That's how you know with Logan. He can't say it out loud, so he builds it instead, and hands it to you, and just hopes you can read wood.”
The quiet one made me a coaster because I set my mug on the attendance folder.
And here's the loud one reading me the manual for a man I'm supposed to hand back in a week, while I stand in the seedling aisle with an armful of tomato starts and a chest full of things an omega whose heat is closing in has no business feeling.
Nolan watches it cross my face with the frank open interest of an alpha who reads people for a living, and the delight softens a half-degree into something kinder.
“Yeah,” he says, quieter. “You've got it worse than I thought.” He tips his head toward my armful, letting me off the hook, because apparently the loud one also knows exactly when to stop.
“Those are tomatoes. Brave. Bold. Doomed, but bold.” He plucks the lot out of my arms like it weighs nothing and starts toward the register.
“Come on. You're going to overwater these, it's written all over you, it runs in the anxious-planner type. I'll teach you how not to murder them.”
“I'm not—”
“You color-coded something recently. I can tell. It's a lifestyle, not a criticism.” He glances back, grinning. “And you can tell me how gone my brother is, since he won't, and I've got a two-hour drive back to the basin and nothing to do but wonder about it the entire drive.”
And I follow the wrong Walker to the register, arms empty, body humming, the streak that's held for four weeks wobbling hard on its axis, and one thought surfaces clear as a bell. The town's going to be full of them now.
There are two of that quiet, careful, devastating face in the world, and my pre-heat-stupid body flagged the wrong one for a full three seconds before it caught up.
I'm going to need a bigger diagram.