27. Logan
Logan
Wednesday is mine.
The schedule says so, in Josie's handwriting, in the little grid she made us all back at the start, when it was still a plan with edges and not the shape my life bends around now. Wednesday, four o'clock, Logan. Nobody wrote down what Wednesday's for. Nobody had to.
And nobody wrote down when it stops, either, but I can feel it coming the way you feel weather. Four weeks, she said, back at the start. A campaign with an end date.
We're near the end of it now. One of these Wednesdays is going to be the last one, and she's going to thank us all very kindly and go pick the life she actually wants, and I've made my peace with not being sure I'm in it.
Made my peace is the wrong phrase. I've stopped arguing with it. That's different.
So this one counts. It's mine, and she's coming out to the house, and I've swept the finished room twice and lit the fire and put a lamp where the light falls best. More than I'd admit to Finn.
I know that's too much. I did it anyway.
Finn and Hudson came by the site Monday, both of them, which never happens. They stood around pretending to look at my framing for a while. Then Hudson got to it, because Hudson always gets to it, but for once there was no joke in front of it.
We're not going to ask if you're in, he said. We know you're in. Thing is, so are we. Somewhere back there it quit being the arrangement and started being a pack. A real one. I think all three of us clocked it about the same week and just didn't say.
He looked at Finn when he said it. Finn didn't argue. From Finn, who spent a month swearing none of it was real, not arguing was the loudest thing in the room.
So here's the only problem left, Hudson said.
She doesn't know yet. Still thinks it's the deal.
And she's skittish, man, she's got one foot out the door already, we've all seen it.
So we don't rush her. Nobody hands her the whole truth and spooks her off.
We don't tell her. We show her. Slow, till she gets there on her own and it's safe to.
Finn said exactly one thing, quiet, to the framing and not to me. Don't declare it. She'll bolt. Then, after a second, like it cost him, just make it so she can't not see it.
I've been turning it over ever since. They're right. They know her. And that's the trouble with today, because I know exactly what I'm not allowed to do, and I'm going to want to do it anyway.
She's late. That isn't like her. Josie runs early to everything, alarms set fifteen minutes fast on purpose, and I'm standing at the front window watching the road like a dog when her little car finally turns onto the lot, and I have to make myself step back and not go out before she's even parked.
She comes up the walk slow. That's not like her either. Josie moves quick, always, quick and bright, hands going while she talks.
Today she comes up my path slow, one hand trailing the porch rail. When she gets close enough for the light to catch her, her face has gone soft and flushed at the edges, and her scent reaches me a beat before she does.
Brown sugar and warm oat. It always is. Except lately it's deeper, richer, gone thick and dark like it's been sitting somewhere warm.
It hits the back of my throat and drops straight through me, and I have to shift my stance on my own porch like a teenager. The smell of her does that to me now. Has for weeks. And I am endlessly, quietly ashamed of how little say I get in it.
I don't say any of that. It's not mine to name, and it's not mine to want this hard.
“You look wrecked,” I say instead. Stupid thing to lead with. She laughs, and it comes out shaky.
“Charming. You should put that on a card.” She stops at the bottom of the deck steps and looks up at me, and there's a decision working behind her eyes, close to the surface now. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“I nearly didn't come.” She says it fast, like she has to get it out before she loses the nerve. “I sat in my driveway for ten minutes. Ten.”
“What stopped you? For ten minutes.”
“Wasn't sure I was still on the schedule.” She climbs the steps, light about it, but she doesn't quite meet my eye. “Reunion's over. Figured the whole thing might be winding down.” A shrug, and then a small smile that undoes the shrug completely. “But I wanted to see you. So.”
She's close now, close enough that her scent wraps all the way around me, and I have to hold very still.
She thinks she might not be wanted here.
Five years. Five years I've spent rearranging my life around the chance of her crossing a room, and she sat in her driveway wondering if she was still invited. I don't have the first idea how to tell her without telling her everything.
I let her in.
The house is quiet in the afternoon, tools down, nobody but us. Most of it's still raw, bare stud walls and bare subfloor waiting on me, but the light comes in low and gold through the windows and the whole place smells like cut pine and woodsmoke.
She walks in and stops just inside the door the way she always does, taking it in. And I watch her take it in, because watching Josie notice things is a thing I could do for the rest of my life and call it a full one.
“You finished the whole front room,” she says, stopping in the doorway of the one space that's done, floor laid and walls up and trimmed out clean, a fire going in the grate under a mantel I built by hand.
“Last week.”
“It's beautiful, Logan.” She crosses to the fireplace and runs one finger along the mantel where the grain runs out clean, and I built that mantel, spent an entire Sunday on it, and watching her touch it puts a lump in my throat I have to look away to survive.
“Walnut,” I say. “Same as your coaster. Had it left over.”
“I still have the coaster you gave me.” She's still looking at the mantel, not at me. “It's on my nightstand. I don't even use it for anything. I just... like knowing it's there.”
I have to take a second with that. It's on her nightstand.
A scrap of walnut I made her because I couldn't stand watching her set a hot mug on the attendance folder, and she took it home Sunday and put it where she sleeps and just likes knowing it's there.
I don't say anything, because if I try to say anything about it my voice is going to do something I can't take back.
She turns. Leans against the finished doorframe, and the gold light is all over her. “I met your brother, by the way. Yesterday. Garden center.”
Everything in me stops.
“Nolan.”
“Nolan.” She's watching my face like it's the best show in town. Knowing Nolan, it probably is. “He's very... forthcoming.”
“What did he say.”
“That you've been weird and happy for about a month now and started ironing your work shirts, which he says is a sign of something serious.” She's enjoying this.
“That when you like someone you build them a thing instead of saying words, and I should learn to read wood.
That you called him. On the phone. To describe a woman's potato salad for four minutes.”
I am going to kill my brother. I am going to drive all the way out to the basin station and do it slow.
“He talks a lot,” I say.
“He talks a lot.” She pushes off the frame, and the teasing goes out of her face, replaced by that guarded, deciding look. “But he wasn't wrong about the building thing. Was he.”
“No.”
“So.” She's looking at me across the one finished room in a house that isn't anything yet. “I have a question, and you have to answer it, because you can't lie. Which is the single most inconvenient thing about you.”
“That's the deal.”
“You kissed me. On the date.” She says it lightly, like it's nothing, and only the way she won't quite meet my eye gives her away. “And then you went right back to goodnight-at-the-door. Every time since. So.” A little shrug that doesn't land as breezy as she wants it to. “Why'd you stop.”
There's a true answer to that, and I'm not allowed to give it.
“Wasn't the right time.” I look at the fire instead of at her, because if I hold her eyes she'll see the rest of it. “That's all.”
It's not an answer and we both know it. Something flickers and dims behind her eyes, and I hate it, and I let it happen.
“That's not an answer, Logan.”
“I know.” I hold her eyes. That much I can give her. “Come here anyway.”
She crosses the room to me, slow, that same unhurried walk, and stops close enough that I have to look down to hold her eyes, and I do, I hold them, because I am done looking at windows.
“You're impossible,” she says. Not unkind. A little sad, and trying to cover it, and I feel that cover go up like a wall I built myself.
“I know that too.”
I lift my hands to her face like she might break, or I might, and neither of us is sure which.
Her skin is hot. Fever-hot under my palms, cheeks burning, and up close there's a fine tremor running through her that I don't name, I just gentle her, thumbs along her cheekbones, slow, the way you'd steady a thing you've waited years to be trusted with, an omega running so hot under my hands, so far past what her suppressants should be letting through, that it scares me a little.
And then I kiss her.
I can't say it. So I'll say it like this. Every word I'm swallowing, I put into my hands and my mouth instead, and I let her feel all of it and call it nothing, because that's the deal I've made with myself, that's the only way I get to give her the truth without spooking her with it.
Careful lasts about a second. Then her mouth opens under mine and a sound comes out of her, small and undone, and her hands fist in my shirt and pull, and five years of holding on slips the leash all at once.
And her scent changes. Sweetens, sharpens, blooms into something that goes straight to my head. Under it, unmistakable, the smell of how much she wants this.
I'm hard against the front of my jeans in a way there's no hiding and no apologizing for. Wanting so badly to press her into the wall and take that I have to breathe through it, both hands going still on her for a second just to remember I'm a man with rules.
I kiss her like I've been saving it. Because I have.
I back her gently to the wall, one hand sliding into her hair and the other flat between her shoulder blades, holding her into me, and she goes up on her toes to get closer and I take her weight without thinking, because taking her weight is the only thing I've ever wanted to be for.
She's shaking. Really shaking now, fine and constant, and when I pull back to check her she chases my mouth and makes a sound of complaint that lands somewhere at the base of my spine.
“Hey,” I say against her lips. “I've got you. Slow.”
“I don't want slow.”
“I know.” I catch the little tremor in her hands, the heat pouring off her skin, the way her scent keeps climbing, and I gentle her through all of it. “Slow anyway. You're getting all of it. We've got all afternoon.”
Because she's coming apart under my hands, and it's not just me.
Her body's running hot and fast and way ahead of both of us, climbing toward something her suppressants shouldn't be letting anywhere near the surface, and I'm not going to be the one who rushes her through the one afternoon I get to give her slow.
I kiss the corner of her mouth. Her jaw. The line of her throat, where her pulse is going wild, and she tips her head back against the wall to let me and breathes my name at the ceiling.
Then I go down on my knees on the floor of the finished room, in the firelight and the last of the gold coming through the windows, on the drop cloth still spread from the trim work, and I take her with me, easing her down, and I get my hands on the button of her jeans and stop, and look up, and wait.
“Yes,” she says, wrecked, already lifting her hips. “God, Logan, yes.”
I draw them down and off. Her underwear with them, because I am done being careful and she told me to be.
And then she's bare in the gold light on the floor of the house I'm building, thighs falling open for me, slick and swollen and flushed, and I have to stop and just look, because five years of not letting myself imagine this did not come anywhere close.
“Logan.” Half a laugh, half a plea. “You're staring again.”
“Give me a second.” My voice has gone to gravel. “I've wanted to look at you like this for a long time.”
Then I settle between her thighs like a man kneeling at the one altar he's ever believed in, and I put my mouth on her.
She comes up off the drop cloth. I hold her down with a forearm across her hips and take my time, because I have wanted to do this for five years and I am not going to rush it now that I'm finally allowed.
I lick into her slow, learning the taste of her, the shape, what makes her gasp and what makes her swear.
She's slick against my mouth and sweeter than her scent ever promised, her whole body gone pliant and open the way an omega only goes for an alpha she trusts with everything, and I could drown here happy.
I flatten my tongue over her clit and she keens, high and broken, so I do it again, and again, setting a rhythm and holding it while her hips try to buck up into my mouth.
“Logan—” It tears out of her. “Oh—there—right there, don't you dare stop, don't you dare—”
I don't stop. I close my lips around her clit and suck, and slide one finger into her at the same time, and she clamps down around it, hot and tight and wanting, and the sound she makes is one I'm going to hear in my sleep for the rest of my life.
“More. Logan. I need—”
“I've got you.” Against her, so she feels the words more than hears them.
I've never talked during this in my life, never had the nerve, and the nerve isn't really here now either, it's just that the wanting's bigger than the shyness for once.
“Been wanting this so long I don't—” My voice gives out, comes back rougher.
“Don't have to be quiet here. Let me hear you. Please—let me feel you come.”
I give her more. Two fingers now, curling up into the spot that makes her body go tight, my mouth never leaving her clit. She's shaking apart under me, both hands fisted in my hair, hips fighting my arm, thighs starting to shake around my head.
The careful man. The quiet one. The one who never asks. On my knees, asking with my whole mouth, and getting an answer.
She breaks with my name in it, clenching hard around my fingers, slick flooding my hand, and I work her through every wave of it, tongue gentling, fingers slowing, until she's boneless and twitching and tugging weakly at my hair because it's too much.
I kiss the inside of her thigh. Rest my forehead against her hip and just breathe her in for a second, shaking a little myself, wrecked by getting to do the one thing I'm actually good at.
I take care of her.