29. Josie
Josie
By Thursday I am not okay, and I am handling it by pretending very hard that I am.
The pretending has layers. There's the surface layer, where I taught fifteen four-year-olds about the letter G and did not once lie down on the reading rug and refuse to get up.
There's the middle layer, where I've stopped being able to wear my softest cardigan because the seams feel like sandpaper and my skin has decided everything is too much.
And there's the bottom layer, the one I'm not looking at, where there's a bottle in my nightstand with four pills left in it and a heat coming for me like weather.
I'm not looking at the bottom layer. I've gotten very good, over six years, at not looking at the bottom layer.
So when Hudson Grant's truck pulls into my driveway at four o'clock, unannounced, I'm on my hands and knees in the front garden bed doing battle with a root that has personally wronged me, sweating, gritty, one breath from tears for no reason I'm willing to name.
“Porter.” The truck door slams. “You look deranged. I love it. What are we killing?”
“A root.” I sit back on my heels and shove hair out of my face with a muddy wrist. “It started it.”
“It usually does.” He comes across the grass in that easy unhurried lope, all long legs and no particular hurry, and drops into a crouch beside me, and his scent rolls off him, juniper, clean and green and familiar, and my whole raw-edged omega body leans toward the nearest alpha it trusts before I catch myself and haul back.
“Move over. You're doing it emotionally. Roots respond to leverage, not feelings.”
“Everything responds to feelings, Hudson. That's the whole problem with being alive.”
He looks at me a beat longer than the joke earns.
Because here's what nobody warns you about Hudson Grant, the part hidden under all the noise and the grin and the method-acting nonsense.
He watches. Half the town thinks he's the loud one who's not paying attention, and the truth is he's the one who's always paying attention, he just does it with jokes so nobody feels watched.
And right now he's watching me, and whatever he sees makes the grin go quieter at the edges.
“Okay,” he says, easy, like it's nothing. “New plan. The root lives. You've made your point, root. We respect you.” He stands, and holds down a hand. “Up. Come on. You've got a face like a Sunday you didn't sleep through and I'm not leaving you out here to lose a fight to landscaping.”
I take his hand. He hauls me up like I weigh nothing, and for a second I'm too close to him and his warmth and his juniper and my stupid oversensitive skin sings so loud, my body pulling toward his scent like it's already decided he's pack, that I have to step back fast and make it look like I'm brushing off dirt.
He notices. Of course he notices. He notices everything.
He doesn't say anything about it.
“I can't hang out,” I say. A lie. I have nowhere to be, I have exactly one plan for this evening and it's quiet dread. “I've got—”
“You've got nothing. You've got a root you're losing to and a kettle.” He's already heading for my porch like he lives here.
“I brought pie. Aunt Deb's recipe, executed by me, which means it's structurally unsound but emotionally correct.
Sit on your steps. I'll get plates. Don't argue, I know where they are, I've been in your kitchen more than my own this month.”
And I don't argue.
I sit on my porch steps in the low gold four-o'clock light, filthy and fraying and one bad thought from crying, and Hudson Grant bangs around my kitchen narrating a running argument with my cutlery drawer, and a knot that's been pulled tight in me for days lets go by one notch.
He comes back with two plates and a pie that is, in fact, listing to one side like a shed in a strong wind, and sits down next to me on the step, close but not too close, his shoulder a warm inch from mine, and hands me the less-collapsed slice.
“Eat that. You look like a stiff breeze would file a missing persons report.”
“You're very rude to me.”
“I'm very honest with you. It's different. It's my best quality.” He forks up a bite of the wreckage. “Also I'm the only one who tells you the truth without making it a whole federal event, so eat your pie and let me be your favorite for ten minutes.”
I laugh. It surprises me, comes out of somewhere under all the dread, and he grins around his fork, delighted, because making me laugh when I don't want to is Hudson's entire love language and he knows he just scored.
We eat pie on my steps and don't talk about anything.
He tells me a long stupid story about Beckett Fletcher and a canoe and a goose that may or may not be true.
He does not ask why my eyes are pink. He does not ask why I flinched off him in the garden, or why I'm wearing my scratchiest cardigan inside out, or why I've got the specific fragile look of a woman holding something heavy over her head with both arms.
He just stays. Warm and loud and easy at my side, filling the quiet so I don't have to, asking nothing, taking up space next to me like a wall you're allowed to lean on.
And I want to tell him. That's the terrible part. Sitting here in the last of the light with juniper and pie and Hudson's dumb goose story, I want to lean into his side and tell him all of it.
The bottle. The heat. The four pills. The way I've started planning how to give all three of them back before they work out I'm the one who fell. I want to tell him because Hudson is the easiest person in the world to tell things to. That's his trick. That's his gift.
I don't. Because telling him is the first domino, and I know exactly where the dominoes end.
When the pie's gone he stands, stretches, and pulls me up off the step, and before he lets go he does the small thing that undoes me every time, the one that asks for nothing back — he ducks and presses a quick warm kiss to the top of my head, the way you'd gentle a kid or a spooked horse, casual as breathing.
“You'd tell me,” he says. Not a question. Quiet, under the easy. “If it was bad. You'd tell one of us.”
“It's not bad.” Four pills. A date on a spreadsheet. “I'm just tired, Hudson.”
He looks at me a second longer, and I watch him decide to let me have it, the way you let someone have a lie they need.
“Okay, Porter.” He squeezes my hand once and lets go. “I'm around. You know where the store is. You know where I am.” The grin comes back, full wattage, the curtain dropping. “Try not to die fighting a root. It's an embarrassing obituary and I'd have to give the eulogy and I'd roast you.”
He lopes back to his truck. Waves out the window without looking. Pulls out.
And I stand in my garden in the dark-coming light with the taste of bad pie in my mouth and the warm ghost of a kiss on the top of my head, and I think, with a clarity that scares me, one clean unbearable thought.
I'm going to lose this.
This. Them. Hudson on my steps with a bad pie and a kiss on my head. Finn. Logan. Three alphas who show up for me like it's nothing, like I'm easy to show up for.
And I'm not going to lose it because anyone takes it. I'm going to lose it because I'm going to end it myself, on purpose, before they can figure out I'm the one who fell — that somewhere in all this pretending, I stopped pretending, and they didn't.
That was always the plan. Wind it down, hand them back their lives, walk away first. I just didn't count on it feeling like this. Like giving away the only thing I've ever actually wanted, with my own two hands.
The root is still in the garden bed, undefeated. I leave it. Some things you don't get to win.
I go inside, and I do not open the nightstand drawer, and I lie in the dark being tired the way I told Hudson I was tired, and I let myself have the memory of the kiss on my head for one more night before I start the work of giving them back.
Tomorrow, I tell myself. I'll start being sensible tomorrow.
My skin burns against the sheets. Under the dread, my omega body has already started counting down toward a heat no pill left in that bottle is going to hold.