9. Josie
JOSIE
Ican’t get the second earring in.
It’s not a hard job. It’s been not-hard my whole life, but my hands have got this fine hum in them tonight, the good kind of nervous, champagne-nervous, and I keep missing the hole and stabbing myself gently in the earlobe, and I’ve started laughing at myself in the mirror about it, which isn’t helping.
Dot did my hair this afternoon—soft waves, half up, “leave some down, he likes it down,” which I did not confirm or deny but she’s right—the whole back room of the diner turned into a salon for the day, Casey painting somebody’s nails, three conversations running at once over the crossover of a curling iron, and me in the middle of it grinning like a fool for two straight hours.
Casey caught me at it in the mirror once and narrowed her eyes. “You’re being weird.”
“I’m being festive.”
“You’re being weird festive.” But she let it go, because Casey files everything and pushes nothing, and someday—soon, maybe tomorrow, once Levi knows—I’m going to get to watch her face when she finds out what weird festive was.
Now I’ve got the green dress on, the one Levi calls the trouble dress with a completely straight face, and standing here in front of our dresser mirror I look like a woman with a wonderful secret.
I look like her. Cheeks already pink, eyes too bright.
Anyone paying attention could read me from across a parking lot.
Good thing the plan’s tonight, honestly.
I wasn’t going to survive another week of my own face.
Nell nearly caught me Thursday at the clinic dropping off Dot’s cholesterol paperwork—took one look at me across the counter and got that scanning-for-symptoms squint, and I invented a dentist appointment and fled.
Nell Sutter has diagnosed half this valley off less than what my face has been doing all week.
I run the line one more time. Out loud, quiet, watching my mouth say it: “You always say the club’s your family, right?” Beat. “What if we started our own?”
I’ve said it so many times in two days it’s gone a little smooth, worn like a river rock.
I keep testing where his face will go. The blink.
The started our own what? And then—the landing.
I want to be watching his eyes the exact second it lands.
That’s the whole thing. Three years of loving a man who says it with his hands, and tonight I finally get to watch something land on him where he can’t reach for a wrench.
I’ve even planned the after. If it goes the way I’ve storyboarded it—and I’ve storyboarded it within an inch of its life—he’ll do the Levi thing where the feeling’s too big for the room, and he’ll need to put his hands somewhere, and this time the somewhere will be me, and we’ll slip out the back of our own party for ten minutes and let Tucker think whatever Tucker thinks.
And someday when the kid asks where were you when you found out about me, he’ll get to say: at a party the whole family threw us, under the string lights your mother spent a week on, and I kissed her in the truck lot till Dot sent a search party.
That’s the story I’m trying to buy tonight. That’s the whole shopping list.
And underneath all of it, way down where I don’t poke at it much, there’s the other hope.
The real one. Because here’s the truth I’d only ever say to the mirror: I’ve spent three years loving Levi Ford louder than he loves me.
Not more, maybe—I’ve never let myself decide more—but louder, first, out in front where everybody can see it, no takebacks.
I said I love you first, month five, in the cab of his truck, and lived through the eleven days it took him to say it back.
I moved in first—my toothbrush, my lease not renewed, my whole flag planted—while he was still saying your place and my place.
I’m the one who learned every birthday in his family, who shows up loud to everything, who’s been all-in at full volume since practically the Stockman parking lot, betting the whole hand every round while he calls and calls and never raises.
And he’s never made me feel dumb for it, not once.
But he’s never once caught up to it either.
And some little worn-out night-shift part of my heart has been waiting three whole years for proof, real proof, either direction, and tonight—tonight when I hand him the biggest thing I’ve got, whatever comes back at me across that table is going to be the answer.
I just want it to be enough. God, let it be enough.
“Zip you up?”
He’s in the doorway. Showered, good jeans, the black button-down I got him that he pretends he hates, and he’s leaning on the frame watching me with a beer in his hand, and I have no idea how long he’s been there.
“Please. And don’t say anything about the earring situation.”
“Wasn’t gonna.” He sets the beer on the dresser and comes up behind me, and the mirror gives me both of us at once—him a full head taller and twice as wide, black shirt open at the collar, freshly shaved for the first time in two weeks, which he only does for weddings, funerals, and me—and I watch his big hands gather my hair over one shoulder like it’s made of something spendy.
“You iron that shirt?” I ask the mirror.
“Shirt came like this.”
“Levi Ford. Did you iron that shirt.”
“...There may have been an incident with an iron.”
“Oh my God. You love me.”
“Somebody’s gotta uphold the family reputation. Hold still.”
He does the zipper slow. Too slow. Knuckles grazing up my spine ahead of it, taking the long way, and in the mirror I watch him watch what he’s doing—that focus he gets, the shop focus, wasted extravagantly on a zipper—and when it’s done, his thumb keeps going.
Drags up my spine, bottom to top, one long line that puts goosebumps clear down my arms, and I watch my own face in the mirror do exactly what it’s been doing for three years when he touches me like that, which is give up all its secrets except the one that matters.
“Levi.”
“Mm.” His mouth lands on the back of my neck, right where he knows, of course where he knows, and his other hand slides around the front of my hip, big and warm and flat, pulling me back against him until there’s no daylight anywhere between us and I can feel exactly how much he means what he’s about to say.
“You want to know what I’m gonna do about this dress later,” he says into my ear, low, conversational, like he’s quoting me a brake job, and then he tells me.
In order. In detail. Where his hands are going to be and where his mouth is going to be and what I’m going to be saying by the time he’s halfway through the list, words I could never repeat at Dot’s counter delivered in that easy gravel voice with his thumb tracing slow circles on my hipbone the whole time—and every single thought in my head blows out like a candle.
The line. The plan. Marley Quinn, whoever that is. The earring in my hand. Gone. There’s just his mouth on my neck, and his hand on my hip, and three years of my body knowing exactly where this goes and leaning back into it like it’s home, because it is.
“We have a party,” I manage.
“Party’s ours. Can’t start without us.” His teeth graze my ear. The zipper he just did up—I feel his fingers find the pull of it again, thoughtful, like a man reconsidering his work.
“Dot will kill us.”
“Dot loves me.”
And he turns me around by the waist, both hands, easy as turning a page, and he’s already walking me backward toward the dresser with the dress sliding half off my shoulder and his mouth coming down on mine, and I’m laughing into the kiss and not stopping him even a little?—
—and out in the driveway, long and rude and right on time, Tucker leans on his truck horn.