7. Josie #3
“I'm calling it Phase One,” he adds, pleased with himself.
“There are phases?”
“There are now.” He points the pen at Logan, then Finn. “You two are on the hook for yours. One each, broken in, something you actually wear. Drop them by the school this week.”
He pulls his out of the tote, gray, soft-looking, and holds it out across the coffee table. “Here. It's soft. You'll like it.”
I take it. It's heavier than it looks, soft from washing, and when I pull it into my lap it smells like him, juniper and clean rain, the open-air smell of a alpha who's never once been stuck indoors against his will, and my whole body leans a quarter-inch toward it before I can tell it not to.
I make myself fold it over my arm like a normal person handling a normal garment, and not like a woman who just got a lungful of an attractive alpha and felt it somewhere unhelpful.
The rule I just made hums in the back of my mind, I call it, and I notice that none of them has reached toward me, not once, all night. They've kept their hands to themselves and let me hold the whole evening in my own two.
Which is the kind of thing I'd normally turn over for an hour. Tonight I leave it alone.
“One more thing, and it's the big one,” I say, because Lily drilled this into me and she was right.
“We can't just show up at the reunion and wing it.
A real pack doesn't think about where to put their hands.
It's just there. If we want to sell this to a backyard full of people who've known me my whole life, we have to practice. Actually practice. Between now and the reunion.”
“Define practice,” Finn says.
“One of you, every day. Rotating. We spend time together, just the two of us, until being around each other stops feeling like a performance and starts feeling like a habit.
Coffee, errands, whatever you've got going on.
The hand stuff, the standing-close stuff, all of it.
By the time we're in that backyard, it can't be something we're thinking about. It has to be muscle memory.”
Hudson's already writing. “A rehearsal schedule. I'm obsessed. I'm building a spreadsheet.”
“You are not building a spreadsheet.”
“It's already half built in my mind, Porter, you can't unbuild a spreadsheet.” He's grinning. “I'll take the first slot. Tomorrow. And I'm not making you practice in a backyard, I'm putting you in a kayak. You ever been?”
“No, and I'd like to keep it that way.”
“Perfect. Nothing sells a couple like one of them mildly panicking in a tandem kayak. I'll get Wes to open the shop.”
“Whatever days,” Logan says, easy. “I'm around. Job sites, mostly, but you're welcome wherever I am.” Then, because he can't help himself, quieter, “It's good. The practicing. It's a good idea.”
And then it's Finn, who I expect to fight it, because a month of forced one-on-one time with me is exactly the kind of thing a man builds an alphabetized tool wall to avoid.
He doesn't fight it. “Fine. I'll take a day. Tell me when.”
It's the easiest yes he's given all night, and I don't have time to wonder why, because Hudson's already assigning days and Logan's volunteering his Sunday and the whole thing is suddenly real, a calendar, a plan, a month of showing up.
“Okay,” I say. The plan's real now, days and all, and the part of me that runs on momentum doesn't want to wait until tomorrow to start. “So let's start now. Something small, while we're all here.”
Three sets of eyes come up.
“What kind of thing,” Finn says, careful.
“A hand. Just holding hands.” My voice is steadier than I expected, now that I'm the one driving. “So we know what it's like.” I look at the three of them, all of them gone still and waiting for me to call it. “Logan. You're closest.”
Logan doesn't lunge. He doesn't make it a thing. He just turns on the couch, slow enough that I could stop it at any point, and holds his hand out, palm up, open, on the cushion between us. Waiting.
“Whenever you want,” he says. “I won't move till you do.”
I put my hand in his.
His fingers close over mine, warm and rough, a carpenter's hand, callused at the base of every finger, and the size of it folding around mine sends something low and warm up my arm that has nothing to do with the cover story and everything to do with how long it's been since anyone touched me on purpose.
This close, I get him for the first time. Maple and cedarwood, the warm smell of a alpha who works with his hands and means it. And I have to remind myself, firmly, that I'm the one who called for this and I am absolutely not allowed to lean in and find out what the rest of him smells like.
The room is very quiet, and somewhere across the coffee table Hudson has the grace not to say a word, and Finn is looking at our two hands with an expression I will think about much later when I'm supposed to be sleeping.
It's just a hand. It's the most anyone's held of me in six years.
“Okay,” I say, and my voice only wobbles a little. “Okay. That's, that's fine. That's good. We can do that.”
“We can do that,” Logan agrees, and doesn't let go until I do.