9. Josie
Josie
Idid not sleep well, and it is entirely Hudson Grant's fault.
I have spent eighteen hours not thinking about the kiss with the focus of a woman thinking about nothing else.
I thought about it through dinner. I thought about it while I lay in bed staring at the ceiling.
I thought about it at two in the morning, and at four, and again over coffee I held with both hands like it could anchor me to the day.
The conclusion I've reached, after all that rigorous analysis, is that I am not going to think about it. There. Solved.
So when I pull up to the address Logan texted me, a half-built house on a quiet lot at the edge of town, I am calm and unbothered and completely fine, and only thinking about the kiss in the background, like a song stuck behind a door.
He's up on the deck framing when I get out of the car, and he doesn't see me yet, and for a second I just watch him work.
I've watched Logan fix my playground fence all month, which I'll admit I watched more closely than the job strictly required. But I've never seen him on a real site, never seen him build something instead of mend it, and it turns out his element is something.
He moves through the half-finished frame like he built the concept of right angles personally.
There's a pencil behind his ear. He sets a board, checks it against a level, frowns at something only he can see, shaves a hair off the end with a plane in two clean strokes, and sets it again.
And this time whatever was wrong is right.
He's rolled his sleeves up. I have decided not to have feelings about Logan's forearms two days in a row, and I am failing, and then he turns and sees me and his whole face does a thing, opens up, goes warm, before he catches it and reels it back to something more contained, and I forget about the forearms because the face was worse.
“Hey.” He pulls the pencil from behind his ear like he needs his hands to have a job. “You found it.”
“One of your directions was 'left at the brown cow.'“
“Brenda. She's reliable.” He says it completely straight, and I laugh, and he ducks his head and almost smiles, pleased and trying not to look pleased, and I think, not for the first time and with a small new flicker of alarm, that Logan Walker is a genuinely lovely man and I should probably stop noticing it so much.
The plan, such as it is, was to practice. The standing-close, the easy touch, the muscle memory we all agreed we needed. But Logan, it turns out, has no idea how to start that on purpose, and neither, I'm realizing, do I. So we just, don't. We circle it. We talk about the house instead.
And it takes me a while to notice he never says a client's name.
He says the kitchen's going here and I'm running the beam this way so the morning light comes through and I haven't decided on the stairs yet.
Every sentence has an I in it where a customer's name should be.
And somewhere around the third one it lands on me, quiet and strange.
“Logan. Whose house is this?”
He doesn't look up from the board he's measuring. The back of his neck answers before he does, going slowly pink. “Mine.”
“You're building your own house.”
“Building it slow. Weekends, mostly. Couple of years now.” He marks the board, sets the pencil back behind his ear. “No rush on it. It's not, ah. It's not for anything yet.”
Not for anything yet. I tuck that away with all the other things about Logan I don't have room to feel today.
“My brother helped me frame the back of it,” he says, nodding at the far wall, filling the quiet the way he does, with facts instead of feelings. “Before the season started. He's better at the heavy stuff. Stronger than me, which he never shuts up about.”
“I didn't know you had a brother.” Five years in this town and you'd think I'd have met every Walker by now, but Logan keeps to himself, and so, apparently, does whoever this is.
“Nolan. He's a ranger, posted out at the basin station most of the year, so he's not around much.” He fits the next board. “We're twins.”
“You're a twin.”
“Identical.” He says it to the board, fighting the smile, like he's enjoying knowing something I don't. “It throws people.
He's got the beard and about four years of extra sun on me, but it's the same face.
He'll walk into the diner one day and you'll think I lost my mind and grew facial hair on the drive over.” The dimple comes out, brief, the one I'm learning means he's pleased with himself.
“He's the loud one. Says all the stuff I don't. You'd like him. Everybody likes Nolan.”
There is something so guileless about a man telling you, with total sincerity, that you'd probably like his more confident brother better, that I have to look back down at the board so I don't do something embarrassing about it.
He hands me things. That's how it starts, in the end, not a grand practice exercise, just Logan needing a board held steady and me holding it, the two of us crouched over the deck frame, his hands and my hands an inch apart on the same length of pine.
He smells like maple and warm cedarwood and sawn lumber, and I am very aware of the inch.
“Other end,” he says, low. “Can you, just, hold it level for me.”
I hold it level. He drives the screw, and his forearm brushes mine, warm, and his scent comes with it, maple and cedar and clean sweat, close enough that some old quiet part of me leans toward it before I catch myself and lean back.
He goes still for a second, just a second, like a man who walked into a doorframe in the dark. Then he keeps going like it didn't happen, and there's color climbing up out of his collar.
“Sorry,” he says.
“For what?”
“I don't know.” He's looking very hard at the screw. “Reflex.”
And I should tease him. Normally I would tease him. But there's something about how careful he's being, how he's holding all his bigness so gently around me, that closes my throat a little, and I don't say anything at all.
“Can I do one?” I hear myself ask.
He looks at me like I've offered to perform surgery. “A screw?”
“I'm very capable. I run a classroom of twelve. I have driven a great many things into a great many surfaces, mostly thumbtacks, but the principle transfers.”
His mouth does the thing where it wants to smile and he won't let it all the way. “Okay.” He sets a board, hands me the drill, and it is heavier than I expect and I nearly put it through the deck. “Whoa. Two hands. Here.”
And then he's behind me, not touching, gentle as a man defusing something, one big hand hovering near mine on the grip without landing, talking me through it, low and even, line it up, let the tool do the work, don't force it, which is apparently the entire Logan Walker philosophy of everything.
The screw goes in crooked. Catastrophically crooked. It is the worst screw in the history of carpentry.
“There,” I say, triumphant.
He looks at it. He looks at me, at how pleased I am, and I watch him make a decision, watch him choose, very deliberately, not to fix it.
“Yep,” he says. “That'll hold.”
“You're going to take it out the second I leave.”
“I would never.” He absolutely is. There's a whole house depending on it.
But he leaves my catastrophe sitting there in the frame like it belongs, and goes and gets another board, and I sit back on my heels feeling weirdly, stupidly proud of one terrible screw, and decide not to look too hard at why.
We get good at it without deciding to.
That's the strange part. We never have the conversation about practicing, we never run the drill. But somewhere in an afternoon of him handing me boards and me holding them and the two of us working out the house together, the inch between our hands stops being a thing I'm counting.
He steadies me with a hand at my back when I lean too far over the frame, automatic, there and gone. I end up with my hand flat on his shoulder for balance and forget to take it off for a whole minute. He lets me. Neither of us mentions it.
I got here a knot of nerves, and Logan just, untied me, board by board, without either of us saying a word about it.
Around three he shows me the one room that's finished.
He doesn't make a thing of it, just, “there's one room that's basically there, if you want to see,” and leads me down the hall to a room at the back, the quiet corner of the house, and pushes the door open, and I step in and stop, because I know exactly what it is before he says a word.
It's a nest room. Every omega instinct I have goes quiet and certain at the sight of it, the way you go still in a doorway that feels like it might be home.
The platform takes up most of the floor, built so low it's almost on the boards, but wide, deep, big enough for a whole pack to pile into and disappear. It's bare now, just the frame of it, waiting for the mattresses and the blankets and everything soft that would go on top.
There's just the one small window, set up high and no bigger than it has to be, letting in barely enough light to see by.
Because the whole room is built to stay dim, the way a den stays dim, the way an omega wants it.
Enclosed and quiet and safe. Every edge in here is sanded round and gentle.
The walls are a warm, deep color, the color of being held.
He built a nest room. With his own hands. In the house that isn't for anything yet.
“It's not done done,” he says, hanging back at the doorway like he knows better than to follow me in, like he's not sure he should have brought me here at all. “Still needs everything soft. But the room's right. I took my time getting the room right.”
“Logan.” My voice comes out strange. “You built a nest room.”
“Yeah.” He's gone red to the ears, but he doesn't look away, and he doesn't lie, because he's Logan and he can't. “Figured if I ever, ah.
If there was ever somebody who needed one.
I wanted it already here. Already safe. So nobody'd have to ask.” He says it to the floor, and then, quietly, like it surprises him on the way out, “Seems like the kind of thing you build first. Not last.”
And I have to turn and look at the small dark window for a second, because the careful, ridiculous, lovely truth of it is that this man built a safe place for a someday he won't even let himself want out loud, and stood back to let me see it, and my heart has gone and done something about that without checking with me first.
We don't talk about the nest room. He seems relieved I don't make him, and I'm relieved he doesn't make me, and we go back out to the deck like we left it running, and the easiness comes back so fast it's almost suspicious.
I help. I use the word loosely. I hand him the wrong board twice, hold the level upside down, and at one point manage to get a tape measure to recoil so hard it leaves a mark.
“You're doing great,” he says, not looking up, with the steady kindness of a man watching someone slowly ruin his afternoon.
“Admit it. The house is going up faster with me here.” I pass him the next board, correct side this time, small victories.
He looks at the half-built deck. He looks at me. “It's going up,” he says, like a man being scrupulously honest under oath, and doesn't add the rest, and the not-adding is the funniest thing he could have done.
It surprises a laugh out of me, the real kind, and he ducks his head, pleased, and I think, uh oh, in the clear unbothered way you think uh oh right before a thing you fully intend to keep doing anyway.
I leave as the light's going gold, and he walks me to my car, hands shoved in his pockets, the way he gets when there's nothing left for his hands to do.
“So I've got you again in a few days,” he says. “Whenever the rotation comes back to me. Or not, if you're slammed. No rush. Whatever works.”
“That's a lot of outs you just gave me in one sentence.”
“Wanted you to have options.” He says it plainly, and the gentleness of it catches me under the ribs, and he opens my car door because of course he does, and stands back the polite six inches, and I get in.
“Thanks, Logan. For the lemonade. And for letting me wreck a perfectly good deck.” I look up at him, this big quiet man going gold in the last of the light. “I had fun. I didn't think I'd have fun.”
“Yeah.” He smiles, slow and real. “Me neither. Well. I did. I figured I would.” He hears himself and the color comes up again. “Anyway.”
“Brenda the cow really pulled through,” I say, to save him.
His laugh is surprised out of him, warm and bright, and he's still smiling when he taps the roof of my car twice and steps back, and I drive off down the quiet road with a terrible screw crammed into a deck frame somewhere behind me and two alphas' worth of feelings I absolutely did not sign up for.
The plan. The plan is going so well it's going terribly. I genuinely cannot tell anymore.