10. Finn
Finn
The diner was my idea, which I am already regretting.
Not because it's wrong. It's the smart play, and I knew it the second the schedule came up, the rotating schedule, a day for each of us, like she's running a campaign.
The other two took her out where nobody could see. Grant put her in a boat on an empty lake. Walker had her at a job site at the edge of town with one cow for a witness. Sweet. Useless. You don't sell a pack to a town by hiding from it.
You sell it at Dottie's, on a Monday, in the window booth, where Pete can see you from the second stool and have it half across the county before the pie comes.
My mother will hear about it by Wednesday.
That's the entire point. That's the only point.
If she thinks I'm spoken for, she stops.
No more omegas conveniently seated next to me at dinner, no more “I just gave Dana your number,” no more standing in her kitchen getting interrogated about my future like it's a missing person case.
One public booth at Dottie's and the whole campaign ends. That's why I picked it. That's the only reason I picked it, and if I drove over here a little too ready to, I'm not looking at that.
She's already in the booth when I get there. Of course she is. She came straight from the school, still has the look of a woman who spent her day being shorter than everyone she's in charge of, a smear of something glittery on her sleeve, hair coming out of whatever she did to it this morning.
She's reading the laminated menu like there's going to be a quiz. She knows the menu. Everybody knows the menu. Dottie hasn't changed it since the Clinton administration.
“You're late,” she says, not looking up.
“I'm on time. You're early.”
“Same thing, from where I'm sitting.” She sets the menu down. “Sit. People are already looking. Pete's vibrating.”
I sit. The booth is small and so is the table and there is nowhere to put my hands that isn't six inches from hers, which I notice, and then decide not to have noticed.
Her scent's already in the booth, brown sugar and warm oat, and my alpha instincts take a slow inventory of it without asking my permission.
Dottie's on us before I've got my elbows settled, coffee pot already tipping, like she's been standing by with it. “Well,” she says, looking between us with the open delight of a woman who has waited a long time for material. “Isn't this something.”
“Evening, Dottie,” I say.
“Finn Morrow. On a date.” She says it loud enough for the booth behind us, the booth in front of us, and arguably the parking lot. “In my diner. I have been serving this man black coffee and a sad single egg for nine years and he has never once brought a person.”
“It's dinner, Dottie.”
“It's not—” Josie starts, and I watch her remember, mid-sentence, that yes it is, that's the whole job, and pivot so hard she nearly sprains it. “—it's not anything we want a fuss over. So if you could keep it low-key.”
Which, to Dottie, is the same as a starter pistol. Her eyes light up like a slot machine paying out. “Low-key,” she says, in a stage whisper you could hear from the road, and pours two coffees nobody ordered, and sails off toward the kitchen at a speed that suggests a phone.
Josie waits until she's gone. “She heard 'low-key' and somehow that means 'tell everyone immediately,' doesn't it.”
“Your mother will have it by Wednesday.”
“That fast?”
“Dottie called my mother when I got my learner's permit. They have a system.” I turn my mug a quarter-turn on the table, lining the handle up square, because my hands want a job and that's the one available. “This is good. This is the play. Let it spread.”
Dottie comes back for the order. Josie gets the patty melt and a chocolate shake, which is a child's dinner. I get the meatloaf, because it's Monday and Dottie does meatloaf on Monday, and because ordering the same plate for nine years is the kind of stability a man can build a personality on.
Across the diner, Pete has abandoned all pretense of his own dinner and is openly watching us over the rim of his coffee, the way you'd watch a deer come into a clearing.
When I catch him at it he doesn't even flinch.
Just raises his mug an inch, a toast, good for you, son, and goes right on staring.
“Pete's going to pull a muscle,” Josie says, not turning around.
“Pete retired from the mill eleven years ago. We are his entire personality now.” I don't look at Pete. Looking at Pete encourages Pete. “Eat your child's dinner.”
“It's got all five food groups, if you don't look too closely at any of them.” She bites into the patty melt, triumphant. “That's nutrition.”
“It's beige, Josie.”
That gets her, a quick laugh she ducks into her shake, and I tell myself I'm not keeping track of how easy it is to do that, get a laugh out of her, except I appear to be keeping track anyway.
For a while it's fine. It's almost easy. She tells me about her day, a four-year-old named Atlas who bit a four-year-old named Bodhi, a parent who wants the nap schedule revised by committee, the class fish situation, which is apparently ongoing and tragic.
I don't say much. I'm not built for saying much.
But she doesn't seem to need me to, she just talks, and laughs at her own stuff before she gets to the end of it, and somewhere in the middle of a story about a glue incident I notice I've been listening with my whole face, leaning in over a plate of meatloaf like a man with nowhere else he'd rather be, and I sit back so fast the booth creaks.
The trouble is the mouth. She talks with her whole self, and I keep ending up watching her mouth do it, and once or twice when she laughs and ducks her head her scent kicks up warmer across the table and I have to sit very still and run engine displacement figures in my head until it passes.
This was supposed to be a transaction. A booth, a witness, a rumor. Nobody told me I'd spend the whole meal white-knuckling the urge to lean across the meatloaf and find out if she tastes like she smells.
Which is, of course, when Aiden Lee slides into the booth beside me uninvited, still in his scrubs, smelling like the vet clinic and somebody's anal-gland appointment.
“Don't mind me,” he says, stealing one of my fries.
“Just witnessing history. Finn Morrow. Out. With a person. Voluntarily.” He looks at Josie with the delighted, dangerous interest of a man who has known me since we were six and has been waiting twenty-six years for material this good.
“Hi. Aiden. His oldest friend, his only friend, the keeper of every embarrassing thing he's ever done.
We should get coffee. I'll tell you everything.”
“Josie,” she says, shaking his hand, already too charmed, traitor.
“You're the preschool teacher.” Aiden's grin widens, and I know that grin, that grin is trouble. “He's mentioned you. Not in words. He doesn't have those. But there was a tone.”
“There was no tone,” I say.
“There was a documented tone.” He eats another of my fries.
“Anyway, I can't stay, Gemma needs the truck, she's got a goat thing.” He makes a face when he says it, which I figure is about the goat, because goats are a menace and Gemma keeps adopting them.
“Be good.” He slides back out, points two fingers at me, walks backward toward the door grinning like an idiot.
“I'm happy for you, man. Genuinely. It's disgusting.”
He's gone before I can hit him.
“I like him,” Josie says.
“Everyone likes him. It's his whole crime.”
“Gemma's your sister, right? The one with the goats.”
“Little sister. Vet. Collects animals nobody wants and a few nobody asked for.” I drag a fry through ketchup I don't intend to eat. “Aiden's basically a brother. Grew up two streets apart. He's allowed to be insufferable. I'm not allowed to drown him.”
She laughs. I don't, because my brain's still turning over there was a tone, and there was no tone, and I'm irritated at how many times I've now had to tell myself there was no tone.
“What are you thinking about?” she says.
“Nothing.” Which is such an obvious lie that she grins, and the grin lands somewhere I keep specifically locked, and I reach for my water.
This is the part nobody warned me about.
I figured the danger in this arrangement was the touching, the hand-holding, the part where I'd have to act like a man in love in front of a room.
I built my whole defense around that. I can hold a woman's hand for an audience.
That's choreography. I could do choreography in my sleep.
Nobody told me the dangerous part would be a patty melt and an hour of her talking about her day like I'm somebody who gets to hear it.
Then the bell over the door goes, and my mother walks into Dottie's Diner.
Of course she does. The one night. She's got Marie Hartley with her and a fresh blowout and the radar of a woman who has spent two solid months trying to get me into exactly this booth with exactly any girl, and she stops dead three feet inside the door, and her whole face opens like a garage.
“Incoming,” I say, low. “Don't look.”
Josie looks. Naturally. Everyone always looks.
“Oh no.” Not a question. She knows exactly who's bearing down on us, the same way the whole town does, except she's got two extra reasons to panic, because Cynthia Morrow does her highlights every six weeks and the last time the two of them stood within twenty feet of each other, Josie was lying to her face through a closet door about a sensory table that did not exist. “Finn. We were supposed to let her hear about this. Secondhand. Safe. Not, not in person, not tonight—”
“I'm aware.”
“I know this is the part you actually need, Finn, her seeing us, I know that.” Her voice is climbing anyway.
“But she does my hair. And the one time I had to lie to that woman I nearly combusted on the spot, and I'm fairly sure she's had her eye on me ever since, like she knew I was covering for something.
And now she's going to find me sitting in your booth eating a patty melt, which is basically a signed confession.”
She doesn't get to finish, because my mother's already doing the walk, a floaty, casual, I-just-happened-to-be-here walk that fools precisely no one, Marie trailing behind her like a bridesmaid.
And I watch Josie's shoulders climb up toward her ears, the lie-panic setting in, the exact same rising tide I watched through a craft-closet door two months ago.
I know with the certainty of a man reading his own obituary that whatever she says in the next ten seconds will be catastrophic, because she cannot lie.
It is a documented medical condition. Small children have caught her.
“Just be normal,” I tell her, under my breath.
“I don't have a normal. I have a panic and a fish funeral voice.”
So I do the thing I have spent all night not doing.
I reach across the table and take her hand.
It's not for me. That's what I tell myself, fast, on the way there.
It's damage control. She's about to come apart and my mother is twenty feet out and closing, and the fastest way to sell something is to do it before you can think about it, so I do it before I can think about it, my hand over hers on the laminate, my thumb settling over her knuckles like it's done this before.
Her scent shifts the second I touch her, the panic-sharpness in it easing into something warmer, and the alpha part of me hums low and pleased that I did that, that a touch from me settled her. I do not examine the size of how much I like it.
She goes still. Stops mid-panic. Looks at our hands, then at me.
And here's what I wasn't ready for. She turns her hand over.
Under mine. Palm up, fingers lacing through fingers, holding back, and her scent shifts, warm, brown sugar gone soft at the edges, and the thing I shut behind a door two months ago and have been bracing shut ever since just walks right through it like the lock was never there.
“Finn,” my mother says, arriving, vibrating at a frequency only dogs and disappointed mothers can produce.
“And Josie.” She says my name and then Josie's like the second one is the prize at the bottom of the box.
“I knew it. Marie, didn't I say. Spring Fling, this one,” she says, aiming a manicured nail at Josie, “goes the color of a fire truck telling me some story about a craft table, and I thought, that girl is hiding something, and I was right. I have been right since April.” She presses a hand to her chest. “I am not going to make this a thing. I want you to know I am choosing, right now, not to make this a thing.”
She is absolutely going to make this a thing.
“Mom,” I start.
She isn't listening. She's already pulled out her phone, ostensibly to check the time, in the universal mother gesture for I am documenting this.
“Marie,” she says, not lowering her voice at all, “look at them. Look at his face. When have you ever seen his face do that.”
“Never,” says Marie, who I have known my entire life and who I will be remembering this from at her funeral. “It's like he's a different boy.”
“He is holding her hand,” my mother informs the diner.
“I can see that, Mom.”
“I'm just saying it. Out loud. Once.” She presses her lips together and blinks fast, like a woman accepting an award. “Then I'm leaving you two alone. Marie, come on. We're leaving them alone.” She does not leave. “Is it serious?”
“Mom.”
“I'm going. Look at me going.” She backs away one entire step. “Josie, sweetheart, you come to the shop, I'll do your hair for nothing, we'll talk.”
“Okay,” Josie says faintly, and her hand tightens in mine, and I squeeze back before I know I'm going to, I've got you, I've got it, don't, and she steadies.
And I sit there with this small impossible omega's hand laced through mine, holding on like she means it, my mother dabbing her eye twenty feet from the pie case, the whole diner pretending not to watch.
And I understand, with the cold clarity of a man who has just lost an argument he was having with himself, that I am in enormous trouble.
That I have been since the buttons. That no amount of telling myself it's the favor is going to fix what just came loose in me when she laced her fingers through mine and didn't let go.
I told myself it was about my mother.
I am such a liar. Worse than her, even. At least she's got the ears to show for it.