12. Josie
Josie
The reunion is two weeks out.
Which means two weeks of practice left. Which means, by arithmetic I keep refusing to do, two weeks before I hand all three of them back and the schedule on my fridge becomes a list of things that used to happen.
I do not think about that. I have a whole summer of unstructured time coming and a master's degree in not thinking about things.
So on Saturday morning, the first morning of no school, I take my suppressant with my coffee like always. One little pill. Same as every day for six years. I get on with it.
By Saturday afternoon I take a second one.
It's nothing. I've been running hot, that's all. It's June, the classroom AC died in its final week, and my body's confused about the season. That's the story, and I'm sticking to it.
I am absolutely not looking at the other thing. The warm, low, restless hum under my skin that started somewhere around a kayak. Got worse at a diner. Has not, despite very clear instructions, gone anywhere since.
One pill has held my cycle flat for six years. The bottle says one.
I take a second, feel the hum bank down to a simmer, and shove the bottle to the back of the drawer where I don't have to look at it.
It's fine. It's a long week. Everyone runs warm in June.
Logan comes back around on the rotation Sunday afternoon.
It barely counts as practice. He needed cedar shims, I needed nothing, and somehow we're walking the length of Main together anyway, slow, in the gold light, while the whole town pretends not to watch their newest pack assemble itself one alpha at a time.
“What's a shim,” I ask, because I genuinely don't know and because the silence is the comfortable kind that makes me want to poke it.
“Thin little wedge of wood. You slide it into a gap to make something sit right.” He holds up a finger and thumb, a sliver of space between them. “Door's hanging crooked, you shim the frame till it's true. Table wobbles, one shim under the short leg and it stops.”
“So it's a tiny wood wedge that fixes everything.”
“Pretty much.”
“Logan.” I stop walking. “You're a shim.”
He blinks at me. “What?”
“You. You're a person-shaped shim. You go around sliding yourself into everybody's wobbly spots until the whole town sits level and nobody even notices you did it.”
His neck goes pink, which I am learning is the most honest thing about him, faster than his face, every time. “That's, that's not, it's a piece of wood, Josie.”
“It's a beautiful metaphor and you know it.”
“It's a building material.” But the dimple's fighting its way out, and he ducks his head, and we keep walking, and I add the pink neck to all the other things about Logan Walker I am absolutely not keeping a list of.
He carries my bag. I didn't ask. He just lifted it off my shoulder at the second stall like it offended him to watch me hold a thing I didn't have to.
Now it's on his shoulder with his shims and neither of us has said a word about it. That's the trick with Logan. There's a whole category of thing he does that doesn't survive being mentioned. Point it out and he goes pink and apologizes. Leave it alone and it just keeps happening.
We get to the end of the row, where Marta does the little marinated dishes, samples in paper cups.
She lights up when she sees us, because of course she does, the whole town's been lit up about me for a week.
She presses two cups of some orzo thing on us, and we stand there eating it with toothpicks like civilized people.
And I watch Logan, without a word, without even really looking, reach his toothpick into my cup and pick out every single olive, one by one, and eat them himself, like it's the most natural thing in the world.
I stop chewing.
It's such a small thing. The smallest thing. He doesn't announce it. Doesn't make it a gesture. Doesn't even seem fully aware he's doing it, the way you'd brush a crumb off someone you live with.
He just remembered. From a conversation I barely remember having, weeks ago at his job site over lemonade, where I said olives were a personal betrayal and a texture crime. He laughed that surprised laugh and said noted, and I thought he was being polite.
He wasn't being polite. He kept it.
And now there's a little pile of olives on his side and a cup of orzo I can actually eat on mine, and he's already moved on to telling me something about the shims, and I'm standing in the middle of the farmers market having a quiet crisis over a salad.
“You okay?” He's looking at me now, head tipped, a little worried. “Is the orzo bad? You don't have to eat it. I can get you the other one.”
“The orzo's perfect,” I manage. “You took my olives.”
His ears go pink. “You said you didn't like them.”
“I said that once. In passing. Weeks ago. It was barely even a sentence.”
“You said they were a texture crime.” He says it like that settles it. Like of course he'd remember. Like keeping track of what a texture crime is to me is a perfectly normal use of the space in his head. “Was I supposed to let you eat them?”
And he means it. That's the part that undoes me.
There's no angle in it. No charm, no working a bit. He's not doing it because we're practicing, or because the town's watching, or because it'll sell anything to anyone. He did it because I don't like olives and he was standing next to my olives. To Logan, that's the whole entire argument.
I think about handing all of this back in two weeks and have to look very hard at my orzo.
We finish the walk slow. He tells me about the shims, and then, when I ask, a little about the house, and somewhere in there he mentions the nest room again, the one he showed me, the one that's built but still waiting on everything soft.
He doesn't make a thing of it. He just says he found the right wool blankets, finally, the heavy kind, and went quiet after, like he'd said more than he meant to.
The careful way he talks about that room, like it's a held breath, like it's waiting for someone, snags somewhere behind my ribs and won't let go.
I find myself watching him instead of the stalls. The way he thanks every vendor by name. The way he drifts a half pace to the outside of the sidewalk without thinking, putting himself between me and the street, a thing so automatic he'd deny it if I asked.
He is the least complicated man I've ever met and somehow the hardest to look directly at.
And the worst part is what it does to me.
Not soft, not sweet. Low and hot and immediate, a pull behind my navel that has no business being there over a salad.
I find myself watching his hands on the bag, the rolled sleeves, the forearms, the easy way he carries my weight like it's nothing, and thinking about those hands somewhere they have absolutely no business being.
I have to look at the tomatoes very hard for a second.
By the time he walks me to my car, the bag still on his shoulder until the last second, I have eaten a whole cup of orzo with no olives in it and fallen a distance I'm refusing to measure.
“My turn comes back around in a few days,” he says. “If the rotation holds. Or whenever. No rush.”
There won't be a few days. There's the reunion, and then there's the part where I give him back.
I don't say that. I say, “Yeah. A few days.” And the lie comes out so easy it scares me, because it doesn't feel like the operation anymore.
It feels like wanting.
Monday it's Finn, because Monday Dottie does meatloaf and apparently we're a meatloaf-on-Monday couple now. A thing nobody consulted me about and that I am powerless against.
He's already in the booth when I get there, which is new. There's a glass of water sweating on a coaster on my side of the table and another in front of him.
I slide in and start talking about my day. The chaos of the last week of term, still settling. The kid whose mother wants him reading chapter books at four. And somewhere in the middle of it I reach for the water without looking, and it's just there, exactly where my hand goes, full.
I don't think anything of it. I drink half of it. I keep talking.
It happens again twenty minutes later. I get to the end of a sentence and reach, and the glass is full again.
I look down at it. Then I look at Finn, who is studying the menu he's known by heart for nine years with the focused attention of a man who would rather do anything than be caught.
“Did you refill my water.”
“Dottie refilled your water.”
“Dottie's been in the back ten minutes.”
“Then I don't know what to tell you.” He turns a laminated page he isn't reading. “Water's a mystery. Drink it or don't.”
“Finn.”
“Josie.”
“You're watering me like a houseplant.”
“You talk for forty-five minutes and forget to drink anything.” He says it flat, still not looking up. “Somebody's got to. You'd dry out, and the preschool would lose its best one, and then where would this town be.”
He says it like a complaint. Like I'm a maintenance issue he's resigned to. And there's nothing in his tone, and somehow that's worse than if he'd said something sweet, because Finn doesn't do sweet. Finn does done, quietly, before you noticed it needed doing.
I watch him the rest of the meal, the way you watch a card trick once you know there's a trick. And I catch it, the next time. His hand going to the pitcher Dottie left on the table, eyes never leaving mine, topping me off mid-sentence so smooth I'd never have seen it if I weren't hunting for it.
A man taking care of a thing before I even know it needs taking care of. Gruff about it. Deniable about it. Doing it anyway.
The worst part is he's right. I do forget to drink anything.
I've spent twenty-eight years forgetting to drink anything, and not one person ever sat across from me long enough to notice.
And now there's a firefighter who'd rather lose a tooth than admit he's keeping my glass full, doing it like it's the most boring obligation in the world.
I don't know what to do with being noticed like that.
I've spent my whole life being the one who notices. The easy one. The one who keeps everybody else's glass full. Nobody ever filled mine. I assumed that was just the deal.
He keeps a hand on the back of my neck on the way out.
For the town, obviously. The town is watching.
The town is always watching. The hand is warm and broad and it covers the whole back of my neck like he could tip my head back with two fingers if he wanted, and I think about him wanting to, and have to remind myself how walking works.
His thumb moves once, just under my ear, where the town can't possibly see, slow, deliberate, and the simmer under my skin flares into something molten and immediate, heat dropping straight through me to pool low and insistent, and I have to stop on the sidewalk and pretend I've got something in my shoe before my knees editorialize.
“You good?” he says.
“Shoe thing,” I say. “Rock. Famous rock. Very aggressive.”
He waits while I deal with my imaginary rock, hands in his pockets. He doesn't smile. But something at the corner of his mouth is having a real hard time, and woodsmoke and clove hangs in the warm evening air between us, and I am in so much trouble.
That night I take a third suppressant and lie in the dark waiting for it to work, listening to my own pulse not settle, my skin too tight, the sheets too much against me.
I think about Logan's forearms and Finn's hand on my neck and Hudson's mouth at the overlook and I am slick and restless and furious about all of it, my body running a fever the little white pill is supposed to break and isn't.
Here's what six years on one little pill does. You stop thinking of yourself as an omega with a body that has plans. You become a person who handled it. Who took the thing off the table. Who doesn't ache three days a season for a pack she was never going to have anyway.
The suppressant isn't medicine to me. It's a door I closed. It's the reason I can stand next to alphas all day and run a whole fake-pack operation and never once worry my own biology is going to embarrass me in front of the entire town.
The door is rattling.
Eventually the simmer eases, finally, enough to sleep.
And I lie there telling myself it worked.
It's working. It always works. One or two has always been plenty, and three is just because it's June and I'm tired and I've spent a week getting touched by three alphas my body has decided to take a personal interest in.
It's fine. The pill worked. I'm just topping up.
I'm a woman who closed a door six years ago and has started, this week, leaving my hand on the knob.
I don't look too hard at that either. Refusing to look at things is practically my whole personality.
Two weeks. Olives and water and a thumb under my ear. Three alphas doing small quiet things to me that I never asked for and can't give back and am going to have to. And a body that has stopped, completely, listening to a single word I say.
I close my eyes and I refuse, expertly, to look at any of it, until the refusing finally tips over into sleep.