13. Hudson
Hudson
The problem with being the fun one is that everybody assumes you're not paying attention.
I lean into it, usually. It's a good cover. You crack the joke, you grin, you keep the whole room loose, and nobody clocks that the guy running his mouth is also the guy who noticed you went quiet four minutes ago and has been steering the conversation away from whatever did it ever since.
I've made a whole life out of being underestimated by people having a nice time.
So when Josie texts me Tuesday morning that she's fine, just tired, don't worry about today, we can skip, I do not skip. I read fine and just tired and don't worry, three separate lies stacked into one text by a woman who cannot lie.
I close the shop an hour early and drive to her place with no plan except the one I've had since roughly day two. Find out what's wrong, fix it, and don't let her see how much I want to.
She opens the door in an oversized shirt with her hair up and a look on her face like she's been losing an argument with herself all day.
“I said skip,” she says.
“You said fine,” I say. “You're a bad liar, Porter. It's my favorite thing about you. Get your shoes.”
“Where are we going.”
“Nowhere. Out. I'm taking you to do nothing in a different location than the location you've been doing nothing in.”
She sighs and steps back to let me into the entryway, which is a victory I do not gloat about out loud. She goes hunting for her shoes, finds one, and starts hopping around swearing about the other.
It's under the side table, half kicked behind a basket. In plain sight if you're tall enough to be looking down at the right angle, which I am. I fish it out and hold it up.
She stops. Looks at the shoe. Looks at me. And I watch her decide not to make it a thing.
“Come on. You can be tired in my truck. The truck doesn't care.”
What I don't say is that she's been off all week, wound tight, running warm. I can smell it on her, brown sugar gone a little sharp at the edges, a scent doing something it isn't supposed to do, and every alpha instinct I own has been standing at attention about it for two days.
I'm not going to mention that either. She's got enough going on without me reading her like a paperback.
So I take her up to the overlook instead, the long way, windows down, no agenda.
Somewhere around the second song she stops gripping her own hands in her lap and starts arguing with my music.
Somewhere around the third she's laughing at me, really laughing, the wound-up thing in her face loosening a notch at a time.
I keep my eyes on the road and feel like I've gotten away with something enormous.
We end up sitting on my tailgate watching the valley go pink, a bag of the gas-station snacks she pretended she didn't want, her sock feet up on the bumper. And it's easy. Nobody warns you that's the part she'll get you with.
The bit was supposed to be the easy part. The flirting, the performance, the make it convincing. This isn't the bit. This is just sitting with her while the light goes, and it's the easiest thing I've done in years. And that scares me more than any of the rest of it.
“Okay,” she says, pointing a pretzel at me. “Settle something. You keep turning up with Sutter's bread. That's an eighty-minute round trip for a loaf. I've decided that's unhinged and I need to understand it.”
“It's not eighty,” I say. “It's seventy-five if the light at Carver's is with me.”
“You've timed it.”
“Of course I've timed it.” I steal one of her pretzels, which earns me a look of genuine betrayal. “Somebody told me once that Sutter's sourdough ruined her for all other bread. Stuck with me. So now I'm a man who drives seventy-five minutes for a loaf, and I blame her entirely.”
She goes still for half a second, like the math is trying to add up and she won't let it. Then she shakes it off. “Well. Whoever she is. She sounds like a woman of excellent taste.”
“The best,” I agree, and watch her decide not to look at me. “Point is, you can't call me unhinged. You'd drive seventy-five minutes too. You'd drive ninety.”
“I would not drive ninety minutes for bread.”
“You drove to that orchard stand in October and came back with so many cider donuts you had to give half to the staff room.”
She opens her mouth. Closes it. “That's seasonal. The donuts are only there in October. That's not a craving, that's a window.”
“Listen to yourself, Porter. Listen to the passion in your voice.” I'm grinning. She's trying not to. “We're the same. It's tragic. You should accept it now and save us both the time.”
“We are not the same. You wrestled a man for a pie.”
“Different conversation, but yes, and I'd do it again.” I knock my shoulder into hers. “Your turn. Tell me a thing. Something you'd never tell anybody you were trying to impress.”
“That's a trap. If I tell you, that means I'm trying to impress you.”
“It does mean that, yeah.” I let that sit. Watch the color come up her neck in the last of the light, and feel ridiculously pleased about it. “Go on.”
She picks at the pretzel bag. Glances at me sideways, deciding. “I cry at the dog food commercials. The ones where the dog waits at the door.” She says it fast, like ripping off a bandage. “Every time. Sobbing. It's humiliating. Lily's banned me from talking about them at school.”
“That's not embarrassing. That's the correct response to those commercials.”
“It's a yogurt brand's fault that I cried on a Tuesday.”
“They engineered it. You're a victim.” I hand her back one of the pretzels I stole, a peace offering, and she takes it, and for a second neither of us is performing a single thing. “See, now I have to tell you one back. That's the rule.”
“There's a rule now.”
“There's always been a rule. You just got here.” I think about it, actually think, which I don't usually do out loud.
“I keep every birthday card anybody's ever given me.
In a shoebox. I'm thirty-one years old and I have a shoebox of cards and I reread them when the shop's slow.” I shrug.
“There. Now we're even, and you know something nobody else does, and I know about the dog commercials. That's basically a binding contract.”
She doesn't say anything. The valley's gone gold to rose to that deep blue it does, and she's looking at me like I've handed her something she doesn't know where to put, and the quiet stretches out warm between us, and I become very aware of how little space there is on a tailgate.
“Hudson,” she says. Just my name. Soft, like the front half of a sentence she's not sure she's allowed to finish.
I don't make her finish it. My voice has gone rough and useless anyway. She's close. She got close at some point and neither of us moved to fix it, and her eyes drop to my mouth and come back up, and the last of the light goes, and I stop being able to think about a single reasonable thing.
I don't decide to kiss her. That's the truth of it, and it's the part I'll turn over later, in the dark, for hours. There's no decision.
There's just her face tipped up and the blue light and the unfair scent of her and the fact that I've been wanting to do this since the first day she walked into my shop and made disaster sound like a punchline.
And then I'm kissing her, and her hand is fisted in my shirt, and the bag of snacks goes off the tailgate into the dirt and neither of us cares.
A kiss that isn't for show is a different animal.
There's no audience to play to, no Dottie, no town, no point to prove.
There's just her mouth and the small sound she makes against mine, surprised and then not surprised at all, and the way she turns into it, into me, climbing half into my lap on a truck bed at an overlook like a teenager.
I have kissed a lot of people in a lot of ways. Not one of them has ever made me forget my own name like this.
She fits her hands into my hair and pulls, just slightly, and the sound I make is not dignified. Her scent floods the small space between us, brown sugar and that sharp warm edge underneath, and it goes straight to the base of my spine and lights everything up.
I get a hand at the small of her back and she arches into it, closer.
I can feel the heat coming off her skin through her shirt.
The kiss tips from soft into something with teeth in it, slow and deep and starving, her in my lap and my whole body voting hard for a great many things this tailgate is not the place for.
I keep it slow. I want to keep it slow. I've got her face in both my hands now and I'm trying to stay on the right side of a line I can feel us both leaning over, because whatever this is, it deserves better than a tailgate and the back half of a panic.
She breaks first, forehead against mine, both of us breathing like we ran here.
“Okay,” she says, a little dazed. “That was. Okay.”
“Yeah.” I can't stop my thumb moving along her cheek. My voice has gone to gravel. “That's about where I'm at too.”
“Hudson.” She pulls back enough to look at me, and her eyes are wrecked, and her scent has gone so warm and so sweet it's hard to think straight, and for one second I think she's going to say it, whatever it is, the thing rattling around behind her face all week. “I have to go home.”
It's not what she meant to say. I can see it isn't. But I'm not going to push a scared woman on a tailgate, not for anything.
So I just nod and find her shoe where it fell and drive her home the long way with the windows down. She's quiet the whole way, her hand on the console between us, not touching mine. An inch away. The longest inch in the county.
I walk her to her door. I don't kiss her again, though every part of me is voting for it.
“Goodnight, Porter.”
She looks at me for a long second on her doorstep, her keys in her hand, like there's a whole sentence sitting behind her teeth. “Hudson,” she starts.
“Don't.” I say it gentle, almost smiling, because if she finishes that sentence I'm not driving home tonight. “Whatever you're about to talk yourself out of. Go on inside and don't decide anything yet. Just let it be good for one night.”
She goes inside. I drive home the rest of the way with the radio off, doing math I don't want the answer to, because I came into this a man who was annoyed to catch feelings around day three, and somewhere up on that overlook I stopped being able to pretend it's anything as small as feelings.
I am so far past the leash I can't even see it anymore.