15. Josie
Josie
Ido not sleep much Wednesday night, on account of the fact that a man got on his knees on my kitchen floor and rearranged my entire understanding of myself and then, for once in his life, didn't make a single joke about it, and I spend most of Thursday in a state I can only describe as structurally unsound.
Because I keep doing the same math and hating the answer.
I let Hudson do that. I wanted Hudson to do that. And I'd spent the whole drowsy, boneless afterward of it tucked back against his chest, thinking not only about him but about Logan's pink ears over a pile of olives and the way Finn watches my water glass like it might flare up if he looks away.
Which is the most natural thing in the world.
An omega's body warming to her pack. Except mine isn't my pack.
Mine is a spreadsheet I built at a kitchen table to fool my family.
You're allowed to fall for three alphas at once in this town.
You are not, as far as I can tell, allowed to do it to three alphas you recruited under false pretenses for a reunion.
So I do what any reasonable woman does when her body has decided something her brain hasn't signed off on. I avoid everyone. I take a suppressant at noon, and another one at three.
When neither of them does much of anything, I sit at my kitchen table and look at the bottle and feel, for the first time, a thread of real fear under all the wanting.
It's not working. Not the way it used to.
Six years on this pill, and it's never once let me feel what it's supposed to stop. Now I'm sitting in a quiet kitchen with nobody touching me at all, and I can still feel the low warm pull of it. Banked, but not gone. A stove turned down instead of off.
There's a part that comes next, the part I keep shut in the drawer with the bottle, about what it means when the pill stops being enough. I don't finish the thought. I've gotten this far not finishing certain ones, and I'm not about to start now.
It's Finn's night, as it happens. The rotation swings back around to him today, which normally means the diner, a booth, his hand over mine while Dottie tops up the coffee and the whole town takes notes.
I text him to sort out where. Still on for tonight.
The reply comes fast. Off at six. Why, what's wrong.
Not what's up. Not hey. What's wrong, immediately, because Finn has apparently appointed himself the man who notices when something's wrong with me.
And the worst part is he's right. Something is wrong. I'm falling for three alphas at once, and my own body's trying to tell me something I'm not ready to hear.
Nothing's wrong, I type, which is a lie, and he knows it's a lie, because instead of the diner, the next thing he sends is his address.
Finn's place is a small house on the edge of town that's exactly as I'd have guessed and nothing like I expected.
All clean lines and not much stuff, and one whole side of the living room given over entirely to a bookshelf that doesn't match the rest of him at all.
Packed and overflowing and double-stacked.
I stand in front of it while he gets me a glass of water I didn't ask for, because of course he does. I run my finger along the spines and find poetry, and dog-eared paperbacks, and a whole shelf of kids' picture books worn soft at the corners.
“Gemma's,” he says, handing me the water, following my look.
“The picture books. She was a late reader. I used to do the voices.” He says it flat, like it's barely worth mentioning, and does not seem to understand that he has just handed me the most dangerous piece of information I've collected all week.
“You did the voices,” I say.
“Don't make it a thing.”
“Finn Morrow did the voices.”
“I will put you back outside.”
But there's no heat in it, and the corner of his mouth tips up, barely, that almost-smile I've started watching for like an idiot.
We stand in his quiet house with the evening coming down gold through the windows, and I think, this was a mistake, coming here.
This is so much more dangerous than the diner.
Because the diner is a performance and this is just his house.
His actual life. The books he reads and the picture books he kept and the water he keeps putting in my hand.
There's no town here to perform for. There's just us, and the off-duty quiet, and the careful few feet of air neither of us will admit we're keeping.
I pull a book down at random, because my hands need something to do that isn't reaching for him, and it falls open to a poem some earlier version of Finn has strangled in pencil, small blunt capitals crowding the margins.
“You write in your books,” I say. It comes out like an accusation. I don't know why.
“I think in them.” He says it plainly, nothing between the thought and the saying of it. “You want a man who reads a poem once and shelves it clean, you've got the wrong house.”
And that's what keeps knocking me sideways in here. At the diner he gives you three words and a look and makes you do the rest yourself. Here he just answers. Whole thoughts, out loud, unguarded, like the real one lives in this house and never bothers coming into town.
I slide the book back. His forearm crosses my line of sight as he reaches past me to straighten it, and I catch the pale seam of an old burn running up toward his elbow before I've decided whether to look.
He catches me looking. Draws the sleeve down, unhurried, the way you close a drawer you didn't mean to leave open.
“Old one,” he says. Which tells me nothing, and is meant to. The one thing he keeps closed off in a house where he leaves everything else open, and I know that move, because I've got a few of my own. So I don't push.
“You going to tell me what's wrong,” he says, “or are we going to keep pretending you drove out here to insult my bookshelf.”
Any other night I'd have an answer ready. A joke, a deflection, a plumbing emergency at the preschool. Finn doesn't chase; he lets you leave the door right where you found it, which is one of the ten thousand things about him quietly, catastrophically undoing me.
I open my mouth to hand him the easy version.
And instead I turn into him.
I don't decide to. That's the thing I'll tell myself later, driving home too fast in the dark.
I don't decide a single thing. He's right there, near enough that his scent has already crowded out every thought in my head, banked-fire warm, and my body just tips the last few inches and gets two fistfuls of his shirt, and I kiss him.
For one terrible second he doesn't move, and I think, I've ruined it, I've read it all wrong, I'm going to have to move to a different town.
Then he makes a low sound against my mouth, wrecked, like something giving way under a load it's carried too long, and his hands come up into my hair, and he kisses me back.
And it's nothing like practice. Nothing like the diner, nothing like the for-show hand at the small of my back.
It's woodsmoke and clove flooding everything and his mouth gone serious on mine and the whole week of wanting crashing in at once, and for about four seconds I let it.
I kiss him back like I mean it, because I do, and that's the entire catastrophe.
Then the panic catches up.
It comes in cold and fast, the sober voice in the back of my head I've been outrunning since noon, and what it says is: this is Finn.
Not Hudson, not a kayak, not a deniable laugh on a lakeshore.
This is the one who set the conditions. The one who made the rules.
The one whose mother is planning a whole future on this exact lie.
I just kissed him in his own living room like it was real, which it was, on my end, and I have no idea on earth what to do with a real thing.
So I do the stupidest thing on the menu. I reach for the lie.
I pull back too fast, both of us breathing like we ran here, and I hear myself say, “That was—”
My voice cracks straight down the middle.
“—practice. That should count as practice. Hudson and I, we've done that, the kissing, for the reunion, so it tracks that you and I should probably be able to. Convincingly. Before Saturday. So.”
It is the worst lie I have told in a month of championship lying, and Finn doesn't say one word. He just looks at me, that flat unreadable look, the one that goes straight through the middle of me and reads every word I'm refusing to say, and I cannot stand in it for one more second.
“I should go.” I'm already grabbing my keys, already at his door, already halfway gone. “It's late. We're good. We're on schedule. Goodnight, Finn.”
And I leave. I actually leave, out into his dark yard and down to my car and gone, before he can get a single word out, because if he opens his mouth I'll have to hear whatever's in it, and I am nowhere near brave enough for that tonight.
I make it two stop signs before I have to pull over.
I don't cry, exactly. It's more that my whole body finally catches up to the day. I kissed Finn Morrow like I meant it and then I called it a rehearsal and ran, because that is what I do, that is what I have always done. Keep everybody's glass full. Go home to an empty one. Call it the deal.
I don't let myself finish the rest. The part underneath, the part that's true whether I say it in the dark or not.
That it was never practice. That it stopped being practice a while ago, with all three of them, and I'm the only one still holding a stopwatch, pretending it counts.