17. Logan
Logan
Ihave loved Josie Porter for a lot longer than anyone in this town thinks I have, and tonight I'm doing the one thing I have never once done about it.
I'm taking her on a date.
A real one. Not a diner booth with the whole Hollow watching, not a hand held for show. A table, booked two weeks ago in a voice that came out steadier than I felt, at a little Italian place in Pine Valley I've driven past forty times and never once had a reason to walk into.
I know exactly what the whole thing is. A lie with an end date stamped on it — a spreadsheet somewhere that says the day she hands us back our lives. I booked the table anyway. If a fake month is all I ever get of her, I want one real night stood up inside it.
Bella Notte. Tucked on a corner downtown, warm light in the windows. The kind of place a man takes a woman when he means it.
I've never meant it before.
That's the part that keeps getting me, standing in my kitchen at five thirty in a shirt I actually ironed, wearing enough off the top shelf of the bathroom that I'm hoping reads as tried and not desperate.
Thirty years old, and I've never taken a single person out to dinner and let myself hope about it.
I fix porches. I build ramps for folks whose knees have gone and never send a bill. I've been the one who shows up, not the one who asks, since I was old enough to hold a hammer.
Tonight I asked.
It's practice, is the official story. Logan's day on the schedule, my job to get the two of us comfortable being a pack in public before her family lays eyes on us Saturday.
Practice. I have never practiced anything less in my life.
She's on her step when I pull up, and the sight of her nearly puts my truck in the neighbor's hedge.
A dress. Soft green, the kind that moves when she does, her hair down for once instead of clipped back against the daily war with the four-year-olds.
She climbs up into the cab and the whole thing fills with her, brown sugar and toasted oat gone warm in the evening, and every alpha nerve I've got stands up at once.
“You ironed,” she says, buckling in, thrilled about it.
“I own an iron.”
“Logan Walker.” She reaches over and straightens a collar that did not need straightening, and my neck goes hot, and she clocks it, because she clocks everything. “You cleaned the truck.”
“It was dirty.”
“It has never been this clean the whole time I've known you. I could eat off this dash.”
“Please don't.”
She laughs, loud and unguarded, and settles back, and I pull out toward the highway with my heart doing a thing no working fire has ever managed.
Forty minutes. I get forty minutes of her in my truck, a whole dinner across a candle, the drive home in the dark. It's pretend and I know it's pretend. I'm going to bank every second of it against the rest of my quiet life anyway.
Pine Valley in the evening is all soft downtown light, and Bella Notte is exactly what the town promised. A warm little corner place, candles in the windows, the smell of garlic and woodfire rolling out the door when I hold it open for her.
The hostess takes one look at the pair of us. “Table for two?”
Just that. A table for two, like an alpha bringing his omega to dinner is the most ordinary thing in the world. And something in me that has no business being this loud goes quiet and settled and warm, because for one night, a table for two is exactly what we are.
We get a corner table by the window, and I take the chair with my back to the room without deciding to, so she's the one tucked into the corner where nothing can come at her from behind.
She doesn't notice me do it. I barely notice me do it.
It's just where an alpha sits when the omega across from him is the whole point of the night.
A couple of tables over, a waiter sets a pan of cheese on fire to a small round of applause, and Josie's whole face lights up like one of her four-year-olds.
And I decide, right there, that I'll bring her back here every chance I get for the rest of my life. Reunion or no reunion. Deal or no deal. If she'll only come.
I don't say that. Obviously. I hand her a menu instead.
She can't decide. Narrows it to three, then looks up at me helpless, so I tell the waiter we'll take all three and split them. It solves the problem clean and earns me a look that promises I'll pay for the presumption later.
Then the food comes, and she takes a bite of the first thing and closes her eyes and goes quiet.
And there's a thing that happens in me watching her go soft and happy over something I put in front of her.
Some old alpha wiring I didn't know I was carrying.
Warm and dumb and satisfied down to the bone.
“Okay,” she says, when she can talk again. “You are never allowed to let me order for myself again.”
“Noted.”
“I mean it. That's the best decision anyone has ever made on my behalf.”
“Low bar.”
“Do not.” She points her fork at me. “Do not do the thing where you go humble at me. I'm having a moment about pasta and you're ruining it with modesty.”
And I laugh. Out loud, in a restaurant, which is not a thing I do. She looks so pleased with herself for causing it that I have to study the candle a second so I don't do something drastic.
We talk about nothing. Her kids. The class fish on its third secret name. My work, the house I'm slow-building out at the edge of town, which she asks about and I keep light, the deck and the view.
Then she asks about my family, and I do the thing I don't usually do. I answer.
“Big pack,” I tell her. “Omega mom, three alpha dads. A ranch outside town, growing up. It was loud. Somebody was always fixing something or feeding something or losing an argument to my mom, who never once lost.”
“Three dads.” She props her chin on her hand, delighted. “Okay. I need all of them. Go.”
So I give her all of them. The one who taught me the level and the plane and never once raised his voice. The one who could talk a fence post into confessing. The quiet one, who'd just turn up in a doorway when you needed him and not say a word — I got that off him.
And Mom in the middle of it, running the whole operation on pure warmth and no mercy.
“They sound wonderful,” she says, and means it.
“They sold the ranch a couple years back.
Off somewhere warm now, all four of them, sending me photos of citrus trees and demanding to know when I'm going to give them something to spoil.” I turn my water glass a quarter turn on the cloth.
“Nolan's off being a park ranger and a hermit somewhere in the backcountry. So it's just me these days.”
I don't say the rest. That the big, loud, warm house I grew up in went with the ranch, sold off two years ago to a family I've never met.
That these days I sleep in a loft I framed into the corner of my own workshop, out on the lot where I'm slow-building my own house, board by board, on my own time.
A house built to be full. Because once you've lived in a good full one, empty is a hard thing to get used to.
I take a drink of my water and let her think it's a happy story. It is a happy story. It's only the ending that's still open.
She tells a story about her cousin Cara that has me wheezing into my water. She steals bread off my plate without asking, like she's done it a thousand times, like we're a thing that's been a thing for years.
Somewhere between the bread and the second glass of wine, her shoulders come down off her ears. All the way. I've never once seen them do that in a room with other people in it.
An omega at ease. She runs a whole town's worth of small performances every day and doesn't clock she's doing a single one, and here, across a candle from me, she just sets it all down.
That's the part that gets me — not the dress, not the candle. How easy she is with me.
The way her knee finds mine under a too-small table and stays. The way she leans across to land a joke and forgets to lean back. Nobody performs that. Whatever the schedule says, her body already thinks it knows me.
Mine's been sure about her for five years. It just never once had the nerve to say so out loud.
Afterward, we walk. Clear night, the good kind, the downtown shops all lit up and half of them closed. Neither of us is in any hurry to get back to the truck, which is its own quiet confession we're both pretending not to hear.
She reads me every flyer in every dark window as we go, editorializing.
A lost cat she has decided I'm now personally responsible for.
A community-theater thing she informs me we are attending.
I tell her I'd sooner reshingle the whole preschool by hand.
She says that's the spirit and doesn't let go of my arm.
Then she stops at the window of a shut bookshop, and I stop with her, and for a minute neither of us says a word. Her scent goes soft and warm on the cool air. The street's empty. The streetlight is doing something unfair to her hair.
And I am so far gone, standing on a Pine Valley sidewalk in a shirt I ironed, that I've lost the thread of every reason I spent five years being careful.
She turns to say something. Catches me looking at her. Whatever's on my face takes the words right out of her mouth.
Because she's close, and she smells like everything I've spent five years not letting myself want out loud.
I rebuilt a fence that didn't need rebuilding just to be near this.
Showed up with food, showed up with my hands, showed up every way except the one that would've cost me something to say.
Wanting isn't the word for it anymore. My hands want.
My chest wants. Five years of careful, and the careful just ran out.
I kiss her.
Slow. Careful. Both hands coming up to hold her face like it's the most fragile, most important thing I've ever been trusted with — because it is.
She makes a small sound against my mouth, an omega sound, low and surprised and wanting, and everything alpha in me goes molten and steady in the same instant. Her hands fist in the front of the shirt I ironed. And for one long, perfect stretch there's no deal, no schedule, no reunion, no rule.
There's just Josie, kissing me back under a streetlight, in the one town where nobody's keeping score.
When I pull back I keep my forehead against hers. I'm not ready to give the distance back yet.
“That wasn't on the schedule,” I say, low.
She lets out a breath that shakes on the way out.
“No,” she says. “It wasn't.”
She doesn't say anything after that, and I don't push. I've waited five years. I can stand in a good silence a little longer.
So I take her hand, fingers laced through mine, and walk her back to the truck. She lets me. She doesn't let go the whole way there.
She's quiet on the drive home, tucked into the middle of the old bench seat, close enough that her shoulder knocks mine every time the road bends, watching the dark slide by.
I don't fill the quiet. Never needed to, with her.
Everybody thinks Josie Porter is the noise, the fast, bright, funny one, and she is.
But she's also the only person alive who can sit in a silence beside me and let it be good instead of something that needs fixing.
That's the thing I could never explain to a living soul.
The reason it was only ever going to be her.
Somewhere past the county line she gives up the fight, and her head settles onto my shoulder, and one of her hands ends up loose in mine, and she's out.
Warm and heavy against my side. I ease off the gas and drive the rest of the way like I'm carrying something that could break, and a low alpha purr I don't bother stopping rolls up warm and quiet through the cab.
And because there's nobody awake to hear it, I let myself have the truth for the length of a dark highway. It's real. For me it's real, it was always going to be, and no amount of calling it practice on a schedule was ever going to turn it into anything else.
Which is not the same as getting to keep it.
That's the part I keep forgetting and having to learn again. The deal is hers. When the reunion's done she gets to hand me back my ordinary life, and I'll take it, because taking what I'm given is the whole shape of me. Because I'm the one who shows up and never asks for the rest.
All I get is the hope she doesn't.
So I drive her home through the dark, her asleep on my shoulder, and I don't say the one thing I've wanted to say for five years. I just let her sleep.