18. Josie
Josie
At some point a fake pack stops being four people pretending. It starts being four people who keep ending up in the same kitchen.
It's Wednesday. Nobody scheduled Wednesday. There's no practice on the calendar, no town to perform for, no reason for any of us to be near each other.
And yet here we all are.
Hudson texted bringing dinner, don't argue at five.
Logan turned up ten minutes later with a level, because my one crooked shelf has apparently been bothering him since the day he walked in to hear my terrible plan.
And Finn came because Finn comes now. That's just a thing that happens.
He lets himself in with the key I did not consciously decide to give him and goes straight for my fridge like he lives here.
I should find this alarming. I am the omega who built this whole thing with an exit baked in. A month, clean break, everybody back to their lives.
Instead I'm standing in my own kitchen watching three alphas argue about whether a shelf needs to be perfectly level if you're only putting paperbacks on it.
The house smells like all of them at once, woodsmoke and juniper and maple layered over Hudson's cooking. And my whole body has gone quiet and warm and settled in a way I haven't felt in six years of careful little pills.
And under the settling, there's the other thing, always now. The low live current of wanting them. Three alphas in my small kitchen, my body keeping a running tally of all of them, Hudson's hands, Finn's mouth, the slow careful way Logan kissed me in Pine Valley like the schedule didn't exist.
I am slick and warm and pretending to care about paperback weight distribution. My suppressant gave up hours ago.
That's the part that scares me. Not the wanting — the settling.
Dinner is loud and easy and theirs now, somehow, the four of us, a shape that fit itself together when I wasn't watching.
Hudson cooks and narrates it like a show. Logan fixes the shelf, and then, because he can't stop, the wobbly chair, and then the cabinet door that's hung crooked since I moved in.
Finn sits at my tiny table taking up all the air in the room and shoots down Hudson's worst jokes with one flat word each, which only makes Hudson try harder, which is the whole game.
“So I'm thinking,” Hudson says, pointing the spoon at the room, “we do taco night standing. Every week. Builds tradition. Builds trust.”
“No,” Finn says.
“You don't even know what I was going to say.”
“It involved the word standing. The answer's no.”
“Logan.” Hudson turns, betrayed. “Back me up. Taco night.”
Logan doesn't look up from the cabinet hinge. “I'd eat a taco,” he says, which from Logan is basically a standing ovation, and Hudson points the spoon at him like he's won the argument single-handed.
“See. Walker's in. It's two against one, Morrow, that's democracy, that's the system working.”
“It's not a vote.” Finn takes a sip of the water he poured himself. “I pull the late shift Tuesdays. If we're doing a weekly, it's not Tuesday, and I'm not eating it standing up after fourteen hours on my feet.”
“He's negotiating,” Hudson tells me, delighted, like he's caught Finn doing something scandalous. “You hear that? He's not saying no. He's just saying not Tuesday.”
Finn doesn't rise to it. But the corner of his mouth twitches, the almost-smile he never quite commits to, and Hudson sees it too, and grins like he's been handed the whole world.
And they've started doing a thing I don't have a defense for. They take care of me in shifts, without discussing it, like they worked out a rotation I was never shown.
Logan puts a glass of water by my hand. Ten minutes later Finn, who's clearly clocked that Logan already did it, tops it back up to the brim without breaking off what he's saying.
Hudson slides me the first and best of everything off the stove and watches my face when I taste it, every time, like my reaction is the only review that matters.
Nobody announces any of it. It just happens, a current running under the noise. Three alphas quietly arranging the world so it's softer where I'm standing in it.
I have spent my whole life being the one who arranges the world softer for everyone else.
I do not know how to be on this end of it. I keep waiting for the bill.
“You've gone quiet,” Hudson says, not looking up from the stove, because of course he caught it, he always catches it.
“I'm good.”
“She's doing the face,” Finn says.
“I don't have a face.”
“You've got the one face,” all three of them say, more or less in unison, and then look at each other, startled, because they did not plan that either, and Hudson laughs so hard he has to put the spoon down.
And I stand in my kitchen full of alphas who finish each other's sentences about me.
And I think, with the cold clarity of a woman watching a wave she can't outrun, this is a real pack. This is what it looks like — and it has a return-by date stamped on the bottom.
Later, when Logan's gone home and Hudson's doing the dishes he won't let me touch and Finn's drying because apparently they have also worked out a dish rotation, I slip into the bathroom and close the door and take out the bottle.
I've stopped counting how many today. That's its own kind of answer.
I shake one out. Then I look at it sitting in my palm, small and white and useless, and I make myself be honest for exactly one minute, alone, with the door shut.
It isn't holding anymore.
For six years one pill flattened everything. Kept my body quiet and obedient. Kept the three-days-a-season ache at arm's length where it couldn't embarrass me.
Now I'm taking them like breath mints, and underneath it all my body just keeps climbing. Low and steady and certain. A heat banked but very much lit, getting harder to bank every day I spend in arm's reach of three alphas it has decided belong to me.
Nobody warns you what suppressants actually are. Or maybe they do, and you just don't listen, because you never plan to need to know. They're not a cure — they're a lid. And a lid only works as long as whatever's underneath agrees to stay down.
Mine's stopped agreeing.
I know what it means. I've known since the kitchen table, really, in the part of me that keeps the things I won't look at. Suppressants hold an omega until she finds her pack. Then they start handing in their notice.
My body has found its pack. And it's telling me in the only language it has. A rising heat. A scent gone sweet. A bottle that used to last a month and now lasts a week.
I take the pill anyway. It takes the edge off, a little, the way one sandbag takes the edge off a flood.
I look at myself in the mirror, flushed and bright-eyed, a omega three steps ahead of her courage.
Three days, I think. The reunion's Saturday. Three days, and then the part where it's supposed to end, where I thank three alphas for their excellent work and hand them their lives back and go home to a quiet house that doesn't smell like anyone.
I cannot picture doing it. I genuinely cannot make the image form.
I try to see myself saying the words. Okay, we did it, we're done. To Logan, who built a room in hope. To Finn, who lets himself in now. To Hudson, who watches my face when I taste things. The picture just won't hold, like a word repeated until it stops meaning anything.
Through the door I can hear them in my kitchen, the low rumble of Finn saying something dry and Hudson's bark of a laugh, the easy clatter of two men putting my dishes away in the wrong cupboards because they don't know my kitchen yet but they're learning it.
They're learning my kitchen.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes and I let myself feel it for exactly one breath, the size of what I've done, the thing I built to last a month and accidentally made real, and then I put the bottle back, and I fix my face, and I go back out to my pack.
I don't have a better word for them anymore. That's the whole problem, in two syllables.
My pack.
Three days.