19. Josie
Josie
There are four of us in Hudson's truck and exactly one of us is having a nervous breakdown about it.
It's me. I'm the one. I've been the one since six this morning, when I woke up already sweating in a way that had nothing to do with June and everything to do with the fact that in two hours I have to drive to Pine Valley and convince forty-one relatives that the lie I told my mother four weeks ago is the truest thing in my life.
The worst part is it is. That's the part nobody warned me about.
You build a fake pack to survive a reunion and then the fake pack becomes the only thing you can't survive losing, and now I have to take it home and perform it for the people who've spent my whole life waiting for me to get it together.
“You've counted the trucks in that yard three times and we're not even there yet,” Hudson says from the driver's seat, not looking over.
“There could be a parking situation. I'm being practical.”
“You're being a disaster, and it's adorable, and your leg hasn't stopped since the gas station.” He reaches across the console without looking and puts his hand on my knee, warm and broad, stilling it.
“Breathe, Porter. We've got you. All you have to do is sit there and let three alphas be stupid about you in front of your whole family, and honestly, that's the easiest assignment we've had all month.”
In the back seat, Finn says, flat, “He's right. Annoyingly.”
And Logan, beside Finn, leans forward and sets a water bottle in the cupholder by my elbow without a word, already open, because somewhere in the last month all three of them learned I forget to drink anything when I'm scared, and the small wordless care of it does something to my throat that I have to look out the window to handle.
Hudson's hand is still on my knee. His thumb moves, once, slow, and the heat that's been simmering under my skin all morning kicks up a notch I do not need it to, here, now, in a truck, forty minutes from my mother.
I move his hand. He lets me. He's grinning.
I am in so much trouble — and we haven't even arrived.
Pine Valley looks exactly like it always looks, which is the problem.
We come in off the highway past the big-box plaza and the car dealerships, past the strip where the good Thai place is and the furniture warehouse and the glass-fronted building that used to be a bank and is now, apparently, an architecture firm.
Pine Valley is a real city, the kind with traffic that means it and a downtown with more than one of everything.
Five years in the Hollow, and it still takes me a minute, every time, to remember I'm from here.
And I know all of it by heart. I know which lane to be in for the turn off Cedar without thinking about it. My body could drive this route in its sleep, straight to the house where I was the easy kid, the funny one, the one who'd be fine, definitely, eventually, surely by now.
The last time I came down this highway was earlier this week, in the passenger seat of Logan's spotless truck, for pasta and candlelight and a kiss on a downtown sidewalk I have been very carefully not thinking about since. Same road. Same town. Entirely different terror.
We turn off the main drag into my parents' neighborhood, and their place comes up on the left with a hand-painted PORTER FAMILY banner strung between two trees. The yard's already full of trucks and folding tables and at least nine children running in a pattern only they understand.
“Okay,” I say, to the windshield. “Okay. Here's the situation.”
“We know the situation,” Finn says.
“You met about a month ago at the diner, it's casual but serious, nobody's rushing anything, and if my Uncle Ray asks any of you whether you hunt, the answer is a noncommittal noise and a change of subject.”
“Do they hunt,” Hudson repeats, delighted. “Is that a test? Is there a wrong answer?”
“The wrong answer is a long answer. Uncle Ray doesn't want a conversation, he wants an opening.”
“Noted,” says Logan, who means it, who has probably already sorted Uncle Ray into avoid eye contact, nod, retreat.
I take one more breath. My scent's a mess, I can feel it, four weeks of fraying suppressant and a truck full of alphas and the particular terror of my childhood backyard, all of it broadcasting whatever it's broadcasting. There's no fixing it now.
“Last thing,” I say. “Whatever happens in there. Thank you. All three of you. For doing this.”
There's a silence in the truck that goes on a half-second too long. Finn's looking at me in the rearview. Logan's gone still. And Hudson, when I glance over, isn't grinning anymore.
“Josie,” he says, quiet. “We're not doing anything.”
And I don't know what to say to that, because if I let myself hear it the way he means it I'll come apart in the driveway, so I open the door and get out into the noise instead.
It works. That's what I can't get over. It works immediately and completely, because it isn't acting.
We've barely cleared the trucks before my mother is on us, vibrating, hands pressed to her chest, taking in the three large alphas arranging themselves around me like it's the second coming. “Josie.” She says my name like a held breath. “Josie, sweetheart. Look at you. Look at all of you.”
“Mom, this is Finn, Hudson, and Logan.”
She doesn't even do the math out loud. She just beams, this woman who has spent six years gently asking when it's going to be my turn, and her eyes go bright, and she says, “Well, come in, come in, you must be starving, we have so much food, Frank!
FRANK, she's here, she brought her pack,” and the word lands in the yard like a bell, and I watch the news ripple out across forty-one relatives in real time.
And then it's a blur, the way these always are. But different.
Because every other reunion I've walked into this yard alone and walked the gauntlet alone. The coleslaw and Aunt Deb's sympathy and the settled packs leaning in over their potato salad to ask, so kindly, so gently, whether I'd met anyone.
And this year there's a hand at the small of my back the whole time.
Finn's, mostly, large and steady, steering me out of conversations before they go bad, a fresh drink appearing in my hand whenever the old one's empty.
Hudson charming an entire table of my aunts into helpless laughter.
Logan crouched in the grass twenty minutes in, fixing a kid's broken toy truck with a multi-tool, surrounded by a small reverent audience, because of course he is.
I keep waiting for the seam to show. It doesn't. There's no seam. That's what's wrecking me. You can't find the edge of a lie that stopped being one somewhere around a kayak.
“He's good with kids,” my mother murmurs, appearing at my elbow, watching Logan hand the fixed truck back to a four-year-old like he's awarding a knighthood. There's something wet in her eyes. “That one. Josie. He's good with them.”
“Mom.”
“I'm not saying anything. I'm choosing not to say anything. I just.” She squeezes my arm. “I waited a long time, baby. That's all. I'm allowed to be happy.”
And it's the exact thing that's been eating Finn alive for a month, handed to me now in my own mother's voice in my own backyard. I waited a long time. The joy I'm going to have to do something about, eventually, somehow, when this ends.
If it ends. I don't know anymore what this is or when it stops, and standing in the smell of my mother's barbecue with three alphas threaded through the afternoon like they grew here, I am running out of road on the lie I've been telling myself, the one underneath all the others — that I'm going to be able to give them back.
I find Cara at the dessert table, because of course Cara is at the dessert table.
Cara has been at the dessert table at every family event since we were six.
Now she's there with a plate in one hand and the other resting on the considerable curve of her belly, flanked by three large men in varying states of hovering.
Nate's got a hand at her lower back and a deputy's resting suspicion aimed at the dessert table itself, like a tray of brownies might make a sudden move. Theo's holding a second plate she's clearly already commandeered from.
And Lucas, the doctor, watches her like he's quietly monitoring her blood pressure and would rather lose a limb than say so out loud. A whole pack, orbiting one pregnant omega and her lemon bar.
It's the most settled, real, effortless thing I've ever seen, and looking at it makes me ache somewhere I'd rather not look.
Cara sees me and her whole face does something I do not like, because Cara is the one person in this yard who knows.
“Don't,” I say.
“I haven't said a single word.”
“You're about to. I can see it loading.”
“Oh, it's loaded. It's been loaded since you got out of that truck.” She forks up a bite of someone's lemon bar and points the fork at me, my cousin, my lifelong comparison, the one other person born the same year who got to watch our mothers keep score.
“Theo. Nate. Lucas. Give us a minute, my cousin's about to lie to my face and I need room to work.”
Nate looks at me, looks at the three alphas across the yard, and gives a single slow nod like he's already filed a report. “We'll be at the meat,” he says, and steers the other two off, Theo stealing one last bite off her plate on the way.
“They're very obedient,” I say.
“They're very whipped, which is a different and superior thing, and I love it.” She turns the fork back on me. “Don't change the subject. The subject is you. So. How's the operation.”
“Fine. Great. It's working.”
“Oh, it's working.” She glances past me, to where Hudson is saying something that's making my Aunt Deb wheeze, to Finn standing sentry near the drinks with his eyes already finding me across the yard, to Logan and his audience of toddlers.
“It's working so well I almost put it in a book.
You panic-recruit three alphas to fake-date a reunion and they show up looking like that?
Jos, I write fiction for a living and even I'd send that back for being too convenient.”
“It's a very good favor.”
“A favor.” She says the word like it personally insulted her grandmother.
“Honey. I have written eleven books about exactly this, I know the genre beats in my sleep, and I'm telling you as a professional with a deadline and a contract, that is not a favor.
That man by the drinks hasn't taken his eyes off you since you walked in — and he's pretending to guard the lemonade.
The pretty one's working the whole table but he keeps checking that you're laughing. And the quiet one fixed a toy truck and then looked straight at you to see if you saw him do it.” She sets the plate down.
Lowers her voice, the snark draining out of it all at once, gentle now.
“You know that doesn't look fake, right? Like, from over here, with my whole entire eyeballs. When did it stop being fake, Jos?”
And I open my mouth to tell her it's still fake, it's all fake, it's a scheduling solution and a survival tactic and a thing I invented at my kitchen table, and what comes out instead, in the middle of my parents' backyard, under the PORTER FAMILY banner, with barbecue smoke in my hair, is nothing at all.
Because I can't say it. The lie won't come. For the first time in four weeks the lie won't come, and Cara watches it not come, and her face goes soft and a little sad and a lot happy all at once.
“Yeah,” she says quietly. “That's what I thought.”
Across the yard, Finn catches my eye, and lifts an eyebrow a precise degree, the one that means you good?, and without deciding to, before I can stop it, I smile at him. The real one. The one I can't fake.
And I think, oh no.
And I think, three days was wrong — it's already too late.