28. Josie
Josie
Icome back to myself in pieces, on a drop cloth on the floor of the finished front room in the house Logan Walker is building, the last of the gold coming low through the windows, with the quietest man in Huckleberry Hollow pressing a kiss to the inside of my thigh like he's thanking me for letting him.
My whole body is humming. Wrung out and lit up at once and still not satisfied, a low restless heat sitting under everything that one climax didn't touch, because apparently nothing about my body follows the old rules anymore.
It's been like this for days. Worse every hour. I'm not thinking about what that means. I'm here, on this floor, in the last of the light, and I have decided not to think about anything else.
He lifts his head. His hair's a disaster where I put my hands in it, and his mouth is slick with me, and he's looking up the length of my body with an expression I have never once seen on him in five years of watching him not let himself want things.
He looks undone. Reverent and dazed and a little bit destroyed.
I did that. Careful Logan, who moves the olives and builds the coasters and says goodnight like a shopkeeper. I took him apart with nothing but the permission to, which is the most powerful I have ever felt about anything, and I would like it noted for the record.
And some deep, greedy, newly-awake part of me looks at him kneeling there between my knees, still hard, still holding himself so politely off me, giving and giving and asking for nothing, and thinks one clear greedy thought. Not good enough.
“Come here,” I say.
He comes. He always comes when I ask, up the length of me slow, gentle even now, and I get my hands in his shirt and haul, and roll us, and it startles a sound out of him, half a laugh, all surprise, as he lets me put him on his back on the drop cloth.
“Josie.”
“My turn.” I sit up, straddling his thighs, and reach for the hem of his shirt. “You've made a whole personality out of not asking for things. I'm about to ruin your entire system.”
A flicker crosses his face. Not quite fear. Closer to the look of a man who has never once in his life been on the receiving end and doesn't know the choreography.
“You don't have to,” he says. Quiet. “This was for you.”
And that, right there, is the whole problem with Logan Walker in a single sentence. This was for me. Everything is for me, for everybody, all the time, the man who carries the town on his hip and never once lets anybody carry him.
“I know I don't have to,” I say, and I get his shirt up and off, and put my palms flat on his chest, over the hard fast slam of his heart. “That's not why I'm doing it.”
He's got a carpenter's chest under that flannel.
Nobody warns you about that with the quiet ones.
All that hauling lumber. I take a moment to appreciate it, openly, unhurried, and watch him go red under my hands the way he went red the day he handed me that walnut coaster and pretended it was nothing.
“You're staring,” he says.
“I'm cataloguing. Hold still.” I press a kiss to his sternum, then lower, tracking down. “This is a research project and you're the only subject. Very rigorous. Peer-reviewed.”
“Josie.”
“Say my name like that again, it's excellent for morale.”
I lean down and kiss him. Taste myself on him, which lights something molten and unhinged in me, and while he's still reeling from it I work my way down.
His jaw. His throat. The broad warm plane of his chest, the flat of my tongue over him, and he's breathing like he's run somewhere, both hands fisted at his sides against the drop cloth like he's afraid to touch me, like touching me might use up a ration he didn't earn.
“Hands,” I say against his stomach. “On me. Now.”
He puts his hands in my hair. Careful.
“Harder than that, Logan.”
He tightens his grip, and the groan that comes out of him when I get his belt open is the least careful sound I have ever heard him make.
I get his jeans open, and he lifts his hips to help me shove them down, and then he's bare under me and he is—
Okay. He's a lot. Naturally he is. Everything about this man is quietly, absurdly well-made, so completely Logan Walker that I almost laugh in the middle of everything.
I wrap my hand around him and he makes a sound like it hurts, like the good kind hurts, his head dropping back against the floor, the long line of his throat working.
I stroke him slow. Learning him the way he learned me, watching his face for what pulls each sound out of him, because two can absolutely play at filing things away, and I intend to keep a very thorough file.
“You're smiling,” he manages, hoarse, one eye cracking open. “Why are you smiling.”
“Because you're a menace to be this hot and this quiet about it. It's practically fraud.” I tighten my grip and twist, just slightly, on the upstroke, and whatever he was going to say dissolves into a groan that rolls up from somewhere near the floor. “There he is.”
“Josie.” My name, cracked straight down the middle. “You don't—I'm not going to last—if you keep—”
“Good. That's the entire point. Try to keep up.”
I lower my mouth to him.
He makes a sound that isn't a word. His hips jerk and he catches himself, holds himself still, all that iron control fighting the losing fight of its life, and I take him deeper just to watch it break.
I set a rhythm, hand and mouth together, slick and slow and filthy, and he's so hard against my tongue, so far past careful, that every pass drags another helpless sound out of him.
His hand spasms in my hair. I hollow my cheeks and take him as deep as I can and he chokes on my name, hips straining up against the hand I've got flat on his stomach holding him down.
The sounds coming out of him now are low and helpless and nothing like the quiet man the whole town thinks they know.
I pull off just far enough to talk, my hand still working him slick and steady.
“All that quiet,” I say, against the head of him, and watch it go through him like a current. “All that careful. And you make these sounds.” I take him back into my mouth, deep, then off again. “I'm keeping every one.”
“Josie.” It's cracked straight through. “I'm close—you have to—if you don't stop I'm—”
“I know.” I take him deep one more time, and hum around him, and feel him start to shake, that last thread of his control going.
And then I feel it.
At the base of him, under my hand, the swell starts. Thickening, growing, filling my palm as I stroke down, and my own body clenches hard on nothing in answer, slick flooding between my own thighs untouched, my omega instincts singing high and greedy at the feel of it.
His knot.
Every cell I have wants it somewhere it is not going to get to be today. I settle for my hand.
“Josie.” It's a warning and a plea at once, his voice shredded. “You don't have to, I can—”
I wrap my hand around his knot and squeeze, and take him deep at the same time, and that's it, that's the end of Logan Walker's control.
He comes apart.
Not quiet. Not careful. He arches up off the floor and spills, hot and thick over my tongue and my hand, with a broken, wrecked sound that has my name buried somewhere in the middle of it, his knot pulsing full and hard in my grip.
I work him through all of it, swallowing, squeezing, stroking the knot with every pulse until he's wringing out the last of it. Until he's shaking and spent and boneless and reaching for me with hands that can't quite coordinate.
And then, low and rolling and involuntary, the sound starts.
A purr. Deep in his chest, the sound an alpha only makes when everything in him has gone right at once, rumbling up through the floor and my hands and my bones, and I have wrecked this man so thoroughly that he is purring on the floor of the house he's building for a someday he won't name, and I did that, and my heart cracks clean down the middle.
I crawl up his body and he gathers me in before I get there, both arms wrapping me tight against his chest, the purr rolling through both of us, and we lie tangled in the gold-gone-amber light not saying anything for a long time.
From here, on the floor, I can see straight down the raw, unfinished hallway, past rooms that are still just studs and subfloor, to the one other room he's finished.
The nest room. The one he built with his own hands in a house that isn't for anything yet, so nobody'd have to ask, and never once told me who it was for.
It sits at the end of the hall in the last of the light, waiting on everything soft. I make myself look back at the ceiling before it can do something to me I can't take back.
His heart is still going. I put my palm over it.
“That was supposed to be for you,” he says, eventually. Rough. Faintly scandalized at himself.
“It was for me.” I prop my chin on his sternum so I can see his face. “You have no idea, Logan. Watching you lose it is the single most satisfying thing I have done in years. Possibly ever. I'm getting a plaque made.”
The laugh moves through his whole chest, under my cheek, and then it fades, and he brushes my hair back from my face with a gentleness that undoes me worse than any of the rest of it.
“You're something else,” he says. Quiet. Like a fact he's stating, not a compliment he's paying. “You know that? You really are.”
And here's what I can't say, what's making my eyes sting into the warm skin of his throat. This is the last one.
The plan is nearly up. I've been telling myself for weeks that I'd wind it down clean, hand them all back their lives, walk away before anybody has to watch me want something I was never going to be allowed to keep.
Logan was always going to be the hardest to give back. So I let myself have him today. One afternoon. One time. Something to fold up small and take with me, proof that for a little while three good alphas were mine to reach for. Even if only one of us ever fell.
Because that's the part he doesn't know, lying here easy and sated with his arms wrapped warm around me. He thinks this was two people being reckless on a Wednesday. He doesn't know I'm memorizing him.
And under all of it my body is humming wrong, too hot, wound too tight, that low restless ache that's been building for days climbing higher even now, even spent, even here.
There's a bottle in my nightstand two miles away, running low, and a date on a spreadsheet, and a plan I built with my own hands to keep exactly this from happening.