30. Hudson
Hudson
Hey you three. I can't say thank you enough for these last few weeks.
You saved me at the reunion, all of you, and it meant more than I know how to put in a text.
But it's done now and you've more than paid me back for whatever you think you owe.
You can have your lives back. Go be free men. I mean it. Thank you, truly. — J
I read it a fourth time.
On its face it's a nice text. Warm. Grateful. The kind of thing you'd screenshot and feel good about. But I've spent a month learning the difference between what Josie Porter says and what Josie Porter means, and everything under this one is wrong.
You can have your lives back. Nobody says that who's planning to see you Tuesday. That's not a thank-you. That's a door closing, dressed up nice so you won't hear the latch.
And then there's yesterday. The garden. The way she flinched off me when I hauled her up, quick and hard like my hand burned.
The scratchy cardigan inside out. The pink eyes she wouldn't explain.
The specific fragile look of a woman holding something over her head with both arms and pretending it's light.
I told myself last night to let her have it. That whatever it was, she'd come to us.
Instead she sent a goodbye before the sun was properly up.
I call her.
It rings four times and goes to voicemail, to the chirpy outgoing message she recorded for the preschool parents, and I hang up before the beep because whatever I've got to say isn't a voicemail.
I text instead. Nice try. What's actually going on.
Nothing. Not the little dots. Not read. Nothing.
I wait ninety seconds, which is about eighty-nine longer than I've ever waited for anything, and then I'm off my stool and grabbing my keys off the hook by the register and flipping the sign on the store to CLOSED at seven in the morning, which I have not done on a business day in six years, not even the time I had the flu and sold a man a kayak with a fever of a hundred and two.
Josie lives four minutes from the store if you drive like a person and two if you don't.
I do it in two.
Her car's in the driveway. Curtains drawn. The little house sits quiet in the morning light, window boxes she overwaters spilling over the sills. Everything looks completely normal. I know before I'm out of the truck that it isn't.
Because I can smell her from the driveway.
Brown sugar and warm oat, her scent, except it's not doing what it does.
It's not drifting. It's pouring off the house, thick and dark and sweet enough to stop me flat with one boot still on the running board, sweeter and heavier than I have ever smelled it, and every alpha instinct I own stands up at once and says the word my brain takes a half-second longer to catch up to.
Heat.
She's in heat. Or close enough to it that the difference doesn't matter. Full, or nearly, and building, and rolling off the house in waves while she sends out texts cutting three alphas loose.
There's a thing I keep on a short leash, every day, all day, the part of me that wants instead of jokes.
It hits the end of that leash so hard my vision goes white at the edges.
I put both hands flat on the roof of my truck and breathe through it, because she does not need an alpha coming apart in her driveway. She needs one thinking.
Alone. She's doing it alone.
“No,” I say out loud, to nobody, in her driveway. “No, no, absolutely not.”
I'm at her door in about four strides. I knock, and it comes out harder than I mean it, the flat of my fist. “Porter. It's Hudson. Open the door.”
Nothing.
“Josie.” I put my forehead against the door like proximity's going to help, and her scent comes through the gap at the bottom so strong my knees actually think about it. “Come on. Open up. I just want to see your face, I'm not going to do anything, I just need to know you're okay. Please.”
A sound, from deep in the house. Not words. A low, wrecked little sound, the sound a person makes when they've bitten down on a bigger one, and it goes through me like a blade.
“Okay,” I say, quiet now, forehead still to the wood, because the joking's all gone and there's nothing under it but the part I don't let people see. “Okay. Hang on, Porter. We're coming.”
I stay right where I am, back against her door like I can hold the line just by being here, and I dial. I don't even decide who first. My thumb just knows.
Finn picks up on the fourth ring, groggy, wrecked from sleep. Right. Night shift. Dead to the world, hasn't seen a thing.
“'Sup,” he mumbles. “'S early, man.”
“Wake up. Now. It's Josie.”
I hear him come awake all at once, the mattress, his feet hitting the floor. “What. What happened.”
“She sent us a text this morning. Sounds like you slept through it.” I press my palm flat to her door, like she might feel it.
“It's a goodbye, Finn. Real nice, real final.
Thanks for everything, off you go. And I came to check on her, and she's in heat.
The real thing, not the edge of it. Won't open the door, won't answer, riding it out alone in there because she's decided she's not worth the call.”
The sound he makes is not a word. It's a controlled man losing the top layer all at once.
“I'm moving,” he says, and I can hear it, boots, keys. “Suppressants, she takes—”
“Whatever she takes, it's losing. Bad. Get to her house, fast as you can. I'm on her porch now and I'm not leaving it.” I keep my voice low, for her, close to the wood. “And Finn. She's okay. Stubborn and scared and hurting, but she's tough as boots. We just have to reach her.”
“Yeah.” His voice cracks, does what it almost never does. “Yeah. Go.”
He spent this whole arrangement swearing it was fake. In it for his mother, nothing more, a coworker in a bad plan. One text and one shaking sentence stripped all of that down to the stud.
Logan I have to try twice.
He answers on the second attempt, on the sixth ring, and his voice is wrong before he says a full word. Flat. Scraped hollow.
“I saw it,” he says, before I can get anything out.
“The second it came in. I've just been— I've been sitting here since, Hudson.
I didn't know what to do with it. She said goodbye.
She said have your lives back like she was handing something back she never wanted, and I couldn't— I didn't say anything to anybody because I didn't know what there was to say.”
And there it is, the whole of Logan in four sentences.
He got the same text the rest of us did and read it clearer than any of us.
It knocked him flat and left him there. The man's been sitting alone with his heart on the floor since the text landed, because the woman he's loved for five years just tried to hand him back his life.
“Logan. Listen to me.” I keep it gentle, because you have to, with him.
“It's not a goodbye. It's worse and it's better.
She's in heat, brother. Right now. Alone in there with the curtains shut, and she sent that text going into it, because she'd rather set us free than let us see her need anybody.”
Silence. Then the sound of a very large man standing up very fast.
“Where,” Logan says, and his voice isn't hollow anymore. “Tell me where.”
“Her house. Right now. I'm already here. Go.”
I hang up and I call Lily, and while it rings I slide down to sit on her top step with my back against the door, close as I can get to her, and I do what I never do, the one thing the whole town would bet money I'm not capable of.
I stop performing. There's no one to perform for. It's just me and her quiet porch and the smell of her coming through the gap at the sill and a fear so big and so plain I don't have a single joke to lay over the top of it.
I've spent my whole life staying light, staying up on the surface where nothing can pull you under.
And I sit on Josie Porter's step and let it pull me under anyway, all the way to the bottom, no kicking, no coming up for air.
Turns out I've been swimming for this exact spot the whole time and calling it treading water.
She thinks nobody would come.
She sent that text believing, all the way down, that three alphas would read it and feel relief. That we'd been counting the days. That she was the arrangement and never the point.
Lily picks up. “Hudson? It's seven in the—”
“Lily. You've got Josie's spare key. I need it at Josie's, fast, and I need you to not ask me why until after.” I keep my hand on her door. “It's not bad, exactly, but it's not good, and she needs us, and she's the only person in this town too stubborn to say so. You in?”
Half a second, and a muffled word to somebody, Ethan's voice in the background already asking. Then Lily, who loves her too, who's watched this whole thing from the front row. “We're grabbing it. Ethan's driving. We'll be there in ten. Don't you dare leave that door.”
I wasn't planning on it.
Whatever she wrote in that text, whatever she's decided about herself in that overheating little house with the curtains drawn, she got exactly one thing wrong.
We came. All three of us. The second we knew.
Now I just have to get through that door and prove it.