31. Josie
Josie
The knock comes from very far away, through water, through cotton, through the roar of my own blood.
I'm on the bedroom floor when I hear it. I don't remember getting on the bedroom floor.
I remember the group text, sending it with shaking hands at dawn, the last clean decision I could make before the tide came in.
Let them go. Do this the way you were always going to have to do it.
Alone. And then the wave took me and time went strange and slippery, and now I'm on the floor with a pillow clutched to my chest and every inch of my skin two sizes too small.
It's bad. It's so much worse than the suppressants ever let it get. Five years of pills holding this down, and now my body has come to collect all at once, with interest.
Everything hurts. A cramp rolls through my lower belly deep enough to fold me over the pillow, a clenching, grasping emptiness that wants something I don't have. When it passes I'm slick between my thighs, soaked through, my body making itself ready over and over for a thing that isn't coming.
Too hot. Too empty. Too much. And underneath all of it, the part I'm most ashamed of, the want. Enormous and specific, pointed straight at three men I sent away this morning so they'd never have to see me like this.
The knock again. Then a voice, muffled, that my whole body lunges toward before my brain catches the word.
“Josie.” Hudson. “We're coming in, okay? Lily gave us the key. Don't be scared.”
Scared isn't the problem. The problem is the sound I make when I hear him, low and wrecked and needy, a sound I have never made in front of another person in my life.
The lock turns.
And then the room floods with them, with scent, three of them at once and it's too much, it's everything, juniper and woodsmoke-clove and maple-cedar pouring into my small hot bedroom, and my body arches off the floor toward it like a plant toward the sun, humiliating, involuntary, undeniable.
“Okay.” Finn's voice, and I've never heard it like this, stripped down to the studs. He's crouching. They're all crouching, keeping low, keeping back, three big men making themselves small at the edge of my bedroom like they know something I don't. “Hey. We've got you.”
“You shouldn't be here.” It comes out cracked. “I sent the — I let you go. You're supposed to be free.”
“Yeah, we got the text.” Hudson, gentle, wrecked under the gentle. “It was a good text. Very gracious. We're ignoring it.”
“You don't understand.” Another wave builds and I grit through it, gripping the pillow. “It's my heat. It's — you can't be here for this, you'll feel like you have to, and I never wanted you because you had to —”
“Josie.” Logan. Just my name, in that low careful voice, and it stops me. He's closest, kneeling a careful arm's length away, and his eyes are bright and steady and fixed on my face like the rest of the room's on fire. “Nobody here feels like they have to.”
I don't have an answer for that. Another wave rolls in and steals the chance.
They don't touch me.
That's what breaks through the fog, later, when the wave recedes enough to let me think.
Three alphas in a room with an omega in unmedicated heat, and they are not touching me.
Finn has stationed himself by the door like he's guarding it.
Hudson's gone to the kitchen. I can hear him running the tap, opening my cupboards, muttering.
Logan's closest but still back, still giving me a foot of air, his jaw tight with the effort of it.
“Why aren't you —” I can't finish. Another cramp seizes low and deep and I curl around it, slick slicking hot down my thigh, my whole body one raw open plea. My skin is screaming for them. The emptiness inside me is screaming louder.
“Because you didn't ask us to,” Logan says simply. Like it's the easiest thing in the world. Like every line of his body isn't drawn tight as a cable. “This is yours, Josie. All of it. We don't move until you say.”
And something in me that has been braced for five years, braced for the catch, the cost, the moment the kindness turns into a bill. Something in me cracks right down the middle.
Because I know what a heat looks like when someone thinks they're owed. And this isn't it. This is three men holding themselves at the edge of me like I'm something that could break, waiting.
Hudson comes back with a glass of water and a plate of crackers, cheese, and apple slices he's cut with more care than the task needs. He sets them where I can reach and retreats, hands up, easy.
“Drink,” he says. “You've sweated out a lake. I'm not above bribery, there's more apple where that came from.”
I drink. It's the best thing I've ever tasted. He watches me finish the whole glass with an expression I can't look at directly.
“Nest.” The word comes out of me before I've decided to say it, some deep instinct surfacing. My eyes have gone to the bed, the blankets, the fairy lights I strung around the headboard two winters ago and never took down. “I need — I have to —”
“Then we make a nest.” Finn, from the door. Like it's an order he's relieved to finally have.
I build it on my hands and knees and they let me.
This is the part no one warns you about, the part that lives below language.
The drive to make the safe place, to pull every soft thing in the world into one circle and shore up the walls.
I strip the bed and rebuild it wrong, then right, then wrong again.
I drag the blankets from the closet, the good fleece one, the quilt my gran made.
Pillows into walls. The fairy lights pulled low and glowing gold.
And it's not enough. It's soft and it's warm and it's mine and it is not enough, and I'm kneeling in the middle of it shaking, slick-soaked and cramping and near tears, because something's missing and my body knows exactly what.
Not blankets. Not pillows. Them. The empty ache in me has three names and it will not quiet for anything less.
“Josie.” Logan, reading me the way he reads everything. “What do you need?”
I can't say it. It's too much to ask. It's the whole truth in one word.
“Say it,” he says, gentle. “Whatever it is. We're not going anywhere.”
“You.” It breaks out of me. “I need — I need you in it. Your — “ My face is on fire. “Your scent. I need your scents in my nest, I can't — it won't be safe without —”
For a second nobody moves.
Then Finn reaches back over his shoulder and pulls his shirt off in one motion, and hands it to me. Just like that. Woodsmoke and clove, warm from his body, and I press it to my face and make a sound of pure relief that should embarrass me and doesn't.
“Here.” Hudson, tugging his over his head, giving it over. Juniper. “Been trying to figure out how to get this on you for a month. Wasn't picturing these circumstances, but I'll take it.”
And Logan, last, careful, unbuttoning his flannel with hands that aren't quite steady, folding it once before he sets it in my palms like it matters, like I matter. Maple and cedar, the one my body's been reaching for across fences for five years.
I take all three and I weave them into the center where I'll sleep, and the second their scents layer together over mine the whole nest goes right, clicks into place, safe, and I sink into the middle of it and breathe like I haven't breathed in days.
Three shirtless alphas kneel around my bed, not touching me, watching me settle into a nest built of their own clothes, and none of them look away.
Hudson makes the calls.
I hear him in the hall, low, because I asked and he understood without me finishing the sentence.
“Yeah, Dottie, big order. Whatever travels.
Three hungry men and an omega who's not going to eat much, so — everything. All of it.” A pause.
“No. She's fine. She's got people.” Another pause, and his voice changes, goes soft and a little dangerous.
“And Dottie. If one word of this turns up on your specials board, I'll know exactly who to blame. Thanks. You're a queen. Bye.”
Finn calls the firehouse and says four words about a family thing and hangs up. Logan texts his brother to cover the build.
Our omega's in heat. Nobody says it out loud.
But it's in the room, in the way they've rearranged their whole lives around my bedroom in the space of an hour, in the water refilled before I've finished it, the fresh cool cloth Logan lays on the back of my neck between waves without being asked, the way none of them so much as shifts a pillow of my nest without me reaching for it first.
They take care of me. But they don't let me suffer through it, either, and that's the part that undoes me.
Because when the next wave crests and I'm shaking apart in the middle of the nest, Finn kneels down at the edge of it, close as he's let himself get.
“Tell us what you need,” he says, rough as gravel. “Anything. Hands on you, distance, whatever helps. There's no wrong answer, and we're not going anywhere either way.” Four sentences, which for Finn is a speech, and every word lands. “We're yours. However you want us.”
And I look at the three of them, kneeling around a nest built out of their own shirts, offering me everything and asking for nothing back, and the thing I've been outrunning for four weeks finally catches me.
I have to say it. Before they touch me. Even though it changes nothing, even though I already know how it ends.
“Can I say something first.” My voice comes out steadier than it's been all day. “And I need you to hear that I'm clear. Not heat-clear. Actually clear.”
Logan goes still. Finn doesn't move. Hudson waits.
“You know how this started.” I make myself hold Logan's eyes, because he's the one I'll lose my nerve looking at. “I needed a fake pack to survive my mother and one bad reunion. Three pretend boyfriends, one weekend, and everyone goes home. That was the whole plan.”
My heart is going like a hammer.