Josie'salready there when I come in. Of course she is. She's standing in my mother's kitchen holding a bowl of something and laughing at whatever Gemma just said, and the sight of her there, in that room, easy, like she fits, does something to me I do not have a category for.
And then her scent reaches me across the kitchen, brown sugar and toasted oat, warm and unguarded, and every alpha instinct I own stands up at once and pays attention. It's been doing that all week. I've stopped pretending it's going to stop.
My mother is on her immediately. “Finn. You're late.”
“I'm four minutes early.”
“You're late in spirit. Josie's been here twenty minutes, she brought a trifle, she's a delight, sit down.” She takes the bottle of wine out of my hand without looking at it and steers me toward the table like I'm furniture being rearranged. “Gemma, your brother's here, stop hiding.”
“I'm not hiding, I'm getting the rolls.” Gemma comes out of the pantry with the rolls and a look she aims straight at me, the one she's had since she was nine, the one that meanswe're going to talk later and you're not going to enjoy it.My sister is a small dry person who spends her days elbow-deep in other people's animals and misses even less than our mother does. “Hi, Finn.”
“Gem.”
“So.” She sets the rolls down. “Josie.”
“Don't,” I say.
“I didn't say anything.”
“You saidJosie.”
“It's her name.” Gemma's mouth twitches. “Am I not allowed to say the name of the woman my brother's apparently building a whole pack with? The pack I had to hear about from Mom, who heard it from the entire damn town, because apparently you'd sooner die than mention a thing yourself.”
“Language,” my mother says, sailing past with the roast.
“Sorry, Mom.”
Josie's watching this with the wide, careful eyes of a woman who's realized the ground has rules she wasn't handed. I catch her eye, and something passes between us, quick, just ours, the same look we've traded across a diner booth all week.
And then I remember it isn't a look across a diner booth anymore. It's Thursday. It's her hands in my shirt. Whatever's on my face must shift, because hers does too, color coming up under her freckles, and she looks down at her trifle very fast.
Gemma sees it. Of course Gemma sees it.
I watch my sister clock the whole exchange in about a second and a half, the look, the color, the way neither of us is breathing quite right, and I watch her tuck it away somewhere for later, and I know with total certainty that I'm going to be hearing about this in the pantry before the night's out.
Dinner is loud,because my mother runs a loud table, and I let it wash over me and do the one job I came to do, which is sit next to Josie and be her alpha and not let my mother see the truth of any of it.
It's easier than it should be. That's what's wrecking me. I don't have to act. I put my arm along the back of her chair and it's just where my arm wants to be. She leans into it without thinking and I feel it land all the way down, her scent warming where she's tucked against my side, settling something in me that's been restless for days.
What's not settling is everything else. Her knee is against mine under my mother's table, and every few minutes she shifts and it drags, and I have to keep my face doing normal things while the rest of me keeps a running tally of the exact warm pressure of her leg against mine.
Three days ago she had her hands in my shirt and her mouth on mine, and I have thought about almost nothing since. Now she's sitting at my childhood table eating my mother's roast, and all I can think about, like a man with a problem, is how fast I could get her out of here.
It's a low, steady pull that's been running under everything since the tailgate, and it doesn't care that we're at my mother's table. Her knee drags mine again and I have to breathe through it, jaw tight, keeping my face on the conversation while every animal part of me tracks the warm press of her leg like it's the only real thing in the room. Careful. I've always been careful. Nobody's ever made careful cost this much.
When my mother asks how we met and Josie freezes, deer in headlights, I step in smooth with the version we agreed on. The playground fence. The slow thing. Josie picks it up and runs, and we build the lie together like we've done it a hundred times, because we have.
Under the table her knee is against mine and neither of us moves it.
“I knew it,” my mother says, for the fortieth time tonight, misty over the green beans. “I have been telling people for years, that boy is not cold, that boy iswaiting.And here you are.” Shereaches over and pats Josie's hand. “I'm so glad it's you. I did your hair the week you moved here, did you know that? Five years ago. I told Marie that day, there's a sweet one, somebody's going to be lucky.”
“Mom.”
“What? It's true. I have an eye.” She dabs at said eye with her napkin. “Don't begrudge me. I waited a long time for this.”
And that's the one. The thing I came here braced against and got hit by anyway.
She waited a long time for this. She's so happy she keeps tearing up over root vegetables. And in six days I'm supposed to take this away from her, quietly, no fuss,she gets to stay happy, that's the price,except the price keeps going up, because every day she gets more invested and the more invested she gets, the more it's going to hurt her when it ends.
