There's just Josie, kissing me back under a streetlight, in the one town where nobody's keeping score.
When I pull back I keep my forehead against hers. I'm not ready to give the distance back yet.
“That wasn't on the schedule,” I say, low.
She lets out a breath that shakes on the way out.
“No,” she says. “It wasn't.”
She doesn't say anything after that, and I don't push. I've waited five years. I can stand in a good silence a little longer.
So I take her hand, fingers laced through mine, and walk her back to the truck. She lets me. She doesn't let go the whole way there.
She'squiet on the drive home, tucked into the middle of the old bench seat, close enough that her shoulder knocks mine every time the road bends, watching the dark slide by.
I don't fill the quiet. Never needed to, with her. Everybody thinks Josie Porter is the noise, the fast, bright, funny one, and she is. But she's also the only person alive who can sit in a silence beside me and let it be good instead of something that needs fixing. That's the thing I could never explain to a living soul. The reason it was only ever going to be her.
Somewhere past the county line she gives up the fight, and her head settles onto my shoulder, and one of her hands ends up loose in mine, and she's out. Warm and heavy against my side. I ease off the gas and drive the rest of the way like I'm carrying something that could break, and a low alpha purr I don't bother stopping rolls up warm and quiet through the cab.
And because there's nobody awake to hear it, I let myself have the truth for the length of a dark highway. It's real. For me it's real, it was always going to be, and no amount of calling it practice on a schedule was ever going to turn it into anything else.
Which is not the same as getting to keep it.
That's the part I keep forgetting and having to learn again. The deal is hers. When the reunion's done she gets to hand me back my ordinary life, and I'll take it, because taking what I'm given is the whole shape of me. Because I'm the one who shows up and never asks for the rest.
All I get is the hope she doesn't.
So I drive her home through the dark, her asleep on my shoulder, and I don't say the one thing I've wanted to say for five years. I just let her sleep.
Chapter 18
Josie
At some point a fake pack stops being four people pretending. It starts being four people who keep ending up in the same kitchen.
It's Wednesday. Nobody scheduled Wednesday. There's no practice on the calendar, no town to perform for, no reason for any of us to be near each other.
And yet here we all are.
Hudson textedbringing dinner, don't argueat five. Logan turned up ten minutes later with a level, because my one crooked shelf has apparently been bothering him since the day he walked in to hear my terrible plan. And Finn came because Finn comes now. That's just a thing that happens. He lets himself in with the key I did not consciously decide to give him and goes straight for my fridge like he lives here.
I should find this alarming. I am the omega who built this whole thing with an exit baked in. A month, clean break, everybody back to their lives.
Instead I'm standing in my own kitchen watching three alphas argue about whether a shelf needs to be perfectly level if you're only putting paperbacks on it.
The house smells like all of them at once, woodsmoke and juniper and maple layered over Hudson's cooking. And my whole body has gone quiet and warm andsettledin a way I haven't felt in six years of careful little pills.
And under the settling, there's the other thing, always now. The low live current of wanting them. Three alphas in my small kitchen, my body keeping a running tally of all of them, Hudson's hands, Finn's mouth, the slow careful way Logan kissed me in Pine Valley like the schedule didn't exist.
I am slick and warm and pretending to care about paperback weight distribution. My suppressant gave up hours ago.
That's the part that scares me. Not the wanting — the settling.
Dinner isloud and easy and theirs now, somehow, the four of us, a shape that fit itself together when I wasn't watching.
Hudson cooks and narrates it like a show. Logan fixes the shelf, and then, because he can't stop, the wobbly chair, and then the cabinet door that's hung crooked since I moved in.
Finn sits at my tiny table taking up all the air in the room and shoots down Hudson's worst jokes with one flat word each, which only makes Hudson try harder, which is the whole game.
