“You drooled on Hudson's window,” I tell her.
“I did not drool.”
“There's a whole situation over there. He's going to have to get it detailed.”
“It's character,” Hudson says. “The truck has character now.”
“I hate all of you,” she says, with no force behind it whatsoever, and stretches, and stops stretching halfway like her body just caught up with the day all at once. She rolls her window down a couple inches. June air comes in off the valley, cool and pine-heavy.
“Hot in here,” she says.
It's not. My window's been cracked since the highway, and the June night coming off the valley has teeth in it.
Her color's up, too, high on her cheeks, and that molten-sugar edge is still riding her scent even now that she's awake to police it.
She catches me looking.
And for one long second she doesn't deflect. Doesn't joke, doesn't get there first the way she always does. She just holds my eyes in the dark of the cab, color climbing, and the air between the back seat and the front pulls tight enough to hum.
I'm on the side of that house again with her chin in my hands, and I'd bet the truck she's standing there too. I just can't tell which part she's hearing. The kiss, or the stupid sentence after.
Then she packs it all away. Sits up straighter, folds her hands in her lap. An omega closing the register for the night.
Long day, I tell myself again. It holds about as well as it did the first time.
“Dinner tomorrow,” I say instead, because it's the one safe piece of news I own. “My mother's. She wants everybody.”
“Everybody,” Josie repeats.
“Bring the pack. Direct quote.”
“Great,” she says, one beat too fast and two shades too bright. “That's... yeah. One more. Sure. I love your mom.”
That last part isn't a performance, and everybody in this truck knows it. That's tomorrow's problem in four words. She loves my mother. My mother is planning a future around a pack with a demolition date, and every person at that table tomorrow knows the date except the woman doing the cooking.
“She's making the roast,” I say, because it's true, and because it's easier than the rest of it.
“With the little potatoes?”
“With the little potatoes.”
“Okay,” she says, softer, watching Main Street come up dark and familiar through the windshield. “Good.”
The roast, for the record, happens every Sunday. Has for all thirty-two years I've been alive. Rain, shine, house fires, Gemma's emergency calls, a truly unfortunate year where she experimented with lamb. Every Sunday there is a roast, and every Sunday there are chairs around that table, and I have spent fifteen years dodging the question of who's going to sit in them.
I'm just saying. The roast is a standing event. It doesn't expire tomorrow.
I don't know why I'm telling myself that. I do know. I'm ignoring it.
We walk her to her door. All of us. It's ridiculous, three alphas escorting one omega up a porch she's climbed alone five years running, and it doesn't occur to a single one of us to do it differently, and if somebody suggested it, I'd have opinions about them.
At her door she turns around, keys in hand, and looks at us crowded onto her porch, the swing nobody's ever seen her sit on hanging still behind us.
This is where the line goes. I know, because I wrote it.Well. That's a wrap. Thanks, everyone.Handshakes, or whatever the version of handshakes is for this. Clean cut, no loose ends.
“So,” she says. “Dinner tomorrow.”
“Five,” I say. “She'll tell you five thirty. Come at five.”
