“Hey. She seem okay to you last night? At the table she smelled...” He circles a hand, hunting for the word, and doesn't find it. “Sweeter. Different-sweeter. I don't know.”
“Tired, maybe.” I turn it over and get nowhere either. “End of term. Forty relatives on Saturday.”
“Yeah.” He doesn't sound convinced. Neither am I. “Probably that.”
Then he's gone, and I stand there with the good coffee going cold in my hand and the word out loud now, three, and no way to un-say it.
And a Monday in front of me that's supposed to end, if a schedule nobody's admitted to is still alive, with her.
Here'sa thing I didn't say to Hudson. I didn't know if she'd come tonight.
Nothing puts her in that window booth anymore. The schedule was built to sell a lie with a finish line, and the finish line's behind us. Last night at my mother's table could have beenthe closing performance of the whole run, and Monday at the diner could just be a thing we used to do.
I got there early anyway. Ordered her water. Watched the door like a man with money on it.
And she pushed through it same as always, waved at Pete, dropped into her side of the booth already talking, like Mondays are just a true thing about the world. Like there was never a version of tonight where she didn't come.
I'd have sat there till close. That's the part I'm not examining.
So dinner is what it always is, meaning it's the best hour of my week and I'd die before I said so.
She talks. I water her. Pete watches from the second stool with the naked fascination of a man whose stories ran out in 2009.
She's planting a garden, apparently. School's been out over a week, and she made it exactly one morning of summer break before she needed a project. There's a diagram now. The diagram has zones. The man at the garden center who tried to talk her out of tomatoes is getting a full reenactment, both parts, the salt and pepper shakers standing in for raised beds.
“He called tomatoes 'a heartbreak crop.' Direct quote.” She stabs her meatloaf. “I've known heartbreak, Finn. I can handle a tomato.”
“You killed a cactus in April.”
“That cactus had preexisting conditions.” She points her fork at me. “And it was a gift, so emotionally I never fully invested.”
“The tomatoes are doomed.”
“The tomatoes are going tothrive,because I have a diagram, and because unlike some people I believe in things.”
And her scent's off tonight.
Not bad. The opposite of bad, and that's the whole problem.
It's the brown sugar and warm oat I could pick out of a stadium, except it's gone deeper. Richer. An omega scentthickening toward something I don't have permission to name, like it's been sitting somewhere warm and turning to caramel.
Every time she leans across the table to land a punchline, it rolls over me. Something low in my spine sits up and pays attention.
I know what that is. Some back part of me knows exactly what that is.
The front part of me, the part that's spent four weeks being careful, calls it a long day and refuses the rest. She's been running on empty since the reunion. End of term. Family. Me.
Her body's tired and her scent's gone soft. That's all. That's biology. That's nothing I get to think about across a plate of meatloaf while she repositions the pepper shaker and tells it about drainage.
She walked here, because she walks everywhere, and it's dark out by the time Dottie brings the pie. There's no version of any alpha worth the designation that lets his omega walk home in the dark. And there's a much smaller, much louder version of me that just wants the eight minutes in the truck.
I'm not looking at that version. I'm aware of it. That's different.
I refill her water and I don't think about her scent.
Then Dottie clears the pie plates, and I put cash on the table over her objection, and we're out under the streetlight and I'm opening the truck door for her, and the not-thinking is over.
The truck's too small for this. It's always been too small, I've just never been alone in it with her at night before, her scent filling the cab, the windows up and eight minutes of dark road between the diner and her door.
