Page 10 of Knot the Plan
“My ears are always red. It's a condition.”
“It's not a condition.” He crosses his arms, which everyone in this town knows is Finn forI am winning this conversation, but his voice drops when he says the next part, low enough that it's just for me. “And your scent could be read from space.”
For a second neither of us says anything, and the bay is very warm for a building full of concrete.
“It's a bad plan, Porter,” he says, normal volume again, like the last ten seconds didn't happen. “Worst one I've heard since Hudson's twin.”
“Funny you should mention Hudson.”
The arms come down. “No.”
“He's candidate two.”
“Then you don't need me. You've got a golden retriever who can talk. Add Logan Walker, he'd walk into a lake if you asked him nice, and there's your pack.”
“Why would he walk into a lake?”
Finn looks at me for a second, something almost like pity crossing his face, and then decides not to spend the energy. “Forget it.”
I shake it off. “I'm going to ask Logan. He's on the list.” I say it a little firmer than I mean to. “But I need three, and packs come in threes, Finn, that's not me being greedy, it's just how it works.”
“Take Carl Tubbs. Solves your whole problem.”
“No, it does not.”
“Why not? Man's banned from the festival pie contest, which means he's wide open every festival from here on out. Nothing but time on his hands.”
“I'm not bringing the pie criminal to meet my mother. Focus.”
He drags a hand down his face, leaving a faint streak of grease along his jaw, and I watch the math happen behind his eyes.
The favor. The closet.
The Spring Fling, two months ago. His mother trotted out a lovely visiting omega, who was perfectly nice, which somehow made it worse, and a large grown firefighter hid from his own mother in my preschool's craft closet, between the pipe cleaners and the seasonal felt. The only reason the whole town doesn't know is that I stood in that doorway and lied to Cynthia Morrow's face.
Badly. My voice went up two octaves. I claimed Finn was helping me assemble a sensory table. Cynthia looked at me with her head tilted for what felt like a year and a half of my life, and then chose to believe it, because the alternative was unbearable for everyone.
He knows I know he's thinking about it. I know he knows I know. This is the entire texture of our friendship, if that's what this is. Two months of him hoping I forgot, and me polishing the memory like a coin.
“You said,” I remind him sweetly, “and I quote, 'I owe you one, Porter. Anything. Name it.'“
“I was under duress.”
“You were under a shelf of googly eyes.”
“Anything reasonable. There's an implied reasonable. It's implied in all favors. That's contract law.”
“You're a fireman.”
“Firefighter.”
“You're a firefighter who's about to welch on a debt to a preschool teacher. They'll take your calendar month away.”
And there, for one quarter of one second, something happens at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. Finn Morrow doesn't hand those out on a Tuesday. But the ghost of where one would go, and the woodsmoke mellows, just barely, just enough that I notice the noticing.
Then he kills it.
“No,” he says. Quietly this time, which is worse than the loud one. “Find someone else, Josie. I'm not the guy you bring home to a mother. Ask anyone. Ask mine.”
