Page 18 of Knot the Plan
“Inspecting the grass.”
“Sure,” he says, and lets it ride.
Smith makes us take a jar of pickles. That's the job, some days. You put out a quarter acre and you leave with pickles, and the truck smells like brine and char the whole way back, and your partner eats a sandwich in the passenger seat like it's a dining car.
Back at the station, I decide the truck needs a new gasket. It doesn't. I've checked it twice this week. I'm checking it a third time, because if my hands stop moving I'm going to think about Josie Porter, and I have a system, and the system is the truck.
The system has not been working.
The system stopped working two days ago, when she walked into my bay smelling like burnt sugar and bad decisions and asked me to stand in a backyard and lie to her whole family, and then, when I said no like a sane man, told me the thing about the wave.
She wasn't supposed to know about the wave.
Nobody's supposed to know about the wave. The wave is between me and twelve preschoolers, and that's where it stays.
“You're going to strip that bolt,” Gus says from the kitchen doorway. He's on sandwich four of the shift. “It's been tight for an hour.”
“It's fine.”
“You're fine, the bolt's fine, everything's fine.” He chews. “She got two of them, by the way. Your teacher.”
The wrench stops.
“What.”
“Grant and Walker. Both said yes.” He says it around a mouthful, watching me a little too closely for a man this invested in a sandwich. “Which means she's got two of the three she needs for that thing she came in here askingyouabout on Tuesday. While I was in the back room. With the door open.”
I look at him.
“Walls are thin, Finn. I heard the whole thing. The reunion, the fake pack, the three alphas, all of it.” He takes another bite, unbothered. “Relax. I'm not telling anybody, who would I even tell. But I'll say this part for free.” He points the sandwich at me. “She walks in here, hands you a month of being hers and nothing to lose, and you saidno.”
“It's fake, Gus.”
“Didn't say it wasn't.” He takes another bite. “Said she needs three alphas, and she asked you first, and you said no, and now she's out there asking everybody else.” He shrugs. “None of my business. Just seems like a strange thing to say no to, is all.”
“She needs a third,” I say, because it's the only part my mouth will form.
“She does. Found two without much trouble.” He looks at me, way too casual about it. “She'll find the third too.”
I look at the tool wall. It's alphabetized. I don't remember doing that.
But the favor didn't start on Tuesday. It started two months ago, in a closet, and nobody knows that part.
The Spring Fling. My mother introduced me to a visiting omega. Perfectly nice. Genuinely, no complaints. And that was the problem, the no-complaints, the way I stood there running down a list of reasons it was fine and felt nothing tick over.
My mother beaming like she'd already picked a date. A perfectly nice omega scent in the air, pleasant, forgettable, notone thread of my biology sitting up to notice it. The omega laughing at something I hadn't said. And somewhere in there I walked very calmly out the side of the community tent and into the first unlocked door I could find.
The preschool. Specifically, the craft closet.
A grown man. A public servant. Folded onto a stool built for a five-year-old, wedged between a bin of pom-poms and a shelf of construction paper while his mother's voice worked the crowd outside.
Josie found me in four minutes. Opened the closet door and looked at me.
She didn't laugh.
That's the part I keep coming back to. She had every right to laugh. Instead she said, “Scooch,” took the other tiny stool, and sat down next to me like a craft closet was a perfectly normal place for two adults to be. Didn't ask why. Didn't make me talk. After a minute she pulled a coffee can off the shelf, tipped half of it into my hands, a thousand loose buttons, and set a divided tray between us, one little compartment for each color.
She started sorting. So I sorted. Two grown adults filling tiny compartments with buttons on tinier stools while my mother worked the crowd twenty feet away. She smelled like a kitchen in December, and somewhere between the reds and the blues my shoulders came down off my ears for the first time all spring.
