Page 49 of Knot the Plan
I'm taking her on a date.
A real one. Not a diner booth with the whole Hollow watching, not a hand held for show. A table, booked two weeks ago in a voice that came out steadier than I felt, at a little Italian place in Pine Valley I've driven past forty times and never once had a reason to walk into.
I know exactly what the whole thing is. A lie with an end date stamped on it — a spreadsheet somewhere that says the day she hands us back our lives. I booked the table anyway. If a fake month is all I ever get of her, I want one real night stood up inside it.
Bella Notte. Tucked on a corner downtown, warm light in the windows. The kind of place a man takes a woman when he means it.
I've never meant it before.
That's the part that keeps getting me, standing in my kitchen at five thirty in a shirt I actually ironed, wearing enough off thetop shelf of the bathroom that I'm hoping reads astriedand notdesperate.Thirty years old, and I've never taken a single person out to dinner and let myself hope about it.
I fix porches. I build ramps for folks whose knees have gone and never send a bill. I've been the one who shows up, not the one who asks, since I was old enough to hold a hammer.
Tonight I asked.
It's practice, is the official story. Logan's day on the schedule, my job to get the two of us comfortable being a pack in public before her family lays eyes on us Saturday.
Practice. I have never practiced anything less in my life.
She'son her step when I pull up, and the sight of her nearly puts my truck in the neighbor's hedge.
A dress. Soft green, the kind that moves when she does, her hair down for once instead of clipped back against the daily war with the four-year-olds. She climbs up into the cab and the whole thing fills with her, brown sugar and toasted oat gone warm in the evening, and every alpha nerve I've got stands up at once.
“Youironed,” she says, buckling in, thrilled about it.
“I own an iron.”
“Logan Walker.” She reaches over and straightens a collar that did not need straightening, and my neck goes hot, and she clocks it, because she clocks everything. “You cleaned the truck.”
“It was dirty.”
“It has never been this clean the whole time I've known you. I could eat off this dash.”
“Please don't.”
She laughs, loud and unguarded, and settles back, and I pull out toward the highway with my heart doing a thing no working fire has ever managed.
Forty minutes. I get forty minutes of her in my truck, a whole dinner across a candle, the drive home in the dark. It's pretend and I know it's pretend. I'm going to bank every second of it against the rest of my quiet life anyway.
Pine Valleyin the evening is all soft downtown light, and Bella Notte is exactly what the town promised. A warm little corner place, candles in the windows, the smell of garlic and woodfire rolling out the door when I hold it open for her.
The hostess takes one look at the pair of us. “Table for two?”
Just that. A table for two, like an alpha bringing his omega to dinner is the most ordinary thing in the world. And something in me that has no business being this loud goes quiet and settled and warm, because for one night, a table for two is exactly what we are.
We get a corner table by the window, and I take the chair with my back to the room without deciding to, so she's the one tucked into the corner where nothing can come at her from behind. She doesn't notice me do it. I barely notice me do it. It's just where an alpha sits when the omega across from him is the whole point of the night.
A couple of tables over, a waiter sets a pan of cheese on fire to a small round of applause, and Josie's whole face lights up like one of her four-year-olds.
And I decide, right there, that I'll bring her back here every chance I get for the rest of my life. Reunion or no reunion. Deal or no deal. If she'll only come.
I don't say that. Obviously. I hand her a menu instead.
She can't decide. Narrows it to three, then looks up at me helpless, so I tell the waiter we'll take all three and split them. Itsolves the problem clean and earns me a look that promises I'll pay for the presumption later.
Then the food comes, and she takes a bite of the first thing and closes her eyes and goes quiet. And there's a thing that happens in me watching her go soft and happy over something I put in front of her. Some old alpha wiring I didn't know I was carrying. Warm and dumb and satisfied down to the bone.
“Okay,” she says, when she can talk again. “You are never allowed to let me order for myself again.”
