Page 58 of Knot the Plan
“So,” he says. “Three of you.”
“Ray,” my mother says, half a warning and half a laugh, because she knows exactly what's coming.
“It's not a question, it's a public service.” Ray points his fork down the table at the three of them, one at a time, unhurried. “You three. I have known this girl since the day Frank carried her home from the hospital, and I'm going to tell you the same thing I told every fella who ever came sniffing around, which was a short list, because she's particular, and good for her. You will not find a bigger heart than the one sitting right there. So you cherish it. And if any one of you ever gives her a reason to cry, her daddy and I are going to take a nice long drive out to that Hollow and have ourselves a real friendly conversation. You hearing me?”
And the old reflex comes straight up my throat, the one I've had since I was four.Make it a joke. Get there first.Not because anyone's coming for me. Because Uncle Ray just called me the biggest heart in the room, out loud, in front of everyone, and I have never once in my life known how to sit still inside something that tender.
My whole life I've reached for the joke first, turned myself into the punchline before the love could land, because a laugh I can survive. Being looked at like that, I'm less sure about.
I've already got something light teed up, something that breaks the moment gently, before it can break me.
And before I can say it, Finn sets down his fork.
“You don't have to worry about that.” To Ray, but really to the whole table. Four words. From Finn, that's a filibuster.
Logan clears his throat, ears already going pink. “She's the best thing that ever happened to that town,” he says, to his plate, “and it doesn't know it yet. We're just the ones who noticed.”
“What he's trying to say,” Hudson adds, leaning back, thrilled to have the floor, “is you can leave the truck in the driveway, Ray. Nobody's making that drive. Now. Is that potato salad spoken for, or is it a free agent?”
The table breaks open, warm and loud, Aunt Deb gone frankly misty, the potato salad starting its slow journey down toward Hudson. Uncle Ray gives one slow nod, the kind he gives a fence post he's decided will hold, says “Good answer” to nobody in particular, and goes back to his plate, the whole matter settled to his personal specifications.
And Finn, who kicked the whole thing off with four words and considers his part in it closed, picks his fork back up and says nothing else, because that's Finn.
But I'm looking at him.
Finn, who felt me winding up to make myself the punchline and got there first, flat and plain, before I could, and then let Logan and Hudson carry the rest, and went back to his food like he hadn't just rearranged my entire nervous system.
He feels me looking. Glances over. “What.”
“You didn't have to do that.”
“Somebody did.” He picks his beer back up.
“That wasn't on the script.”
He drinks, eyes on the table, giving me nothing. “There's no script for Ray,” he says, which isn't an answer, which is the most Finn non-answer there is, and leaves it to me to decide whether he means Ray or means us.
And maybe that's the version I'm meant to take. The easy one. Finn being a good fake-boyfriend, saying the right thing in front of my family because that's the job and he's good at the job.
I could take it. I've taken every easy version on offer for four weeks.
But the thing I've spent four weeks and three-a-day suppressants not looking at has finally gotten too big to walk around, and sitting there with my brisket going cold, I let myself know it, once, in the privacy of my own skull — it's real. For me, it's real. And I am all out of road.
I get up.I have to. I mumble something about the bathroom and I get up from the table and walk out across the yard toward the side of the house, past the coolers, into the strip of shade by the garage where I used to hide as a kid when the family got to be too much family.
I put my back against the warm siding and try to remember how breathing goes.
It's too much. It's all too much. Not the reunion. The other thing. The realizing.
I hear his footsteps before I see him. I know them by now, which is its own catastrophe. Finn comes around the corner of the garage, not hurrying, hands in his pockets, and stops a careful few feet away, reading me the way he reads everything, fast and quiet.
“Hey.” His voice drops, low and even, the tone you'd use on somebody standing too near an edge. “It's holding. Nobody out there suspects a thing. Your mother's about to start planning a wedding.” A beat. “You don't have to run.”
He thinks I'm scared the lie is cracking.
And it's so far from it, so completely the wrong catastrophe, that I can't even correct him. I open my mouth and nothing usable comes out, just a shaky breath and the hot sting behind my eyes, and I press the heels of my hands against them and try to get my body back under some kind of control.
It doesn't work. It hasn't worked in weeks. Four weeks of failing suppressant and a whole day pressed up against three alphas and now this, cornered and cracked open in the shade, and I can feel my scent spike sharp and sweet and desperate off my own skin, broadcasting every single thing I can't say.
