Page 59 of Knot the Plan
I see the exact second it reaches him.
His nostrils flare. Whatever easy, steady, talk-her-down thing he came around the corner to do just walks off the job. His pupils blow wide. The clove and woodsmoke of him floods thelittle strip of shade, answering something in me before I can stop it, and my knees go unreliable.
“Josie.” My name comes out rough. Not flat. Not careful. A warning, maybe, or the last of one.
I don't heed it. I can't. I sway toward him half an inch, the smallest tell, an omega leaning into the only thing that's felt safe in a month.
And it undoes him.
He crosses the last of the space between us and takes my face in both hands, tips my head up, and kisses me.
And it is not fair, the way he kisses. There's nothing careful in it. His mouth is warm and certain, his hands hold my jaw like I'm something worth being sure about, and the heat I've been drowning under for four weeks comes up so fast and so total that my knees quit and I have to fist a hand in his shirt just to stay standing.
I kiss him back. I kiss him back like I mean it, because I do, and for one long stupid second there is nothing in the whole world but Finn Morrow's mouth and the woodsmoke and clove of him and the wild, ruinous idea that I might get to keep this.
Then somewhere across the yard a screen door bangs and a kid shrieks and the whole loud reunion comes roaring back in, and we are not in a sealed-off moment anymore. We're pressed against the side of my parents' house in the middle of the afternoon, in reach of anyone who wanders past the coolers.
And Finn steps back.
Not slow. Not reluctant. He steps back and puts a careful foot of daylight between us like a man who's caught himself off-book, and his face goes flat and shuttered, the door I've watched him brace shut a hundred times swinging right back into place.
“That shouldn't have happened.” Low. Rough. Not quite looking at me. “You were coming apart back here. I shouldn't have put my hands on you like that.”
And there it is. The whole thing, handed to me in a couple of flat sentences.
He kissed me because I was falling apart at my own reunion, and he is a decent man who does what needs doing to hold a cracking thing together. That's all it was. Steady the omega. Stop the spiral. Keep the day from coming off its rails.
Crisis management. A hand pressed flat over a crack in the plaster.
I reach for the light thing, because the light thing is the only tool I've ever trusted. “It's fine,” I say, and I get it out almost even. “No harm done.”
His jaw works. His mouth opens like he might argue it.
“JOSIE.” My mother's voice, bright and carrying, from over by the banner. “Baby, where'd you get to? Cara's hunting for you!”
And whatever he was going to say, he swallows it. Hands in his pockets. Flat and unreadable again.
“Go on,” he says. “They're waiting on you.”
So I go.
And crossing the grass toward my mother, I do the only thing I've ever known how to do with a wound. I get organized about it.
One more week. That's all that's left of this. One more week of being his in public, so my mother stays happy and Cynthia never finds out her son handed her a ready-made family and then quietly took it back.
And then I do the last thing on the spreadsheet. The part I built in from the very start, back when it was all still hypothetical and nobody could get hurt.
I end it. Me. I'm the one who calls it off, gently, somewhere people can see, so the story tells itself. Sweet Josie and her nice alphas. Just didn't work out. Nobody's fault, no harm done. Clean. Kind. Deal honored. Everybody walks away fine.
Everybody except me.
Because I'm the idiot who forgot it was fake. I kissed him back like it was the last thing I'd ever get to do, while he was being decent about a woman who couldn't keep it together at a barbecue.
He kissed me to keep me from falling down. I kissed him because I've fallen for all three of them, and I'm the only one who did.
I don't let myself finish the thought past that. I don't have to.
I already know how it ends. I wrote it into the plan myself.
