Page 90 of Knot the Plan
Everything hurts. A cramp rolls through my lower belly deep enough to fold me over the pillow, a clenching, grasping emptiness that wants something I don't have. When it passes I'm slick between my thighs, soaked through, my body making itself ready over and over for a thing that isn't coming.
Too hot. Too empty. Too much. And underneath all of it, the part I'm most ashamed of, the want. Enormous and specific, pointed straight at three men I sent away this morning so they'd never have to see me like this.
The knock again. Then a voice, muffled, that my whole body lunges toward before my brain catches the word.
“Josie.” Hudson. “We're coming in, okay? Lily gave us the key. Don't be scared.”
Scaredisn't the problem. The problem is the sound I make when I hear him, low and wrecked and needy, a sound I have never made in front of another person in my life.
The lock turns.
And then the room floods with them, with scent, three of them at once and it's too much, it's everything, juniper and woodsmoke-clove and maple-cedar pouring into my small hot bedroom, and my body arches off the floor toward it like a plant toward the sun, humiliating, involuntary, undeniable.
“Okay.” Finn's voice, and I've never heard it like this, stripped down to the studs. He's crouching. They're all crouching, keeping low, keeping back, three big men making themselves small at the edge of my bedroom like they know something I don't. “Hey. We've got you.”
“You shouldn't be here.” It comes out cracked. “I sent the — I let you go. You're supposed to be free.”
“Yeah, we got the text.” Hudson, gentle, wrecked under the gentle. “It was a good text. Very gracious. We're ignoring it.”
“You don't understand.” Another wave builds and I grit through it, gripping the pillow. “It's my heat. It's — you can't be here for this, you'll feel like you have to, and I never wanted you because youhadto —”
“Josie.” Logan. Just my name, in that low careful voice, and it stops me. He's closest, kneeling a careful arm's length away, andhis eyes are bright and steady and fixed on my face like the rest of the room's on fire. “Nobody here feels like they have to.”
I don't have an answer for that. Another wave rolls in and steals the chance.
They don't touch me.
That's what breaks through the fog, later, when the wave recedes enough to let me think. Three alphas in a room with an omega in unmedicated heat, and they are not touching me. Finn has stationed himself by the door like he's guarding it. Hudson's gone to the kitchen. I can hear him running the tap, opening my cupboards, muttering. Logan's closest but still back, still giving me a foot of air, his jaw tight with the effort of it.
“Why aren't you —” I can't finish. Another cramp seizes low and deep and I curl around it, slick slicking hot down my thigh, my whole body one raw open plea. My skin is screaming for them. The emptiness inside me is screaming louder.
“Because you didn't ask us to,” Logan says simply. Like it's the easiest thing in the world. Like every line of his body isn't drawn tight as a cable. “This is yours, Josie. All of it. We don't move until you say.”
And something in me that has been braced for five years, braced for the catch, the cost, the moment the kindness turns into a bill. Something in me cracks right down the middle.
Because I know what a heat looks like when someone thinks they're owed. And this isn't it. This is three men holding themselves at the edge of me like I'm something that could break, waiting.
Hudson comes back with a glass of water and a plate of crackers, cheese, and apple slices he's cut with more care than the task needs. He sets them where I can reach and retreats, hands up, easy.
“Drink,” he says. “You've sweated out a lake. I'm not above bribery, there's more apple where that came from.”
I drink. It's the best thing I've ever tasted. He watches me finish the whole glass with an expression I can't look at directly.
“Nest.” The word comes out of me before I've decided to say it, some deep instinct surfacing. My eyes have gone to the bed, the blankets, the fairy lights I strung around the headboard two winters ago and never took down. “I need — I have to —”
“Then we make a nest.” Finn, from the door. Like it's an order he's relieved to finally have.
I buildit on my hands and knees and they let me.
This is the part no one warns you about, the part that lives below language. The drive tomake the safe place, to pull every soft thing in the world into one circle and shore up the walls. I strip the bed and rebuild it wrong, then right, then wrong again. I drag the blankets from the closet, the good fleece one, the quilt my gran made. Pillows into walls. The fairy lights pulled low and glowing gold.
And it's not enough. It's soft and it's warm and it's mine and it isnot enough, and I'm kneeling in the middle of it shaking, slick-soaked and cramping and near tears, because something's missing and my body knows exactly what. Not blankets. Not pillows. Them. The empty ache in me has three names and it will not quiet for anything less.
“Josie.” Logan, reading me the way he reads everything. “What do you need?”
I can't say it. It's too much to ask. It's the whole truth in one word.
“Say it,” he says, gentle. “Whatever it is. We're not going anywhere.”
