Page 20 of Knot the Plan
It's still a terrible plan. Her family will be a minefield, somebody will ask how we met, and Josie will blurt out some story with a timeline that doesn't survive a follow-up question, and the whole thing could come down like a barn in a wind.
I list every reason it's a bad idea. The list is long and good and I believe all of it.
And I put the wrench down anyway.
Gus is watching me from the kitchen with sandwich five. “You're doing a face.”
“I don't do faces.”
“You're doing one right now. It's new. I've never seen it.”
I pick up my keys.
“Cover the radio,” I tell him. “I have to go fix something.”
“Take the pickles,” he calls after me. “Lead with the pickles.”
I do not take the pickles.
The preschool's lights are still on when I pull up, everyone else long gone, the lot empty but for her little car. Late-afternoon sun coming gold through paper snowflakes that are five months out of season. Through the window I can see her stacking tiny chairs onto tiny tables, one at a time, talking to herself, or rehearsing something. Knowing her.
I sit in the truck for one full minute.
There's a thought in here somewhere with my name on it, something about her and a month and how bad an idea this is for reasons that have nothing to do with her family. I don't pick it up. I've gotten good at not picking it up.
I think about the rest of it instead. How people in this town are nice to me the way you're nice to weather, careful, from a distance, hoping it passes. How she walked into the storm, sat down on a tiny stool, and kept my secret for two months without once holding it over me, until the day she finally needed something back. And how, when she asked, I sent her up the block alone.
She found me in a closet and didn't laugh. I told her anything, name it. She named it. A man pays what he owes.
That's the reason. I'm going with that reason.
Then I get out, and I knock on the door of a preschool at the end of the day like a man turning himself in.
She opens it. Blinks up at me. Hope and terror have a fistfight on her face, and her scent does something warm and complicated that I am not going to think about in this doorway, except I am, because it's the thing that's been wrong with me since Tuesday. One conversation through an open door and I've been able to smell brown sugar in rooms she isn't in. A grown man, a firefighter, undone by a preschool teacher and a salad order. It's undignified. It's also not stopping.
Standing here in her doorway with the after-school light going gold, close enough to catch it clean, it's worse than undignified. It's a low pull that's got nothing to do with a favor or a deal—jaw set, hands in my pockets, running the same discipline I run at a working fire. Flat face, steady voice, the want locked down where it won't show. Twenty years I've spent keeping my face still. She's the first thing that's ever made the keeping-still cost me.
“I owe you. I don't like owing people.” I make myself say the rest. “I'll do your fake pack thing. I have conditions.”
Chapter 7
Josie
By six o'clock Friday my house smells like garlic and roasting chicken, I've got two alphas in it and a third on the way, and it's dawning on me that I did this. On purpose. To myself.
Hudson got here first. Of course he did. He arrived at five forty with a six-pack, the legal pad from the shop already half full of notes in his own handwriting, and a tote bag he won't explain, and the expression of a man who's been looking forward to this all week.
“I made a list,” he says, waving the pad. “Things your family's going to ask. How we met, who fell first, whose idea the third date was. We should have answers before we need them.”
“You actually prepped.”
“I'm offended you're surprised. I prep for everything. You should see my fishing tackle.”
Logan's in my kitchen, which is a sentence I did not expect to think today. He showed up at five fifty holding a dish of something that smells like garlic and roasting chicken, said “it's nothing, just had stuff in the fridge,” which is a lie because nobody has this in the fridge. He set it on my counter, foundmy oven on the second try, and has been keeping it warm and staying out of the way ever since.
Every so often I catch him looking around my house the way he looks at the fence, like he's noting which things he'd fix. He hasn't offered. He just notices, quiet, and goes back to the green beans.
So that's two. Two alphas, in my house, behaving themselves, here because I asked.
