Page 56 of Knot the Plan
She's over by the drinks table with her cousin Cara, the extended family orbiting her, and she's not performing anymore. That's what gets me.
All day she's beenon, giving them the bright bulletproof Josie they came for. And here, tucked in next to Cara with a plastic cup of lemonade, she's just — her. Head tipped back. Laughing at something with her whole body, the real laugh, the one that gets away from her, the one you have to earn.
Cara says something else and Josie shoves her shoulder and laughs harder, and for a second every guard she owns is just gone, and she's wide open and easy and completely, unguardedly happy.
I'm too far to hear a word of it. I don't need to. I could pick that laugh out of a stadium.
And watching her have it, watching her be that easy and lit-up and unafraid, thinking nobody important is looking, something in the center of my chest just quietly falls over.
Because I want that. Not the party, not the performance, not the version of her that works a room the way I do. That. The laugh she doesn't decide to give. I want to be someone who gets to be in the room for that, on purpose, for a long time.
And that's the exact moment I stop being able to pretend I'm pretending.
I've been pretending for weeks. Longer than the plan. I dressed it up as the job, as being a good teammate, as Hudson being Hudson, because Hudson flirts with everybody and it means nothing, that's the whole brand, that's the shield I've carried since I was fifteen and figured out that if you're everybody's friend you never have to risk being one person's anything.
I put her hand on my knee that first fake-date and told myself it was for the mission.
I brought her a coffee she didn't ask for every morning and told myself it was for the mission.
I lay awake three nights ago running through everything she said at the bar, word for word, in her voice, grinning at my ceiling like the idiot I apparently am now, and I told myself?—
Yeah. I didn't have a lie left for that one, honestly. I just stopped telling myself things around two in the morning and let it be true in the dark where nobody could see.
But here, in the daylight, in the Porters' backyard, barbecue smoke in the air and her loud family roaring around me, there's nowhere dark left to hide it. Whatever this is, it stopped being the plan a long time ago, and I'm standing in her mother's yard finally out of excuses for it.
I set the plate down on the nearest table before I do something stupid with it.
“Now, you.” Aunt Deb has me by the elbow. Round, determined, a paper plate in one hand and the particular gleam of a woman collecting stories for the group chat. Deb of the two pies, back for more. “Nobody's told me the good part yet. How'd you meet our Josie? A girl doesn't just turn up with three of you. There's a story.”
And the old reflex loads up before I've even decided to fire it, the fast easy version, the one that sells.
“Farmers market,” I say, grinning, hand to my heart. “She dropped a peach. I caught it. Our eyes met over the stone fruit. Birds sang. A nearby fiddle started up out of nowhere. I knew right then, Deb, I'd found the woman I was going to spend my life pretending I wasn't obsessed with.”
Deb swats my arm, delighted, exactly the transaction I built the line for. And Josie's all the way over by the drinks with her grandmother now, well out of earshot, not close enough to hear a word of it or to see my face while I say it.
Which is the only reason the next part happens.
Because Deb tips her head, still smiling, and says, “No, but really,” and I open my mouth to hand her another joke, and what comes out instead is the truth.
“She unspooled forty feet of my rope,” I hear myself say, and I'm grinning already, because this is one of my favorites.
Deb blinks. “She—what?”
“Five years ago. Her first week in town, before I knew her name, before anybody did.” I lean in, because it's a good one and I know how to tell it. “She came into the shop in a rush. Brand new teacher, needed rope for some classroom thing, a web she was stringing up for the kids to climb through. I was ringing somebody up, told her I'd be two minutes. She did not have two minutes.”
Deb's already smiling. Everybody smiles at this part.
“So she went to the wall and found the rope herself and gave it one good pull to measure off a length. Now, you have to understand how those spools are hung. You pull one wrong, they all go.” I shake my head, delighted all over again. “And she pulled one wrong.”
“No,” Deb breathes.
“Forty feet of climbing rope came off the wall in about four seconds. Then the spool next to it. And she's down there grabbing at it, trying to reel it back in by hand, making it ten times worse, until she's standing in the middle of my shop buried up to her knees in the stuff. This brand-new stranger. Red clear to her ears.”
I'm laughing now, the memory of it too big to hold.
“And she looked up at me over the top of this catastrophe she'd made of my whole rope wall, dead serious as a judge, and said, 'I would like to buy one yard of rope, please.'“
Deb hoots. I'm grinning ear to ear.
