Page 60 of Knot the Plan
Chapter 22
Finn
The sun's going down over Pine Valley when we finally hit the highway, and Josie's asleep against the window before we clear the last stoplight.
Out cold. Forty-one relatives, ten hours of smiling, and the second the road smooths out she's gone, cheek on the glass, one hand still curled around the water bottle Logan refilled twice today without being asked.
Twice. I counted.
I don't know when I started keeping track of what she drinks, but I can tell you she's had coffee, two lemonades, and half a beer she abandoned when her uncle started his toast, and if anybody asks, it's professional habit. Hydration awareness. Very common among firefighters.
Hudson's driving. Logan's in the back with me. Nobody's talking.
It isn't the quiet from the drive up. That one had a shape to it. Four people, one plan, everybody rehearsed. This is the other kind. Something happened today and everybody felt it and nobody wants to be the first to touch it.
I'm not thinking about the side of the house.
I've been not thinking about it for an hour now. It's a full-time job with no breaks and terrible pay.
Her mouth under mine. Her hand fisted in my shirt. The small sound she made when I tipped her chin up, a sound I'm going to be hearing at two in the morning for the rest of my natural life. There was no audience on that strip of shade. Nobody to sell it to. I know exactly what that kiss was.
And then a screen door banged, and I stepped back, and out of every sentence in the English language, I went withthat shouldn't have happened.
I heard it land, too. Watched her take it and fold it up small and hand me back ano harm done,ears going red the way they do when the words don't match the omega saying them.
I told a woman I'd wanted to kiss since a craft closet in April that it was a mistake. Because her scent was coming apart and mine was answering it, and being careful is the only skill I've ever fully trusted.
No harm done. Sure.
We haven't said a word about it since, and we're sure as hell not starting now. Not in a truck. Not with witnesses.
The plan says the reunion was the finish line. Her side's done. Mine winds down slow, because my mother doesn't get a clean break, she gets a soft landing. I set that condition myself, at Josie's kitchen table, a month ago, back when I thought the hard part was going to be the pretending.
The pretending turned out to be the easy part. Turns out you don't have to pretend anything if you just go ahead and mean all of it. Nobody warned me about that. There should be a pamphlet.
“Anybody else starving,” Hudson says, to the truck in general. “I ate at the reunion, but it was performance eating. Doesn't count. You can't taste anything with a great-aunt watching you chew.”
“You had three plates,” Logan says.
“Three performance plates.”
It gets nothing. Hudson drums the wheel, checks his mirrors, tries again.
“Good brisket, though.”
Silence.
“The potato salad was a war crime, but the brisket...”
“Hudson,” I say.
“What. I'm making conversation. Somebody has to. You two ride like furniture.”
Logan goes back to his window. I go back to the dealerships. Hudson holds out for half a mile, then puts the radio on low, and the radio is worse, some love song from twenty years back filling in everything we're not saying, so he shuts it off again.
This is the loudest alpha in three counties. A man who narrated his own kayak capsize while it was still happening. And even he can't find a safe topic, because every road out of this silence runs through today, and today runs through her.
And she's asleep six inches from his elbow with all three of our jackets in reach and a foil-wrapped plate of her mother's leftovers riding in the cooler like a hostage.
