Page 53 of Knot the Plan
I know what it means. I've known since the kitchen table, really, in the part of me that keeps the things I won't look at. Suppressants hold an omega until she finds her pack. Then they start handing in their notice.
My body has found its pack. And it's telling me in the only language it has. A rising heat. A scent gone sweet. A bottle that used to last a month and now lasts a week.
I take the pill anyway. It takes the edge off, a little, the way one sandbag takes the edge off a flood.
I look at myself in the mirror, flushed and bright-eyed, a omega three steps ahead of her courage.
Three days,I think. The reunion's Saturday. Three days, and then the part where it's supposed to end, where I thank three alphas for their excellent work and hand them their lives back and go home to a quiet house that doesn't smell like anyone.
I cannot picture doing it. I genuinely cannot make the image form.
I try to see myself saying the words.Okay, we did it, we're done.To Logan, who built a room in hope. To Finn, who lets himself in now. To Hudson, who watches my face when I taste things. The picture just won't hold, like a word repeated until it stops meaning anything.
Through the door I can hear them in my kitchen, the low rumble of Finn saying something dry and Hudson's bark of a laugh, the easy clatter of two men putting my dishes away in the wrong cupboards because they don't know my kitchen yet but they're learning it.
They're learning my kitchen.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes and I let myself feel it for exactly one breath, the size of what I've done, the thing I built to last a month and accidentally made real, and then I put the bottle back, and I fix my face, and I go back out to my pack.
I don't have a better word for them anymore. That's the whole problem, in two syllables.
My pack.
Three days.
Chapter 19
Josie
There are four of us in Hudson's truck and exactly one of us is having a nervous breakdown about it.
It's me. I'm the one. I've been the one since six this morning, when I woke up already sweating in a way that had nothing to do with June and everything to do with the fact that in two hours I have to drive to Pine Valley and convince forty-one relatives that the lie I told my mother four weeks ago is the truest thing in my life.
The worst part is it is. That's the part nobody warned me about. You build a fake pack to survive a reunion and then the fake pack becomes the only thing you can't survive losing, and now I have to take it home and perform it for the people who've spent my whole life waiting for me to get it together.
“You've counted the trucks in that yard three times and we're not even there yet,” Hudson says from the driver's seat, not looking over.
“There could be a parking situation. I'm being practical.”
“You're being a disaster, and it's adorable, and your leg hasn't stopped since the gas station.” He reaches across the console without looking and puts his hand on my knee, warm and broad,stilling it. “Breathe, Porter. We've got you. All you have to do is sit there and let three alphas be stupid about you in front of your whole family, and honestly, that's the easiest assignment we've had all month.”
In the back seat, Finn says, flat, “He's right. Annoyingly.”
And Logan, beside Finn, leans forward and sets a water bottle in the cupholder by my elbow without a word, already open, because somewhere in the last month all three of them learned I forget to drink anything when I'm scared, and the small wordless care of it does something to my throat that I have to look out the window to handle.
Hudson's hand is still on my knee. His thumb moves, once, slow, and the heat that's been simmering under my skin all morning kicks up a notch I do not need it to, here, now, in a truck, forty minutes from my mother.
I move his hand. He lets me. He's grinning.
I am in so much trouble — and we haven't even arrived.
Pine Valley looks exactlylike it always looks, which is the problem.
We come in off the highway past the big-box plaza and the car dealerships, past the strip where the good Thai place is and the furniture warehouse and the glass-fronted building that used to be a bank and is now, apparently, an architecture firm. Pine Valley is a real city, the kind with traffic that means it and a downtown with more than one of everything. Five years in the Hollow, and it still takes me a minute, every time, to remember I'm from here.
And I know all of it by heart. I know which lane to be in for the turn off Cedar without thinking about it. My body coulddrive this route in its sleep, straight to the house where I was the easy kid, the funny one, the one who'd be fine, definitely, eventually, surely by now.
The last time I came down this highway was earlier this week, in the passenger seat of Logan's spotless truck, for pasta and candlelight and a kiss on a downtown sidewalk I have been very carefully not thinking about since. Same road. Same town. Entirely different terror.
