Page 57 of Knot the Plan
“I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the counter,” I say. “Helped her wind every foot of it back. She apologized about nine times, bought her one yard, and left. I never even got her name.”
And that's where the grin catches.
Because I hear myself say it. I hear thedetailof it. The exact color of her cardigan. The way she saidplease. The precise degree of red her ears went.
It's been five years, and I've kept all of it. Taken it out and looked at it more times than a man has any business looking at a memory of a stranger he never got the name of.
I never got her name that day. Didn't need it. I just kept her. For five years I have just quietly kept her, and never once asked myself why.
“Oh,” Deb says, very softly, watching my face do whatever it's doing.
“Yeah,” I say, and my voice comes out strange. “Yeah. Oh.”
I'm in love with Josie Porter.
Not the bit. Not the play. The actual woman who counts trucks when she's scared and forgets to drink water and once brought down my entire rope wall and then asked, so politely, to buy one yard of it.
Her. All of it. The whole ridiculous stubborn tender disaster of her, and I've been gone since a rainy Tuesday I never even told her I was in the room for.
Every wall I've ever built comes down, quiet and total, the way a boat goes over in the shallows. Lazy and inevitable and always heading this direction the entire time.
“She's something,” Deb says, patting my arm, and wanders off toward the pie table with a look on her face I decide not to think about, because a man who just came apart over potato salad and a five-year-old memory of some rope can only handle so much.
Then her mother's voice rings out over the crowd —”JOSIE, baby, come sit, we're eating!”— and the reunion starts folding itself toward the long tables, and Josie looks up and finds me through the crowd, the way she does, first face she looks for, and she gives me a small helplesssave meface about her family, and grins.
And I grin back, easy, like my whole world didn't just tip over into a potato-salad bowl, and I cross the yard to go be the alpha she thinks she's only borrowing.
I pull out her chair. I drop into the seat beside her. I steal the pickle off her plate because that's our bit and she smacks my hand because that's her half of it, and under the table, where nobody can see, I let my knee rest against hers and leave it there.
She doesn't move away.
She has no idea. She thinks I'm playing a part.
And I let her think it, because I know her. Because she runs. Because she's decided somewhere deep down that she's the funny one, the easy one, the one nobody picks when it's for real.
And if I tell her now, in the middle of her family's reunion, that somewhere between a peach joke and a rainy Tuesday I stopped pretending entirely, she'll bolt so fast she'll leave a Josie-shaped hole in the fence.
So I'll wait. I'll be patient, which I have never once been about anything.
But I'm not pretending anymore. Not for one more second of it.
Down the table, Uncle Ray sets down his fork and laces his hands over his stomach, settling in with the satisfied look of a man who's decided he likes at least one of us and is about to make it everybody's business.
“So,” he says. “Three of you.”
Here we go.
Chapter 21
Josie
My family cannot leave a good thing alone. They have to hold it up to the light and turn it over in their hands. They have to make sure it's real, and then, because they can't help themselves, make sure all over again.
It happens at the long table, of course it does, because that's where it always happens, somewhere between the brisket and the inevitable moment my Uncle Ray decides it's his turn to have a word with the three alphas I brought home.
We're all seated by then, the whole loud sprawl of us, and I've got Finn on one side and Hudson on the other and Logan across from me being slowly adopted by my grandmother, and for a while it's just good. It's the best reunion of my life and I'm trying very hard not to notice that, because noticing it means noticing what it costs.
Then Uncle Ray leans back in his folding chair, laces his hands over his stomach, and turns the full weight of his attention on the three alphas beside me.
