Page 65 of Knot the Plan
Cynthia's laughing her big salon laugh, wiping her eyes with a napkin.
“For what it's worth,” Logan says, thoughtful, to his plate, “the tent did what tents do. Structurally it performed fine.”
The table goes quiet for exactly one beat.
“Oh, this is a thing he does,” Hudson says, lighting up, swinging around in his seat like a man who's just been handed a gift. “You should've seen him at Earl Cobb's funeral. Wholetown's paying respects, and Logan corners the widow to tell her Earl's porch was going to need new joists inside five years. At thereception.”
“She brought it up,” Logan says, to his plate. “Marlene asked about the porch.”
“Marlene was making conversation, buddy. That's what people do at funerals. Nobody at a funeral wants the joists.”
“...The porch really did need the joists.”
Gemma laughs, but she leans in when she does it, warm, on Logan's side of it. “No, I like it. A man who tells the truth about porches at a funeral. That's a keeper quality.”
Logan looks up, startled and pleased, and she gives him a small nod, welcome-to-it. Then she swings the whole thing around on the actual target. “Finn does the opposite, by the way. Finn once went to a wedding and didn't speak for four hours. Mom thought he'd had a stroke.”
“I spoke,” Finn says.
“You said 'good cake' to the groom and left.”
“It was good cake.”
The whole table's going under now, Cynthia dabbing at her mascara and declaring Logan the most honest thing to ever sit in that chair, and beside me the maple-and-cedar of him is warm and close, and without a word, without even looking, he moves the olives off my plate to the edge of his.
Finn's arm is along the back of my chair.
Here's the part that should scare me and doesn't. There's exactly one person at this table we're supposed to be performing for, and she's at the head of it in her good earrings, and Finn's arm isn't doing a single thing for her benefit.
It's just where his arm lives now.
Woodsmoke and clove settle over me like a hand on the back of my neck, three scents I could pick blind in a crowd nowtangled up in Cynthia's kitchen, and I lean into all of it before I remember I've got a reason not to.
It lands harder than it should. A month ago Finn's arm on the back of a chair would've been a nice warmth, easy to ignore. Today it goes through me a half-degree too hot, somewhere low, and I take a slow sip of water and decide, firmly, to deal with that later.
“So,” Gemma says, spearing a potato, watching all of this with the flat unbothered attention of a woman who spends her days reading animals that can't lie to her and eleven goats that wouldn't know how. “All three.”
“Language,” Cynthia says, on reflex, to a sentence that had none.
“I didn't say anything, Mom. I'm admiring the pack. It's a nice pack.” Gemma's mouth does the Morrow thing, the quarter-inch twitch that runs in the family like the eyes. “Very coordinated. They pass her things before she asks. Watch.” She nods at my plate. “No olives. Full water. And she hasn't touched either one to make it happen.”
“Gemma.”
“I'm complimenting you, Finn. It's rare. Enjoy it.”
Logan goes faintly pink over his roll. Hudson looks delighted. Finn looks like an alpha who'd very much like the roof to come down.
“They're well-trained,” I say, because the joke is the only load-bearing wall I've got.
“Mm,” Gemma says, and lets me have it, and doesn't believe it for a second.
Under the table, Finn's knee is against mine. Not doing anything. Just there.
And I press back into it half a millimeter. The smallest tell there is, an omega leaning into the one thing that's felt safe in a month.
I feel him go still beside me the way he does, the whole big quiet weight of him registering it. And Cynthia rolls straight on to the Huckleberry Festival, like the floor isn't quietly on fire.
“The potato salad's really good,” Logan says, quiet, to the table, in the first gap Cynthia leaves. He's on his second helping. He looks at me when he says it, ears going faintly pink. “Really good.”
