Page 69 of Knot the Plan
At the stoplight on Main I dig the bottle out of my bag without deciding to. It comes up too light in my hand. Rattling thin, weeks early.
I do not count it.
I close my fist around it and put it back, because counting is a thing you do to a problem you plan on looking at. I am not looking at this one.
Green light.
I drive home too fast in the almost-dark, one hand pressed flat to my sternum like that's going to do anything, like a wall ever held because somebody outside leaned on it.
Because my body isn't reading from the plan anymore. It's three steps ahead of the whole calendar, warm and certain and climbing, an omega's whole biology waking up around a pack it decided was hers weeks ago, on a kitchen floor and a job site and the shady side of a house. It didn't choose one of them.
It chose all three.
The sweet edge on my scent. The flush that won't quit. The pull that stopped waiting to be touched. Six years, one pill a day, and it flattened everything, and now I'm taking them like breath mints and my body climbs anyway.
There's a name for what that means. I know the name.
I don't finish it. I never do. It's the one household chore I've kept up flawlessly for four weeks, not finishing that thought, and I'm not about to ruin my streak two miles from home.
The thought can wait at the door. It's had practice.
Chapter 24
Finn
Hudson finds me at the firehouse Monday morning, and that's how I know it's serious, because Hudson does not voluntarily go near a building full of things that could put him to work.
He comes in with two coffees, hands me one, and leans against the engine like he's got all day. He does not have all day. Neither do I. That's not what this is.
“So,” he says.
“So.”
“You want to talk about it, or you want to keep doing what we all did at your mother's table last night. Sitting there. Playing house. Acting like the finish line didn't come and go on Saturday.”
I drink my coffee. It's the good kind, the kind he had to drive to get, which means he planned this, which means Logan's probably in on it too, which means the two of them have been talking without me. About me. About her.
“There's nothing to talk about,” I say. “We wind it down gentle. For my mother.”
“Finn.” He says it easy, but he sets the coffee down, and Hudson only puts a drink down when he means something. “I'm going to say a thing, and you're going to let me get to the end of it before you go grab a hose.”
I wait.
“I'm not walking away from her.” He says it to the engine, not to me, the way Logan says the true things. “I know the deal. I signed up for the deal. Four weeks, sell it, out clean.”
I don't say anything. He wasn't done anyway.
“And I've spent three of those weeks falling for a woman I was supposed to be doing a favor for. Logan too. That alpha was gone before either of us got here.”
“I know.”
“So that's two.” He lets it sit. “I came down here to find out if it's three. Because if it's three, we're a pack with a problem worth having. And if it's not, I need to know, so I can figure out how to do this without wrecking your family.”
The firehouse is very quiet. Somewhere in the back somebody's running water and pretending not to listen.
Here's the thing about being a wall. Everybody thinks the hard part is holding. It isn't. The hard part is that once you've held long enough, you forget there was ever a version of you that could do anything else. You brace so long it stops being a choice and starts being your shape.
“It's three,” I say.
