Page 61 of Knot the Plan
Four of us and the windows up, and the cab's gone warm and close the way a truck does on a summer night with too many bodies in it. And her scent has loosened up in her sleep, the way it never gets to when she's awake and managing everybody.
Brown sugar and toasted oat. I could find her blind in a burning building.
Except it's not quite right tonight. It's sweeter. Deeper, like the sugar's gone molten, sitting warm at the back of my throat with every breath, and some low alpha part of me leans into it before I get a vote.
It's doing things to me it has no business doing in a truck with two of my packmates and the woman herself asleep an arm's length away.
I sit with it, jaw tight, hands at ten and two. I don't shift in my seat. I don't let my breathing change. The one skill I've always had is holding a line no matter what's happening on the other side of it. Doesn't mean the line's not costing me. Tonight it's costing me plenty.
I make myself look at the mile markers.
Long day. That's all that is. Ten hours performing for family, a June afternoon, adrenaline burning off. An omega runs herself empty, her scent goes soft. That's biology. That's nothing.
Or it's the kiss, still on her the way it's still on me, and that answer I'm not examining at seventy miles an hour.
I crack my window an inch and breathe highway instead. It helps the way a screen door helps in a flood.
“My mother called,” I say. “While you two were loading chairs.”
Hudson's eyes come up to the mirror. Logan turns from his window.
“Dinner tomorrow. Sunday. All four of us.” I keep it level. “Her words werebring the pack. I've been feeding half a set, I want the whole thing on the table.”
“I've met her a hundred times at the store,” Hudson says. “I sold her the good rain jacket.”
“You've never eaten at her table. Neither has Logan. Last week it was Josie and me, and apparently that format's expired.”
Logan nods, slow, already somewhere else. He'll show up with something he made. The man is constitutionally incapable of arriving anywhere with empty hands.
“So we go,” Hudson says. “One more dinner.”
“One more dinner,” I say. “And after that we start... “
I don't finish it. Turns out I can't. The end of that sentence has been in the plan for a month, in my own handwriting.After the reunion, we let my mother down gently. A week or so. Fewer appearances, cooler answers, let it come apart slow so she never feels the seam.Simple. Kind, even. I built that exit myself, brick by brick, to protect her.
“Right,” Hudson says, when it's clear I'm done. No joke on it. Nothing.
“Okay,” Logan says, quieter.
And that's all of it. Three alphas agreeing to a plan we already agreed to, and the wordokayhas never sounded less like okay in its life.
Somewhere underneath my ribs, uninvited, a thought clears its throat.
Nobody ever said how slow slow is.
I put it with everything else I'm not thinking about. It's getting crowded back there.
Josie stirs against the window. A frown, a shift, some small sound that never makes it to words, and her hand tightens around the water bottle like it's load-bearing.
I've never seen her sleep before. Now I know what her face does when she's dreaming, and I've got no idea where a man's supposed to put a thing like that.
All three of us look over at the same time.
Nobody says anything about that, either.
She wakes up at the Hollow town line, the way people do, some deep-down part of her clocking home before her eyes open.
“Did I sleep the whole way,” she says, thick, scrubbing at her face.
