Page 78 of Knot the Plan
“I'm just orienting you. Hospitality.”
His arm tightens, drawing me back into him, and he presses his mouth to the top of my spine, unhurried, like there's no version of this morning where he's in a rush to be anywhere. “Stop narrating.”
“It's a compulsion. I've been to doctors.”
I feel the huff of his laugh against my skin more than hear it, and my heart does a slow, dangerous thing behind my ribs, because I have made Finn Morrow laugh in a bed, in the morning, and I would burn my careful plan to the ground to do it again, and that is exactly the problem, isn't it. That's the entire problem in one sentence.
He gets up before I have to invent a reason to make him. Finds his jeans. Doesn't do what men do in the after, the awkward retreat, the sudden checking of a phone.
He moves through my small house like he belongs in it. Uses the bathroom, comes back with his shirt in his hand and his hair a catastrophe, and stands in my bedroom doorway looking at me tangled in the sheets like he's deciding something.
“I've got shift at eight,” he says.
“I know. Firemen. Fires.”
“Josie.” He crosses the room. Sits on the edge of the bed, and takes my face in one big hand, and looks at me long enough that I forget three separate jokes. “Last night wasn't the arrangement.”
Every rule I wrote screams at once. This is the part where somebody names it. This is the seam in the arrangement, right here, and one wrong word tears it.
But he doesn't sayit was real.He doesn't hand me the sentence I could argue with, could deflect, could file under kindness. He just says the smallest true thing and lets it sit there, unpushable, and then he kisses my forehead like a man setting something down carefully, and gets up, and pulls his shirt on.
Then he walks out of the bedroom, and I hear him in my kitchen, the tap running, and I think,good, water, he should hydrate, firemen and fires,and I lie back against the pillows and start the long private work of not falling apart before nine a.m.
The tap shuts off. A cupboard. The specific rattle of my ancient coffee maker, which sticks unless you know to lift the lid a half-inch, which he apparently knows, because a minute later the whole house smells like coffee and there's no cursing.
He comes back to the doorway with two mugs.
Hands me one. It's the good mug, the one I hide at the back so nobody chips it. And it's not just coffee, it'smycoffee, toomuch milk and the cinnamon I keep by the stove, the way I made it in front of him exactly once, weeks ago, and never again.
“You watched me make this one time,” I say. It comes out unsteady.
“Mm.” He leans against my doorframe with his own mug, in yesterday's clothes, unhurried, like there's nowhere a Tuesday could possibly need him to be. “You take it like a dessert. It's alarming.”
“It's a valid beverage choice.”
“It's a milkshake in a coffee costume.”
I laugh, and he watches me do it over the rim of his mug, and something about the whole picture, Finn Morrow in my doorway in the morning, having found the good mug, having remembered the cinnamon, undoes a stitch in me I did not know was load-bearing.
He finishes his coffee. Sets the mug in my sink, rinses it, because he's Finn. Then he crosses the room one more time, tips my chin up, and kisses me properly, slow and certain and unhurried, nothing like a goodbye and everything like a promise he hasn't figured out how to say in words yet.
“Eat something,” he says against my mouth. “Not just coffee.”
And then he's gone, actually gone, truck coughing to life outside, and my house is too quiet.
I sit up holding a coffee made exactly the way I like it by a man who signed up for a favor, and I conduct a brisk, professional assessment of my situation. The assessment takes about four seconds and concludes that I am in an enormous amount of trouble.
I decide to appeal the finding. I have always been good at appeals.
I makeit forty minutes before I call Cara.
“It's seven forty on a Tuesday,” she says, instead of hello. “You're either dying or you did something. Which.”
“Can it be both.”
“Josie.” I hear her sit up, hear a door close, hear my cousin shift from half-asleep into the particular focus of a woman who plots disasters for a living. “Talk.”
So I talk. Not all of it. I keep the shape of last night to myself, because some things are mine, but I give her the load-bearing beam of it.Finn stayed. An alpha who signed up for a favor stayed the night, and I didn't want him to go, and I don't know how to do the next part.
