Page 82 of Knot the Plan
“It's beautiful, Logan.” She crosses to the fireplace and runs one finger along the mantel where the grain runs out clean, and I built that mantel, spent an entire Sunday on it, and watching her touch it puts a lump in my throat I have to look away to survive.
“Walnut,” I say. “Same as your coaster. Had it left over.”
“I still have the coaster you gave me.” She's still looking at the mantel, not at me. “It's on my nightstand. I don't even use it for anything. I just... like knowing it's there.”
I have to take a second with that. It's on her nightstand. A scrap of walnut I made her because I couldn't stand watching her set a hot mug on the attendance folder, and she took it home Sunday and put it where she sleeps and just likes knowing it's there. I don't say anything, because if I try to say anything about it my voice is going to do something I can't take back.
She turns. Leans against the finished doorframe, and the gold light is all over her. “I met your brother, by the way. Yesterday. Garden center.”
Everything in me stops.
“Nolan.”
“Nolan.” She's watching my face like it's the best show in town. Knowing Nolan, it probably is. “He's very... forthcoming.”
“What did he say.”
“That you've been weird and happy for about a month now and started ironing your work shirts, which he says is a sign of something serious.” She's enjoying this. “That when you like someone you build them a thing instead of saying words, and I should learn to read wood. That you called him. On the phone. To describe a woman's potato salad for four minutes.”
I am going to kill my brother. I am going to drive all the way out to the basin station and do it slow.
“He talks a lot,” I say.
“He talks alot.” She pushes off the frame, and the teasing goes out of her face, replaced by that guarded, deciding look. “But he wasn't wrong about the building thing. Was he.”
“No.”
“So.” She's looking at me across the one finished room in a house that isn't anything yet. “I have a question, and you have to answer it, because you can't lie. Which is the single most inconvenient thing about you.”
“That's the deal.”
“You kissed me. On the date.” She says it lightly, like it's nothing, and only the way she won't quite meet my eye gives her away. “And then you went right back to goodnight-at-the-door. Every time since. So.” A little shrug that doesn't land as breezy as she wants it to. “Why'd you stop.”
There's a true answer to that, and I'm not allowed to give it.
“Wasn't the right time.” I look at the fire instead of at her, because if I hold her eyes she'll see the rest of it. “That's all.”
It's not an answer and we both know it. Something flickers and dims behind her eyes, and I hate it, and I let it happen.
“That's not an answer, Logan.”
“I know.” I hold her eyes. That much I can give her. “Come here anyway.”
She crosses the room to me, slow, that same unhurried walk, and stops close enough that I have to look down to hold her eyes, and I do, I hold them, because I am done looking at windows.
“You're impossible,” she says. Not unkind. A little sad, and trying to cover it, and I feel that cover go up like a wall I built myself.
“I know that too.”
I lift my hands to her face like she might break, or I might, and neither of us is sure which.
Her skin is hot. Fever-hot under my palms, cheeks burning, and up close there's a fine tremor running through her that I don't name, I just gentle her, thumbs along her cheekbones, slow, the way you'd steady a thing you've waited years to be trusted with, an omega running so hot under my hands, so far past what her suppressants should be letting through, that it scares me a little.
And then I kiss her.
I can't say it. So I'll say it like this. Every word I'm swallowing, I put into my hands and my mouth instead, and I let her feel all of it and call it nothing, because that's the deal I've made with myself, that's the only way I get to give her the truth without spooking her with it.
Careful lasts about a second. Then her mouth opens under mine and a sound comes out of her, small and undone, and her hands fist in my shirt and pull, and five years of holding on slips the leash all at once.
