Page 86 of Knot the Plan
“You're something else,” he says. Quiet. Like a fact he's stating, not a compliment he's paying. “You know that? You really are.”
And here's what I can't say, what's making my eyes sting into the warm skin of his throat. This is the last one.
The plan is nearly up. I've been telling myself for weeks that I'd wind it down clean, hand them all back their lives, walk away before anybody has to watch me want something I was never going to be allowed to keep.
Logan was always going to be the hardest to give back. So I let myself have him today. One afternoon. One time. Something to fold up small and take with me, proof that for a little while three good alphas were mine to reach for. Even if only one of us ever fell.
Because that's the part he doesn't know, lying here easy and sated with his arms wrapped warm around me. He thinks this was two people being reckless on a Wednesday. He doesn't know I'm memorizing him.
And under all of it my body is humming wrong, too hot, wound too tight, that low restless ache that's been building for days climbing higher even now, even spent, even here. There's a bottle in my nightstand two miles away, running low, and a date on a spreadsheet, and a plan I built with my own hands to keep exactly this from happening.
Chapter 29
Josie
By Thursday I am not okay, and I am handling it by pretending very hard that I am.
The pretending has layers. There's the surface layer, where I taught fifteen four-year-olds about the letter G and did not once lie down on the reading rug and refuse to get up.
There's the middle layer, where I've stopped being able to wear my softest cardigan because the seams feel like sandpaper and my skin has decided everything is too much. And there's the bottom layer, the one I'm not looking at, where there's a bottle in my nightstand with four pills left in it and a heat coming for me like weather.
I'm not looking at the bottom layer. I've gotten very good, over six years, at not looking at the bottom layer.
So when Hudson Grant's truck pulls into my driveway at four o'clock, unannounced, I'm on my hands and knees in the front garden bed doing battle with a root that has personally wronged me, sweating, gritty, one breath from tears for no reason I'm willing to name.
“Porter.” The truck door slams. “You look deranged. I love it. What are we killing?”
“A root.” I sit back on my heels and shove hair out of my face with a muddy wrist. “It started it.”
“It usually does.” He comes across the grass in that easy unhurried lope, all long legs and no particular hurry, and drops into a crouch beside me, and his scent rolls off him, juniper, clean and green and familiar, and my whole raw-edged omega body leans toward the nearest alpha it trusts before I catch myself and haul back. “Move over. You're doing it emotionally. Roots respond to leverage, not feelings.”
“Everything responds to feelings, Hudson. That's the whole problem with being alive.”
He looks at me a beat longer than the joke earns.
Because here's what nobody warns you about Hudson Grant, the part hidden under all the noise and the grin and the method-acting nonsense. Hewatches.Half the town thinks he's the loud one who's not paying attention, and the truth is he's the one who's always paying attention, he just does it with jokes so nobody feels watched.
And right now he's watching me, and whatever he sees makes the grin go quieter at the edges.
“Okay,” he says, easy, like it's nothing. “New plan. The root lives. You've made your point, root. We respect you.” He stands, and holds down a hand. “Up. Come on. You've got a face like a Sunday you didn't sleep through and I'm not leaving you out here to lose a fight to landscaping.”
I take his hand. He hauls me up like I weigh nothing, and for a second I'm too close to him and his warmth and his juniper and my stupid oversensitive skin sings so loud, my body pulling toward his scent like it's already decided he's pack, that I have to step back fast and make it look like I'm brushing off dirt.
He notices. Of course he notices. He notices everything.
He doesn't say anything about it.
“I can't hang out,” I say. A lie. I have nowhere to be, I have exactly one plan for this evening and it's quiet dread. “I've got?—”
“You've got nothing. You've got a root you're losing to and a kettle.” He's already heading for my porch like he lives here. “I brought pie. Aunt Deb's recipe, executed by me, which means it's structurally unsound but emotionally correct. Sit on your steps. I'll get plates. Don't argue, I know where they are, I've been in your kitchen more than my own this month.”
And I don't argue.
I sit on my porch steps in the low gold four-o'clock light, filthy and fraying and one bad thought from crying, and Hudson Grant bangs around my kitchen narrating a running argument with my cutlery drawer, and a knot that's been pulled tight in me for days lets go by one notch.
He comes back with two plates and a pie that is, in fact, listing to one side like a shed in a strong wind, and sits down next to me on the step, close but not too close, his shoulder a warm inch from mine, and hands me the less-collapsed slice.
“Eat that. You look like a stiff breeze would file a missing persons report.”
