Page 82 of Snowed In with Benefits

“Ladies and gentlemen first,” I shoot back. “And you’re neither.”

Emmett snorts. Hunter brings him a plate along with his own, and we all start eating.

“Did you hear that last night?” Emmett says between bites.

“All I heard was Josie,” I say honestly.

She blushes and it’s the prettiest shade of red I’ve ever seen in my life. Hunter chokes on his food trying not to laugh.

“After that,” Emmett says. “In the woods. Tree cracked.”

“You sure that wasn’t a gunshot?” Hunter asks.

I have nothing to contribute. I don’t recall any noise like that. I watch the way she eats, one delicate little bite at a time, even when she’s shoveling the bites in one after the other. That can’t be natural. That’s got to be learned behavior.

“Gunshots don’t splinter,” Emmett says plainly. “Tree fell out there somewhere. Gotta find it and make sure it didn’t fall wrong.”

“How can a tree fall wrong?” Josie asks.

“Across a fence,” Emmett says.

“Into a building,” I add.

“Blocking the creek,” Hunter pipes up.

Her eyes widen. I kind of love it when they do that, it makes her look kind of like a deer. That was the first impression I ever had of her, that she was like a startled deer. She’s come into her own since then, but she still has her little moments of startle that make my heart squeeze.

“Oh,” she breathes. “I see.”

“Want some help?” Hunter asks.

Emmett shakes his head. “One-man job.”

That doesn’t mean that the job itself is a one-man job. That means that he needs to be the one man on the job. He’s probably over-peopled, overstimulated, over it. It’s not that he doesn’t like Josie’s attention. It’s that all four of us were sharing his bed last night, first carnally, then sleepily, and he hasn’t had his alone time. For as much as he likes Josie, and I know he does, he still needs his time. He’s like this naturally. Always has been.

We finish up breakfast relatively quickly. There’s some more talk happening around the table, but I’m just not interested in it. Something broke open in me last night when we were drinking around the tree, and Josie was there to catch the pieces. I keep coming back to it. The whiskey going around. Emmett’s voice cracking on Davey’s name. The memory of the sound of the explosion, and the way the room went so quiet afterward that I could hear the fire settling in the grate. I’ve carried that night for years. We all have. But we’ve always carried it between the three of us, sealed up, airtight. Last night she was there, and she didn’t try to fix it or explain it away. She just put her hands on my face and kissed me like she was pulling me out of deep water. Nobody’s ever done that. Nobody’s ever been close enough to do that.

That means something. That’s big. So big that I don’t really know how to deal with it. I feel like she’s holding a raw, aching part of me without context. Like she’s accepted my legal history in a vacuum. She’s got bits and pieces of me that I’ve given her, reluctantly and otherwise, and I’ve got pieces of her. Still, there’s so much missing. Context. I don’t know how to give her context, but I want to.

“Heading out,” Emmett says, scooting away from the table. “Back in a few.”

Hours, not minutes. A felled tree isn’t a quick job for two people, let alone one. I start cleaning up the table and Josie joins me, drying the dishes that I’ve washed and putting them away. She has to stretch to get them in their places and I like to watch her reach. Not because she’s struggling, but because she’s not. She’s comfortable enough here now to take control of the dishes, at least in part, and I like that.

“You’re very efficient at dishwashing,” she says kind of randomly.

I shrug. “Lots of practice.”

“That was his job for a while,” Hunter tells her. “Then it was his job again, for a while longer.”

She gives me a curious look. This is the context I was looking for. This is the open door, I can just walk through it. But I don’t. I just shrug.

“Yeah.”

“Well, I can see why. You’re good at it.”

I hesitate for what feels like forever, but is really only the length of time it takes me to wash a dish. I turn it over in my hands, scrubbing at a spot that’s already clean, because my hands need something to do while my brain figures out whether my mouth is going to cooperate. The dish is spotless. I keep scrubbing. “That’s not why,” I say finally.

“Oh?” The sound is careful. She’s leaving the door open for me without looking like she’s trying to pry. I kind of wish she would just pry. It would be way easier for me to just answer direct questions than it is to navigate this gentle verbal dance. I don’t do gentle.