“Yep,” he says. “That'll hold.”
“You're going to take it out the second I leave.”
“I would never.” He absolutely is. There's a whole house depending on it. But he leaves my catastrophe sitting there in the frame like it belongs, and goes and gets another board, and I sit back on my heels feeling weirdly, stupidly proud of one terrible screw, and decide not to look too hard at why.
We getgood at it without deciding to.
That's the strange part. We never have the conversation about practicing, we never run the drill. But somewhere in an afternoon of him handing me boards and me holding them and the two of us working out the house together, the inch between our hands stops being a thing I'm counting.
He steadies me with a hand at my back when I lean too far over the frame, automatic, there and gone. I end up with my hand flat on his shoulder for balance and forget to take it off for a whole minute. He lets me. Neither of us mentions it.
I got here a knot of nerves, and Logan just, untied me, board by board, without either of us saying a word about it.
Around three he shows me the one room that's finished.
He doesn't make a thing of it, just, “there's one room that's basically there, if you want to see,” and leads me down the hall to a room at the back, the quiet corner of the house, and pushes the door open, and I step in and stop, because I know exactly what it is before he says a word.
It's a nest room. Every omega instinct I have goes quiet and certain at the sight of it, the way you go still in a doorway that feels like it might be home.
The platform takes up most of the floor, built so low it's almost on the boards, but wide, deep, big enough for a whole pack to pile into and disappear. It's bare now, just the frame of it, waiting for the mattresses and the blankets and everything soft that would go on top.
There's just the one small window, set up high and no bigger than it has to be, letting in barely enough light to see by. Because the whole room is built to stay dim, the way a den stays dim, the way an omega wants it. Enclosed and quiet and safe. Every edge in here is sanded round and gentle. The walls are a warm, deep color, the color of being held.
He built a nest room. With his own hands. In the house that isn't for anything yet.
“It's not done done,” he says, hanging back at the doorway like he knows better than to follow me in, like he's not sure he should have brought me here at all. “Still needs everything soft. But the room's right. I took my time getting the room right.”
“Logan.” My voice comes out strange. “You built a nest room.”
“Yeah.” He's gone red to the ears, but he doesn't look away, and he doesn't lie, because he's Logan and he can't. “Figured if I ever, ah. If there was ever somebody who needed one. I wanted it already here. Already safe. So nobody'd have to ask.” He says it to the floor, and then, quietly, like it surprises him on the way out, “Seems like the kind of thing you build first. Not last.”
And I have to turn and look at the small dark window for a second, because the careful, ridiculous, lovely truth of it is that this man built a safe place for a someday he won't even let himself want out loud, and stood back to let me see it, and my heart has gone and done something about that without checking with me first.
We don't talkabout the nest room. He seems relieved I don't make him, and I'm relieved he doesn't make me, and we go back out to the deck like we left it running, and the easiness comes back so fast it's almost suspicious.
I help. I use the word loosely. I hand him the wrong board twice, hold the level upside down, and at one point manage to get a tape measure to recoil so hard it leaves a mark.
“You're doing great,” he says, not looking up, with the steady kindness of a man watching someone slowly ruin his afternoon.
“Admit it. The house is going up faster with me here.” I pass him the next board, correct side this time, small victories.
He looks at the half-built deck. He looks at me. “It's going up,” he says, like a man being scrupulously honest under oath, and doesn't add the rest, and the not-adding is the funniest thing he could have done.
It surprises a laugh out of me, the real kind, and he ducks his head, pleased, and I think,uh oh,in the clear unbothered way you thinkuh ohright before a thing you fully intend to keep doing anyway.
I leaveas the light's going gold, and he walks me to my car, hands shoved in his pockets, the way he gets when there's nothing left for his hands to do.
“So I've got you again in a few days,” he says. “Whenever the rotation comes back to me. Or not, if you're slammed. No rush. Whatever works.”
“That's a lot of outs you just gave me in one sentence.”
“Wanted you to have options.” He says it plainly, and the gentleness of it catches me under the ribs, and he opens my car door because of course he does, and stands back the polite six inches, and I get in.
“Thanks, Logan. For the lemonade. And for letting me wreck a perfectly good deck.” I look up at him, this big quiet man going gold in the last of the light. “I had fun. I didn't think I'd have fun.”
“Yeah.” He smiles, slow and real. “Me neither. Well. I did. I figured I would.” He hears himself and the color comes up again. “Anyway.”
“Brenda the cow really pulled through,” I say, to save him.
