Chapter 12
Josie
The reunion is two weeks out.
Which means two weeks of practice left. Which means, by arithmetic I keep refusing to do, two weeks before I hand all three of them back and the schedule on my fridge becomes a list of things that used to happen.
I do not think about that. I have a whole summer of unstructured time coming and a master's degree in not thinking about things.
So on Saturday morning, the first morning of no school, I take my suppressant with my coffee like always. One little pill. Same as every day for six years. I get on with it.
By Saturday afternoon I take a second one.
It's nothing. I've been running hot, that's all. It's June, the classroom AC died in its final week, and my body's confused about the season. That's the story, and I'm sticking to it.
I am absolutely not looking at the other thing. The warm, low, restless hum under my skin that started somewhere around a kayak. Got worse at a diner. Has not, despite very clear instructions, gone anywhere since.
One pill has held my cycle flat for six years. The bottle says one.
I take a second, feel the hum bank down to a simmer, and shove the bottle to the back of the drawer where I don't have to look at it.
It's fine. It's a long week. Everyone runs warm in June.
Logan comes back around on the rotation Sunday afternoon.
It barely counts as practice. He needed cedar shims, I needed nothing, and somehow we're walking the length of Main together anyway, slow, in the gold light, while the whole town pretends not to watch their newest pack assemble itself one alpha at a time.
“What's a shim,” I ask, because I genuinely don't know and because the silence is the comfortable kind that makes me want to poke it.
“Thin little wedge of wood. You slide it into a gap to make something sit right.” He holds up a finger and thumb, a sliver of space between them. “Door's hanging crooked, you shim the frame till it's true. Table wobbles, one shim under the short leg and it stops.”
“So it's a tiny wood wedge that fixes everything.”
“Pretty much.”
“Logan.” I stop walking. “You're a shim.”
He blinks at me. “What?”
“You. You're a person-shaped shim. You go around sliding yourself into everybody's wobbly spots until the whole town sits level and nobody even notices you did it.”
His neck goes pink, which I am learning is the most honest thing about him, faster than his face, every time. “That's, that's not, it's a piece of wood, Josie.”
“It's a beautiful metaphor and you know it.”
“It's abuilding material.” But the dimple's fighting its way out, and he ducks his head, and we keep walking, and I addthe pink neck to all the other things about Logan Walker I am absolutely not keeping a list of.
He carries my bag. I didn't ask. He just lifted it off my shoulder at the second stall like it offended him to watch me hold a thing I didn't have to.
Now it's on his shoulder with his shims and neither of us has said a word about it. That's the trick with Logan. There's a whole category of thing he does that doesn't survive being mentioned. Point it out and he goes pink and apologizes. Leave it alone and it just keeps happening.
We get to the end of the row, where Marta does the little marinated dishes, samples in paper cups. She lights up when she sees us, because of course she does, the whole town's been lit up about me for a week. She presses two cups of some orzo thing on us, and we stand there eating it with toothpicks like civilized people.
And I watch Logan, without a word, without even really looking, reach his toothpick into my cup and pick out every single olive, one by one, and eat them himself, like it's the most natural thing in the world.
I stop chewing.
It's such a small thing. The smallest thing. He doesn't announce it. Doesn't make it a gesture. Doesn't even seem fully aware he's doing it, the way you'd brush a crumb off someone you live with.
