Twenty-four hours ago I kissed her in my mother's driveway, and this time I didn't take it back. Didn't explain it. Didn't apologize for it. Didn't hand her a single word she could use to call it practice.
I meant the silence as a correction. One honest nothing to set against the stupid sentence from the reunion.
I've been carrying it since like a lit match in a dry June, and the whole drive I can feel her not mentioning it either.
She's quiet on the drive. That's new. Josie's never quiet.
She's got her head tipped back against the seat, eyes half closed, color high on her cheeks that wasn't there an hour ago. And somewhere around the second stop sign she's drifted toward my side of the cab, tipped into the middle of the bench like a plant leaning at a window, her shoulder a half-inch off mine and closing.
I don't think she knows she's doing it. That's the part that undoes me. Josie plans everything, and this isn't planned, this is just her body picking a direction, and the direction is me.
When I pull up outside her house, she doesn't reach for the door.
“You okay,” I say.
“Tired.” She rolls her head to look at me. “Good tired. It was a good day.” A beat. “You watered me for two hours.”
“You needed watering.”
“I know.” Quiet. Not a joke. “That's the part I can't...” She stops. Starts again. “Nobody does that. You know? Nobody ever just. Notices.”
And there it is. The door I've been standing in front of my whole life, and she's the one who walked up and put her hand on it, tired and flushed and honest in the dark of my truck, and I have run completely out of wall.
I should say goodnight. That's the move. That's the careful play, the one that protects the plan and her and my mother's happy ending. Say goodnight, watch her inside, drive home, do it gentle, do it right.
“I'll walk you to the door,” I say instead.
She looks at me a second longer than the words need. Then she nods, and I'm out of the truck and around the hood before she's got her seatbelt off.
Her porch is small. I remember it from the reunion drop-off, all four of us crowded onto it while nobody said a word that mattered, that swing of hers hanging dead still like it was listening.
Tonight it's just us and the swing. She gets her key in the lock on the second try because her hands aren't quite steady.
I notice that. I add it to the scent and the color and the not-quite-steady of the whole night, and the back part of me that knows what all of it adds up to gets louder.
She gets the door open. Turns around. We're close on the small porch, closer than the reunion, close enough that her scent is the only thing I can breathe.
“So,” she says. Barely.
“So.”
“This is the part where you say goodnight.” She doesn't move. “You're very good at saying goodnight. Historically. You did it after the reunion. That whole drive home. Very responsible. Although last night you?—”
“Josie.”
“—set a concerning precedent, is all I'm?—”
I put my hand against the doorframe beside her head. Not touching her. Giving her the whole slow second to step inside and shut me out, the way I gave her the second in Pine Valley, the way I've given her every second.
Because careful is the only thing I've ever fully trusted about myself.
She doesn't take it.
She looks up at me, flushed and tired and certain. There's nothat shouldn't have happenedin me anywhere tonight. No flat shuttered face. No wall left to get behind.
There's just her, and the caramel-warm pull of her scent winding through every alpha instinct I own, and the words I've been swallowing for four weeks pressing so hard against my teeth they ache.
And under all of it, plain and physical and impossible to talk myself out of, I'm hard. Have been since the truck, since her knee drifted against mine on the bench and stayed.
