And then there's yesterday. The garden. The way she flinched off me when I hauled her up, quick and hard like my hand burned. The scratchy cardigan inside out. The pink eyes she wouldn't explain. The specific fragile look of a woman holdingsomething over her head with both arms and pretending it's light.
I told myself last night to let her have it. That whatever it was, she'd come to us.
Instead she sent a goodbye before the sun was properly up.
I call her.
It rings four times and goes to voicemail, to the chirpy outgoing message she recorded for the preschool parents, and I hang up before the beep because whatever I've got to say isn't a voicemail.
I text instead.Nice try. What's actually going on.
Nothing. Not the little dots. Not read. Nothing.
I wait ninety seconds, which is about eighty-nine longer than I've ever waited for anything, and then I'm off my stool and grabbing my keys off the hook by the register and flipping the sign on the store to CLOSED at seven in the morning, which I have not done on a business day in six years, not even the time I had the flu and sold a man a kayak with a fever of a hundred and two.
Josie lives four minutes from the store if you drive like a person and two if you don't.
I do it in two.
Her car'sin the driveway. Curtains drawn. The little house sits quiet in the morning light, window boxes she overwaters spilling over the sills. Everything looks completely normal. I know before I'm out of the truck that it isn't.
Because I can smell her from the driveway.
Brown sugar and warm oat, her scent, except it's not doing what it does. It's not drifting. It'spouringoff the house, thickand dark and sweet enough to stop me flat with one boot still on the running board, sweeter and heavier than I have ever smelled it, and every alpha instinct I own stands up at once and says the word my brain takes a half-second longer to catch up to.
Heat.
She's in heat. Or close enough to it that the difference doesn't matter. Full, or nearly, and building, and rolling off the house in waves while she sends out texts cutting three alphas loose.
There's a thing I keep on a short leash, every day, all day, the part of me that wants instead of jokes. It hits the end of that leash so hard my vision goes white at the edges. I put both hands flat on the roof of my truck and breathe through it, because she does not need an alpha coming apart in her driveway. She needs one thinking.
Alone. She's doing it alone.
“No,” I say out loud, to nobody, in her driveway. “No, no, absolutely not.”
I'm at her door in about four strides. I knock, and it comes out harder than I mean it, the flat of my fist. “Porter. It's Hudson. Open the door.”
Nothing.
“Josie.” I put my forehead against the door like proximity's going to help, and her scent comes through the gap at the bottom so strong my knees actually think about it. “Come on. Open up. I just want to see your face, I'm not going to do anything, I just need to know you're okay. Please.”
A sound, from deep in the house. Not words. A low, wrecked little sound, the sound a person makes when they've bitten down on a bigger one, and it goes through me like a blade.
“Okay,” I say, quiet now, forehead still to the wood, because the joking's all gone and there's nothing under it but the part I don't let people see. “Okay. Hang on, Porter. We're coming.”
I stay right where I am, back against her door like I can hold the line just by being here, and I dial. I don't even decide who first. My thumb just knows.
Finn picks up on the fourth ring, groggy, wrecked from sleep. Right. Night shift. Dead to the world, hasn't seen a thing.
“'Sup,” he mumbles. “'S early, man.”
“Wake up. Now. It's Josie.”
I hear him come awake all at once, the mattress, his feet hitting the floor. “What. What happened.”
“She sent us a text this morning. Sounds like you slept through it.” I press my palm flat to her door, like she might feel it. “It's a goodbye, Finn. Real nice, real final. Thanks for everything, off you go. And I came to check on her, and she's in heat. The real thing, not the edge of it. Won't open the door, won't answer, riding it out alone in there because she's decided she's not worth the call.”
The sound he makes is not a word. It's a controlled man losing the top layer all at once.
