The Summerberry Festival was exactly what I expected and somehow still more chaotic. Painted signs. Jam jars stacked like Jenga towers. Children chasing balloons with the kind of unhinged energy that made me step wide.
There were handwoven baskets, strawberry lemonade slushies, someone aggressively whittling near the fudge tent, and a tent with four different kinds of fried cheese curds. I wasn’t sure if that was charming or mildly threatening.
But none of it mattered.
Because the moment I spotted her again, crouching by a vendor table and negotiating with a man in overalls about placement rights for his decorative gnome statues, my chest did this tight, stupid thing I couldn’t quite explain.
She was flushed, laughing, and covered in approximately four types of berry products. Talking with her hands and somehow wrangling order out of chaos without even pausing for breath, and I couldn’t stop watching her.
Fifi Bell was a walking contradiction: a human sparkler with the stubbornness of a thousand mules, who could organize a festival, flirt like it was a blood sport, and make a man like me, who’d come here toescapeeverything, want to throw away even more to stay.
God help me.
I was falling for her.
Fast. Hard. Recklessly.
She hadn’t seen me yet, which gave me a minute to just…look.
Not in a weird, lurking way.
Okay, maybe a little lurking. But I needed it. That pause. That still moment where I could stand on the edge and admit to myself that something had shifted, and it wasn’t just the location or the sunlight or the jam-scented air.
It was her.
She made everything feel…possible.
Even when she was juggling snack bags and guiding a panicking teenager to the lost-and-found booth and somehow giving me a glance that made my knees weak from thirty feet away.
She spotted me then.
Our eyes locked.
And damn if her entire face didn’t light up like I was exactly the person she hoped to see.
That look?
That smile?
It nearly knocked me on my ass.
She wiped her hands on a dishtowel and jogged toward me, hair bouncing, mouth tugging into a grin that made my stomach flip.
“Hey, stranger,” she called. “You’re not hiding from angry beavers, are you?”
“Not unless one’s manning the cotton candy booth,” I said, eyes trailing down her sun-dappled arms, her scuffed sneakers, the curve of her cheek when she laughed.
“You came.”
“I told you I couldn’t resist glitter and rhubarb.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m seventy-five percent fruit filling at this point. Don’t stand too close or you’ll end up sticky.”
Too late.
I already was.
Sticky. Attached. Wrecked.
