A cheer goes up. Reed claps once. Ash whistles between his teeth and Maggie squeezes my shoulder. “Hollow Gold, coming right up,” she says.
The cider arrives faster than seems polite, two pints and a half-pint balancing up Maggie’s arm. She sets mine down with a small flourish.
I take a sip.
“Oh,” I say into the glass. It’s crisp, sweet but with a sharp, tart kick that cuts right through the sugar.
Across the table, three grins break out. So does Maggie’s next to me.
“We’ve got a convert!” she calls out to the room.
People at the bar let out a cheer, banging their mugs against the wood, and Hal hollers from the dartboards.
I shake my head, grinning.Friendly place.
We settle into the hum of the bar. It’s easy, effortless in a way I didn’t expect, the conversation drifting from a dead car radio somewhere on the I-5 to a potential wholesale buyer in Bellsford. Before long, Reed launches into a story from his younger days, his eyes flashing with mischief.
“So I’m just saying,” he says. “It wasn’t my fault the packing shed caught fire. I was ten. If they didn’t want me playing with matches they shouldn’t have left them next to the gasoline.”
A laugh punches out of me. “Reed. You’re genuinely lucky you made it to legal drinking age.”
“Right you are,” Bram says, the corner of his eye crinkling. He turns to Reed. “And that time you tried to build a flamethrower out of a Super Soaker. I spent four hours hosing down the barn’s east wall before Dad got home, while you and Ash hid.”
“Hey, don’t drag me into this,” Ash says, holding his hands up. “I was an innocent bystander.”
“You,” Bram says, pointing a finger at him, “were the one who convinced the fire chief it was an ‘electrical anomaly’ when he drove by. That tongue of yours has been very active since you were eight.”
Ash’s gaze slides to mine, lingering just a beat too long on the word. I bite the inside of my cheek, my skin prickling as my mind immediately flashes back to our night together—and what, exactly, he’d done with that tongue. He winks, a quick, wicked twitch of his eyelid, before turning back to Bram. “It’s called having the gift of the gab, Bram.”
“He could sell apples to an orchard,” Reed says, signaling to Maggie for another round.
“Point is,” Bram says, looking at me. “If you ever wonder why my hair’s going gray early, it’s these two. I spent my entire teenage years making sure they didn’t end up in juvenile detention.”
Reed reaches across and bumps his fist into Ash’s shoulder as they laugh. Bram watches it happen with a grin, shaking his head slowly.
“And what about you, librarian.” Reed turns to me, dimple half-deployed. “You ever set anything on fire?”
“Maybe once,” I say. “Microwaving a Marshmallow Peep.”
Ash chuckles. “Sounds like a tale for the ages.”
I roll my eyes and tap the back of my hand against his shoulder.
Maggie drops a second round of glasses onto the table, the glass clinking against the wood. As she slides away, the noise in the pub rises. Someone wins at the dartboards, Hal lets out a roar, and Maggie rings a bell over the register. The edges of the room have gone warm and soft, the cider humming in my veins. And that’s when the question I’ve been holding back since my talk with Jenna earlier today finally slips loose.
“So how do you stand it?”
Three sets of eyes find me.
“The orchard,” I clarify. “I mean. You can prune the trees right. You can water them right. You can be perfect about the soil and the spray and the labor, and a single bad frost in April could wipe out the whole year. Right?”
A beat.
“Right,” Bram says, slowly.
“Or a hailstorm,” Reed adds.
“Or rot,” Ash says. “Or a buyer pulling out two weeks before harvest. Or fuel prices.”
