Page 13 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“Is that it?”

I stopped at the foot of the gazebo steps and turned to face him, because this was the part that actually mattered, and you do not deliver the part that matters mid-stride. “Then there’s the Harvest Promise. It’s the oldest thing in the whole festival—older than the contest, older than the maze, older than me, and I’ve been doing this since I was tall enough to hand out flyers. Whoever’s crowned Mr. Pumpkin stands up at the crowning, in front of the entire town, and makes a promise to Sweetbriar. Out loud. For the year. The fire chief promised the town a new ladder truck one year and then had to start a fundraiser to actually get it. The pharmacist promised free flu shots for seniors, and we held him to every dose. It’s not a joke, and nobody in this town treats it like one. You win, you promise the town something real, and then you spend a year being the kind of man who keeps it.”

He was quiet. Looked at the empty stage, the steps where it would happen, and I watched him turn the whole idea over with both hands like it had a real weight to it. He took it seriously, and I felt that oh no go through me again, low and certain. Because the men who deflect everything are easy. I have spent my entire life surrounded by men who deflect everything, and I can banter with that in my sleep. It’s the quiet ones. It’s the ones who go still and actually weigh what you handed them. Those are the dangerous ones, and I had just handed this one the heaviest thing I’ve got and watched him hold it like he understood exactly what it was.

“Okay,” he said. Just that. Like he’d set it down somewhere safe.

We walked back toward the gazebo with the frost gone now to dew, the last of the smoke lifted off the field, and the sun came through the half-turned maples in that low slanting gold, and I felt the whole morning sliding sideways into something I had not budgeted for. Something dangerously pleasant. Two people walking a pretty farm, in no hurry at all, his shoulder a careful and deliberate eight inches from mine, the worry stayed down where I kept it, and for about thirty seconds I had the awful, seductive feeling that I could just—be here. In the morning. With him. Not performing, not managing, not staying a half-step ahead of everything. Just here.

Which is exactly the kind of feeling that gets a girl seen. So I reached for the joke, because the joke is what keeps me safe.

“One ground rule,” I said, brisk, and hopped up to sit on the gazebo rail, partly for the high ground and mostly so I’d have something to do with my body that wasn’t standing close enough to him to count his eyelashes, which I had embarrassingly begun to be able to do. “This happens every single year; it’s a documented occupational hazard, and I find it goes better if I get ahead of it.”

He came to a stop in front of the rail, hands back in his pockets, looking up at me with the patience of a man who has all day and has decided to spend it right here. “What does?”

“The contestants fall in love with me.” I studied my clipboard with enormous professional interest. “It’s the access. The clipboard. The way I believe in them when no one else will. I’m essentially a coach. It’s pure transference. Extremely well documented in the literature.” I stuck my hand out, all business, and grinned at him, because the grin is armor and the armor was holding, mostly, around the edges, if you didn’t look too hard. “So. Promise me you won’t fall in love with me, Officer Hartford. Saves us both the paperwork.”

I meant it to be a joke. I have said far funnier things to hold off far heavier ones a thousand times in my life. It’s the oldest trick I own. But he looked at my outstretched hand. And then he looked up at me sitting on the gazebo rail, and he didn’t laugh, and he didn’t take it, not right away, and for one full terrible second the whole farm went quiet enough that I could hear the few brave bees working the last of the frost-burnt asters down by the hives, and I could hear my pulse beating in my ears, which had no business being that loud over a handshake.

Then he reached up and took my hand.

His was warm—warm in the cold morning, dry and certain and firm—and it closed around mine the way it had on the dance floor at the wedding, careful, deliberate, like he’d been handed something he’d been told was fragile and had quietly decided to take care of it. I felt that handshake in a number of places that have no business being involved in a handshake.

“I promise,” he said.

And then he held my hand. One beat past where a handshake ends. The same beat—the exact same half-second too long—as the dance floor, and I understood all at once that the man had a tell, and the tell was this, this, holding on, and he looked at me with those steady eyes that didn’t dart away and didn’t slide off and didn’t reach for any joke of their own, and he said, in a voice so level you could have set a tool down on it,

“I’m a man of my word, Elizabeth. When I make a promise, I keep it.”

Which is a perfectly ordinary thing to say. It is. I turned it over more times than I will admit, and said plainly, with the words laid flat and bare, it stays a completely ordinary sentence.

But he said it holding my hand on the gazebo rail with the bees buzzing and the dew coming up bright on the grass and my name in his mouth like he’d been saving it, and he said when I make a promise I keep it like it was a fact about himself he wanted entered into the record—and I sat there with my hand in his and my armor doing nothing, none of it, every layer of it useless, just a girl on a rail with a cold mug abandoned somewhere behind her and a runaway pulse and the dawning, sinking, traitorous certainty that I was in genuine trouble.

Also—and this was so stupid I nearly said it out loud just to hear how stupid it was—some small, ungrateful corner of me was actually put out about the promise. I’d asked for it. I’d stuck my hand out and requested it in writing, practically. And he’d given it to me, plainly, for keeps, and that corner of me had the nerve to go oh in a distinctly disappointed key, and I evicted it on the spot without references.

“Great,” I said. My voice came out almost normal. I took my hand back, and it took a beat longer than it strictly needed to, which I declined to log. “Glad we cleared that up. Pie eating’s the kickoff, ten in the morning, wear something washable you don’t love, and if you let Jude beat you in the first round I am transferring you to another coach, and you will deserve it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” And he smiled. Not the nod. Not the careful almost-smile from across the register for all these years. An actual smile, small and slow and aimed directly at me, the kind that reorganizes a whole face, and I felt it somewhere structural, somewhere I was going to have to keep an eye on.

The sun came through the maples. Up the lane, I heard the screen door open across the still morning—Grandma, up and out onto her porch when she’d been told to stay in bed, too far off to have heard a word but close enough, I had the sudden total certainty, to have watched the entire thing through the field with those sharp gray eyes—and she was, in her terrible silent way, more pleased with herself than she had been in years.

I went to hop down off the rail before I could do anything else I’d have to think about later, and the rail declined to let me.

My shirt caught. Some tiny finish nail Grandpa Walt had left in the wood fifty years ago had hooked my flannel, and I came up short mid-slide, stuck, in a position with no dignity available to it whatsoever.

“Hold on,” Matt said, and stepped in.

He freed the fabric off the nail with two fingers, careful, the way he did everything, close enough now that I could smell the cold and the hint of cologne on him, maybe his laundry soap too; basically, he smelled good, and I was mad that I noticed. “There.”

“Well, now you’ve committed,” I said, because the silence was doing things to my body that I didn’t want to acknowledge. “You can’t half-rescue a woman. It’s in the liaison bylaws. You have to see it through.”

“That so.” And his hands settled at my hips—warm, certain, no hesitation in them at all—and he lifted me down off the rail like I weighed nothing, and set me on my feet in the grass in front of him.

He didn’t step back. Neither did I. That was the problem. I was looking up at him, and he was looking down at me, and his hands were still there at my waist, and the whole frost-bright morning went down to the size of the few inches between us, and for one beat, then another, neither of us moved quite fast enough to pretend we hadn’t noticed we weren’t moving. His thumb shifted, barely, against my hip. My pulse forgot its job entirely.

Then we both remembered ourselves at the same time. His hands dropped. I found something urgent to look at over by the hives. He developed a sudden interest in the middle distance, and we stood there a foot apart, having a spirited conversation with the scenery.

“Go home, Hartford,” I said. “I’ll see you at the pie eating contest.”