Page 39 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

The lights buzzed. Somebody two feet away wanted to know where the bathrooms were, and I told them without taking my eyes off her, and she laughed under her breath, helpless, and pressed her lips together, and looked at me like she was deciding something, or trying very hard not to. Her gaze dropped to my mouth. Came back up. The held breath of the whole week pulled so tight between us I could have plucked it like a wire.

“Drink your cider,” she said, soft, not pointing at anything, “Johnny,” and I swear she swayed an inch toward me over the rail before she caught herself.

“Elizabeth…”

I didn’t have anything to say after her name. I’d said it like the start of a sentence, but there was no sentence—just her name on my lips and how much I wanted her, plain and animal.

On a dance floor at my sister’s wedding, in a green dress, she’d asked me what I wanted, and the question had gone somewhere I never looked and left me standing there with nothing—empty room after empty room, no answer anywhere in the house. I’d never forgotten how it felt to be asked. And now I watched the same thing move across her face, the easy answer dissolving on her tongue, the guard coming up half a beat too slow to hide that there wasn’t anything behind it.

Same question she’d asked me, turned around. What do you want? Who looks after you? Who are you when you’re not the one holding everyone else up? I’d asked it because she’d taught me it could be asked, and because I wanted, more than I’d wanted anything in a long time, to be the answer.

Every careful rule I’d built my life out of had gone quiet at once. I could have kissed her right there, in front of the cider press and half the town, and the only thing that stopped me was the last stubborn part of the man I used to be, the one who knew she wouldn’t want her first kiss with me to be something the whole town stood around and watched.

So I held still. I held her eyes. And I let her see all of it anyway, because I was past hiding how I felt, and done wanting to.

“Last sweep’s at close.” She straightened all at once, brisk and bright again, the lighthouse swinging its beam back up before anyone could catch it dark—but her voice wasn’t quite steady, and we both heard it. “I’ll need a hand walking the rows after we shut the gate. Make sure we didn’t lose anybody in there.” She was already backing away into the crowd, into the safety of the noise, but she held my eyes the whole way, a beat past anything the words needed. “There’s a dozen people I could ask, Hartford. I’m asking you. Don’t leave before then.”

“Wasn’t going to,” I said.

And she grinned, and turned, and was swallowed up by her festival, and I stood at the gate with a cider going cold in my hand, counting down to closing time like a man waiting out a lit fuse.

Chapter 16

Matt

The last cars pulled out around ten.

“You take the north half,” Elizabeth said, businesslike, not quite looking at me. “I’ll take the south. We meet in the middle, confirm it’s empty, then head out.”

“Copy that.”

We walked the maze from opposite ends, the string lights looped along the tops of the corn throwing a low warm glow down into the rows, and I swept my half, methodically, calling a low “anybody back here” down each dead end, and I found nobody—just the corn and the cold and my breath clouding silver in the light and the stars thrown hard and bright across the whole sky above the field.

The entire way in, I argued with myself.

This was a bad idea by every measure I owned. She was running a festival that held her family’s whole future up. The last thing she needed was the man who was supposed to be her contestant making her life more complicated. I’d been building a list of reasons for days, adding to it late at night when I couldn’t sleep, and every reason on it was legitimate and sound and true.

And not one of them survived the sight of her coming through the corn toward me.

Because somewhere under all that careful reasoning I’d finally understood the one truth I’d been too much of a coward to look at head-on—that wanting her was never the problem. The problem was spending the rest of my days the way I’d spent the first part of them—at the edge of the warm room, holding the door for everybody else, watching other people’s happiness through a window I was always on the outside of, and never once walking through it myself.

We reached the middle at the same moment.

The center of the maze is a little clearing, a round open room walled in corn on every side, a single lantern hung on a post there, gold and small and steady, and when we stepped into it from our opposite paths we both stopped.

“Empty,” I said.

“Yeah,” she agreed.

And neither of us moved.

She looked at me, and the grin was gone. A strand of dark auburn had come loose from under her cap and lay against her cheek, and I wanted to tuck it back so badly my hand actually lifted before I caught it and made it stop. We were close. We’d gotten close without deciding to, the way we always seemed to, and I could see our breath fogging together in the cold between us, thin and silver in the lantern light, and I watched the exact second she felt how close we’d gotten, because her eyes dropped to my mouth and came back up, and her breath went shallow, and she reached for a joke.

I knew the move by heart by now. The joke, the deflection, the quick light line she reaches for whenever a moment gets too close to the truth of her. And the urge to take it away from her—just once, just to see who she was underneath it when she had nowhere left to hide—was the most reckless I’d felt in longer than I could remember.

I wasn’t going to let her make a joke. Not this time.

“You know,” she started, light and fast and a half-step breathless, “the funny part about a corn maze at night is that statistically it’s the single most likely place in Oregon to lose a⁠—”