Page 40 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

I kissed her.

I caught her face in both hands and kissed the punchline right out of her mouth.

For one heartbeat she went still. Just one—the kind of still where the whole cold night held its breath along with her, where I had time to think I’d read it all wrong, time for the floor to start giving way beneath me⁠—

And then she broke open against me.

Both her hands came up and caught fistfuls of me at once—one twisting into the front of my shirt, the other closing hard around the strap of my overalls and hauling me down to her like she’d been waiting all season for permission and had just, finally, given it to herself. The small helpless sound she made against my mouth broke apart something I’d kept locked down and bolted shut for years, and she kissed me back like she’d wanted this every bit as long as I had, rising up onto her toes to reach me, chasing it, giving back every bit of what I gave her and then more.

I got an arm all the way around her waist and lifted her into me and she came without a breath of hesitation, gladly, her cap knocking loose and falling somewhere in the dark, all that auburn hair coming down at last, and the hand fisted in my shirt slid up the side of my neck and into my hair and pulled, and the other one never once let go of that strap, like she’d found a handhold on me she had no intention of surrendering. I made a low sound against her mouth I’d have been embarrassed by if I’d had one scrap of dignity left to lose, and I didn’t. She’d taken all of it. She was welcome to it.

She tasted like cider and cold air and something underneath that was just her, and she fit against me like she’d been measured for it, like the whole length of her had been made to match mine. The careful man I’d been my entire life stopped existing between one breath and the next, and what was left standing in the corn was only this—her mouth soft and insistent under mine, her hands greedy on me, her warmth the only thing in all that October cold that mattered, and the way she kept kissing me deeper, like she’d wanted it every bit as long as I had and had only ever been better at hiding it.

I kissed her slow, and then not slow at all. I kissed her until the jokes and the fear and the careful, guarded wariness went out of both of us, until her fingers curled tight in my hair and she made that sound again, low in her throat, and I felt it everywhere.

When she shivered, I pulled her in tighter, and felt her mouth curve against mine, and I would have stood in that corn maze kissing Elizabeth Starling until the first hard frost took us both down where we stood and they found us come spring, still holding on.

When we finally broke apart, we didn’t go far.

My forehead came down to rest against hers, and we stayed there in the low light, breathing each other’s air, neither of us steady. One of her hands was still wound into that overall strap like she’d forgotten it belonged to her. The other had come to rest flat over my heart, which was going like I’d sprinted the whole maze, and I knew she could feel it, and I didn’t care, and some brand-new part of me was glad. Let her feel it. Let her know exactly what she’d done to me. Her mouth was kiss-stung, and her eyes were closed, and she was smiling, soft and dazed and without a single joke behind it, the most unguarded I had ever seen her.

“You promised,” she said, finally. Breathless, and not pulling away by so much as an inch.

My stomach dropped, plain and immediate, because she was right. I’d made that promise on purpose, shaken her hand on it, staked the one thing I don’t gamble with—and I’d just broken it against her mouth in the middle of a cornfield. For half a second the guilt was cold and real. Then I checked for the regret the way I check a lock, out of habit, and found the place where it should have been standing empty. I’d broken my word and couldn’t make myself sorry. Because the truth arrived all at once. It had never been a promise I could keep. I’d already been falling when I gave it. You can’t hold a line you’re standing on the wrong side of.

“I know,” I said.

“You shook my hand. You looked me dead in the eye and told me that when you make a promise, you keep it. You made me believe you, Hartford⁠—”

“I didn’t know I was lying,” I said, and kissed the corner of her mouth, where the grin was already trying to start. “That’s the honest truth. I shook your hand, and I meant every word, because I didn’t have the first idea yet what I’d already started feeling. I told myself I just liked you more than was convenient.” I pulled back far enough to look at her, to make sure she was looking at me when I said the rest. “Turned out it was already a lot more than that. I just hadn’t caught up to it.”

I felt her laugh more than heard it, a startled little huff of it warm against my lips, and she drew back just far enough to search my face, and her eyes were bright and stunned, and the grin came all the way back.

“You didn’t know,” she repeated, soft, turning it over.

“I didn’t know.” I brushed the loose strand of hair off her cheek, and let my thumb stay along the line of her jaw, because I could now, because I was allowed. “I’ve been falling since we danced at my sister’s wedding.” I’d resisted that sentence for two months—rationed it, argued it down, refused to let it be true—and saying it finally let it be true, and the relief of that ran through me like warmth into cold hands. “I just didn’t have the word for what it was until you let me sit down in the mud beside you. That was the moment. You let me all the way in, and I was done.”

She made a sound that was half a laugh and half something like a sob, and pressed her face into my chest, and I wrapped both arms around her and held on, and over the top of her wild loose hair I looked out past the corn to the mountain standing white and patient over the whole sleeping valley, and I finally saw the promise for what it had really been. Not a wall around my life. A wall around the absence of one—the thing that had kept me at the edge of every warm room in this town, holding the door, looking in. I knew, as plainly as I’ve ever known anything in my life, that I was finished standing outside my life and looking in at it. For this woman, I was walking all the way inside and letting the door close behind me.

“This complicates everything,” she said, into my shirt.

“I know.”

“You’re my contestant. I’m running the festival—and, in case you didn’t know, I like you too.”

Something in my chest cracked wide, and my hands went tight at her back before I could think about it. I’d steadied myself for a lot of ways that maze could end. Being loved back was the one I hadn’t let myself plan for, and it took the legs out from under every bit of my composure.

“I had my hopes,” I admitted. “Glad they were real.”

“Your sister is going to be insufferable about it. She entered you in this contest. She is going to take full and permanent credit for the rest of our natural lives⁠—”

“Yeah. She will. No doubt about that.”

She pulled back then, just far enough to look at me properly, and her mouth started to curve, and I knew I’d lost her to it, and I found I didn’t mind at all.

“I just want it noted, for the record, Johnny,” she said, the laugh already building up under every word, “that I have thought about that kiss for longer than I will ever admit to you or anyone, and imagined it in a truly unprofessional level of detail, and in not one single version of it was the man wearing a sack of felt apples.”

“You picked the costume.”