Page 41 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“I have superb taste, and it was the best decision of my entire life,” she said, grinning up at me, helpless with it, both hands still on me, one of them fisting my collar again. “Come here, Officer Appleseed.”

I started to. But first I tipped her chin up with one finger and made her look at me.

“Elizabeth.”

“What?”

“The lantern’s still lit,” I said, “and I would very much like to kiss you again before we put it out, and you’ve finally run clean out of jokes, which I am choosing to take as the single most romantic thing that has ever happened to me.”

She laughed, the sound of it going straight up into the corn and the cold and the stars—and then she stopped laughing, and looked at me, and there was nothing left in her face but the truth about how she felt, open and unhidden, and she rose up on her toes and kissed me first this time.

Slow. Sure. No joke in front of it and none behind it. Her hands slid up to frame my face the same way mine had framed hers a minute ago, gentle now, deliberate, like she was answering a question I’d asked her in a language neither of us had needed to say out loud, and I wrapped her up and kissed her back and felt the last careful, guarded, locked-down piece of myself go quiet at last.

We left the lantern burning a good while longer, there in the center of the maze, with the mountain keeping watch over us and the whole complicated, impossible, wonderful rest of it waiting patiently out at the edges of the field for the two of us to come back and figure out how to hold.

Chapter 17

Elizabeth

Ihave been kissed before. Plenty of times, by perfectly nice men, in perfectly nice ways. Not one of them had ever left me lying awake at two in the morning with my heart going like a bird in a box, grinning at a dark ceiling, wondering what on earth I was supposed to do with myself now.

I did not sleep. I lay under Grandma’s quilt and replayed it in a loop I had no intention of stopping—his hands coming up to my face, the sound he made, the exact second he decided he was done letting me joke my way out of feeling it.

I know how to handle whatever gets put in front of me. Give me a crisis, a schedule, a festival, a family, and I will sort all of it into boxes and label the boxes and run the whole operation on three hours’ sleep. What I did not have, lying there at two in the morning grinning at a dark ceiling, was anywhere to put this. It had moved into my chest somewhere in the middle of that maze and showed no intention of leaving—big and warm and faintly terrifying, taking up the room I usually keep clear for worrying about random crap.

I kept waiting for the worry to come back and crowd it out. That’s the part that scared me. The worry didn’t come. Which meant this was bigger than my defenses, and I have very good defenses.

I got maybe four hours. When I finally gave up and went down to start the coffee, I looked like a woman who had either fallen in love or come down with something, and I had to be at the Stop & Go by ten, where exactly one person on earth was positioned to tell the difference at forty paces.

Becca was behind my register when I came through the door. She looked up and she knew.

That was the worst part—she didn’t say anything at first. She just watched me come in with my travel mug and whatever was happening on my face, which, going by the rearview mirror on the drive over, was a great deal, and she let a slow smile spread over her face like sunrise over a battlefield.

“Morning,” she said, far too pleasantly.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Yeah, but you’re saying it with your entire face.” I stowed my bag under the counter and tried, with no success whatsoever, to arrange my features into those of a woman who had slept. “Becca. I am begging you to let me have a normal morning.”

“Absolutely,” she said. “Totally normal morning. Two normal people. One of whom kept my brother out at her corn maze until close last night.” She popped the lid off a roll of quarters with her thumb, taking her sweet time about it, enjoying herself enormously. “Here’s what I keep coming back to. The whole town watched the costume round. We all watched you pin that ribbon on him—very professional, by the way, the whole pinning situation, no notes—and then the night ended, and everybody drove home. Everybody.” The quarters went into the drawer one at a time as she watched me for a reaction. “Except you. And him. Leaving you all alone. In a corn maze. In the dark.”

“We were confirming it was empty. That’s a safety requirement.”

“Mm.” She looked up. “And here you are this morning, grinning at the floor like you won something.”

“It gets bright in here.”

“It does not get bright in here. There’s one window, and it faces north.”

The bell over the door saved me—a contractor in for energy drinks and a sandwich—and I rang him up with the bright competent cheer of a woman absolutely not thinking about anybody’s mouth. Becca let it go, because customers were coming and the rush was building, and even Becca observed the sacred truce of the morning rush.

And then my phone buzzed in my apron pocket, and I made the catastrophic mistake of looking at it.

Matt: Morning. Hope you slept. I didn’t, much. No regrets about that.

And then, before I could even get my face under control, a second one.