Page 45 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

I let out a chuckle and took a taste; it was delicious. I ate every bite, and then I ate the seconds, sitting hip to hip with her in the cold truck bed while the stars came out over the mountain one at a time, and it was, with no competition I can think of, the best meal of my life.

We stayed out there a long time after the food was gone, the two of us wrapped in a quilt with our backs against the cab and the cider going from hot to warm to cool in our hands, not in any hurry about anything.

“Can I say something?” she said eventually, into the dark, “and you don’t make it weird.”

“I make everything weird,” I looked at her sideways. “It’s my one move.”

“Matt.” She turned her head against the cab and looked at me, and the jokes and the teasing went out of her face and left something bare and unguarded behind it. “I keep things light on purpose. If I never get serious, it can’t go badly, right?” Her voice dropped. “I can’t do that with you. I tried. It didn’t work, and it scares the hell out of me, and I’m choosing this anyway. I wanted to say it out loud where you could hear it.”

“I’m in,” I said. “Whatever it is. However scared. You keep things light on purpose—I keep things at a distance on purpose. Two ways of staying safe. Mine ends tonight.”

She made a small helpless sound, as if she’d run out of ways to hold it in, and then she had a fist in the front of my jacket and was hauling me down to her, and I went.

I got a hand into all that loose auburn hair I’d been thinking about since she turned around at the guardrail, and my other arm went around her and pulled her into me, and she came, climbing half into my lap with everything else forgotten, and I kissed her slow and then not slow at all. She tasted like cider and cinnamon, and she made a small greedy noise against my mouth that I felt all the way down to the soles of my feet, and then I stopped being careful.

Her hands were in my hair and under my collar and fisted in my shirt, and mine were learning the curve of her under the open coat, and the kiss got deep and a little desperate all at once, the kind that erases the schedule, the cold, the festival, the whole rest of the world, until there was just the warm weight of her against my chest and her breath going ragged and my heart slamming in my chest like I’d run up the ridge instead of driven.

I don’t know how long we stayed like that, fogging the cold air between us, the quilt slipping, two grown adults making out in a truck bed under the stars like teenagers who’d never get another chance. Long enough that when she finally pulled back an inch, both of us breathing hard, her gorgeous full lips swollen from our kisses and her eyes dark and her hands still bunched in my shirt like she wasn’t ready to let go, I’d have promised her anything.

“Okay,” she breathed, forehead against mine. “Okay. That’s—we should stop, or we’re not going to, and I refuse to have my first real time with you be in a truck bed at forty degrees where I will absolutely pull a muscle.”

“Practical,” I managed.

“One of us has to be. You’re clearly useless.” She kissed me once more, soft, a full stop, and settled back against my chest with my arms coming around her and her head under my chin, and we watched the mountain go fully dark, and neither of us said the obvious thing, which was that something had started up here tonight that there’d be no stopping now.

Chapter 19

Matt

Becca’s text came in at seven-forty on my first morning off in nine days. Violet’s. 8:30. Don’t eat first. Which is how I knew I was in trouble, because my sister only invoked the no-eating-first clause when she intended a conversation to take the full length of a plate of food to conduct.

I went anyway. The old me would have texted back something about paperwork and bought myself a week. The new me—and there was a new me, installed sometime around a bowl of chicken and dumplings in the back of my truck—put on a clean shirt and drove into town actually wanting to see my sister, which should have set off every alarm I own.

Somewhere in the last two weeks Violet’s Café had gone full autumn. Mums in the window boxes in burnt orange and bright yellow, a fat row of gourds along the sill, a swag of orange bittersweet over the door, and a chalkboard on the sidewalk announcing in Violet’s looping hand that today’s special was a maple cinnamon roll the size of a hubcap. Inside it smelled like coffee and cinnamon and warm butter, the smell of every good morning I’ve ever had in this town, and the mismatched purple chairs had picked up little crocheted pumpkins on their backs, and the whole place wrapped around you like a quilt the second the door swung shut behind you.

Becca had taken the table in the back corner. Of course she had. Sightlines to the door, her back to the wall—she learned that from me, and I have never decided whether to be proud or sad about it.

“You’re early,” she said, as I sat. “You’re never early. You came early to breakfast with your sister, and you know I’m going to force you to spill your guts.”

“You said eight-thirty,” I stammered as I slid out the chair across from her.

“It’s eight-twenty.” She folded her hands on the table and looked at me with the bright, terrible patience of a woman who has already won and is just waiting for the other party to notice. “So. How are you, big brother? How’s your week been? Anything new?”

Violet saved me for exactly as long as it takes to pour two coffees. She came over with the pot and a plate bearing one maple cinnamon roll and two forks, set it down between us. Violet is Levi’s big sister, a few years ahead of me in school and now family by way of Becca’s marriage.

Becca cut the cinnamon roll in half with the side of her fork and waited for me to start talking.

“It’s Elizabeth,” I said. “But I don’t know about love,” I clarified. “It’s early and, um…”

It came out easier than I expected, sitting there in the cinnamon-warm corner of a café my whole town has been falling in love in for what seemed like forever.

Becca didn’t whoop. I’d braced for the whoop. She just went still and soft around the eyes, my little sister, and set her fork down, and said, “Yeah. I know. I’ve known since the night of the corn maze.” She tilted her head. “But you just said it. Out loud. To me. You’ve never once told me about a woman, Matt, not in your whole life. I had to find out about the last one from Cade.”

“There wasn’t much to tell, with the last one.”

“There wasn’t much you let yourself want, with the last one.” She said it gently, but it landed where she aimed it, the way only a sister can aim. “Or any of them. You’d date somebody for a while and keep them in a separate drawer from your real life, the one where you were on call for me and your job, and whatever else you used as a shield from your feelings, and then it would end and you’d say it was fine and it always was fine, because you never let it get close enough to be anything else.” She wrapped both hands around her mug. “So. Tell me why Elizabeth is different. And don’t say it isn’t, because you came here early so we could talk about it.”

So I told her. I am not a man who tells people things, and I told my sister everything, in the back corner of Violet’s over a maple cinnamon roll going cold between us.