Page 54 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“I’m extremely helpful.”

We did the dishes. It should not be worth making a memory out of, such a simple thing. But I knew I’d remember it the rest of my life—him washing, me drying, hips bumping. The window over his sink looked out at his backyard, dark and mowed and empty except for a small garden off to the side, and I thought about the pumpkin I was going to sneak onto his porch.

The kitchen was warm, and the radio he’d turned on low was playing something soft and slow, and I was so happy it felt like a held breath of anticipation.

He shut the water off. And in the new quiet he stood there a second, drying his hands slowly, deciding something. I watched him decide it.

“Ask me,” he said.

“Ask you what?”

“You know what.” He turned around and leaned back against the counter, arms folded, all that steady attention pointed straight at me, nothing between us but a dish towel and about a foot of air that had gotten warm all of a sudden. “You asked me once. At the wedding. Champagne, porch rail, your hair down like it is right now. You asked me like it was small talk and then you went back inside and left me on that porch a ruined man, because I stood there and realized I didn’t have an answer. Not one. A whole life, and I couldn’t tell you a single thing I wanted.” His jaw worked. “I’ve been chewing on that question since the night you asked it, Elizabeth. Ask me again.”

The kitchen was very quiet. The music played low, and I put down my dish towel and asked him.

“What do you want, Matt?”

“You.” No wind-up. The word was out of him before I’d even finished the question. “You. That’s my answer. I know it now.” He unfolded his arms and closed the foot of air between us, slow, giving me every chance to back up that I did not take, and his hands came up and framed my face. “I want you.” His thumb traced my cheekbone, and his voice dropped, rough and certain at the same time. “First thing I ever wanted that was mine. And it turns out I want it so much I can hardly see straight.”

“Matt.” My hands had found his chest, his heart going like a hammer under my palm. “That’s the best answer. Ten out of ten.”

“I’ve had time to practice.”

“Do you want to know what I want?”

His eyes went dark. “Yes.”

I went up on my toes and told him with no words at all.

He made a sound low in his chest and then his arms were around me and the kiss went from warm to serious in about a breath and a half, his hands in my hair, my fingers finding the hem of that unforgivable Henley, the counter at my back and then not, because he’d lifted me clean off the floor and I wrapped myself around him, and we were laughing into it and then we weren’t laughing at all.

He walked me backward down the hallway, slow, sure, his mouth never leaving mine, past the guest room with its warm lamp, past the bare walls I was already hoping to fill, all the way to the last door, the one standing open to a dark room I’d never seen.

And there he stopped. Set me down soft. Pulled back just far enough to look at me, both of us breathing like we’d run a mile, and he didn’t say anything; he just asked with his eyes, one hand open between us, palm up. An offer. A door, held.

“Yes,” I said, and put my hand in his, and we walked through together.

Chapter 22

Matt

Her hand was small and cold in mine, and warming it felt like the first assignment of the rest of my life, and that’s the last coherent thought I had for a while.

My bedroom sits at the back of the house, where the maple outside the window throws shadows on the far wall when the street light catches it, and moonlight had started silvering the bottom of the glass, and none of it had ever mattered before. It was a room I slept in. Bed squared away, nothing on the walls, a lamp I never used. And then Elizabeth Starling walked into it holding my hand, October in her hair—cold air and cider and whatever her shampoo was that I’d been smelling all season—and the room mattered so much I forgot how doors worked.

I kicked it shut. She laughed against my mouth, this low breathless sound I felt everywhere, and pulled me down into the kiss with her hands in my collar, and I had her face in my hands and the whole rest of my life narrowing down to the warm point where we touched⁠—

—and I smelled the sauce. The burner. Low, under the pot, left on warm for seconds because I am a man who plans for seconds, and there was a woman with her hands under the hem of my shirt and a lit burner unattended two rooms away, and there is a version of me that could have let it go. I have never met him.

“Hold that thought,” I said, against her mouth.

She blinked. “What⁠—?”

“Ten seconds.” I set her back on her feet with both hands, steady, like handing off something breakable, and went down the hall at a dead calm walk that fooled neither of us, and clicked the burner off, and moved the pot to a cold coil, and hit the kitchen light, checked the lock on the front door out of habit, and came back to find her sitting on the edge of my bed with her hand over her mouth and her shoulders shaking.

“You turned off the stove.”

“The sauce was on warm.”