Page 62 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“Compliment the bees.”

“I’ve been studying bees since your text. Ask me anything.” He was grinning against my cheek now, and then he pulled back an inch, and hesitated, and in the last of the light I watched his ears go faintly red, which I had learned by then was the tell. Whatever came next was something he’d been keeping to himself, probably for years.

“And a dog,” he said.

“A dog?”

“I want a dog.” He said it like a man confessing to a parole officer. “I have always wanted a dog. My whole life. I never let myself, because of the hours, because the house was empty all day, because it didn’t seem fair to the dog—” He stopped, and I watched the old reasons line up in his mouth, and I watched him decide not to say them. “I want a dog.”

“What kind of dog?”

“Big one.” No hesitation at all; the man had specifications. “Farm-sized. Terrible manners. The kind that puts its whole front half in your lap and has never once been told it’s too big for that, because nobody had the heart.”

“You’d train the manners into it within a month.” I teased him. “You couldn’t help yourself.”

“Probably.” He considered. “I’d teach him to sit, anyway. To stay. I’d let the lap thing go.” And then he kissed me again, deeper, both cold hands framing my face, and murmured against my lips like it was a secret between us and the corn, “You asked what I want. That’s the list. But you’re at the top of the list.”

Every item on it had me in it. That was what I was still catching up to, standing there falling harder by the second—the standing invitation, the couch, the hideous quilt, the dog that didn’t exist yet—a whole life sketched out in the dark by a man who used to keep himself apart from everyone, and not one corner of it he’d drawn without me in the frame.

I went up on my toes and answered that the only way it deserved, and the stars came all the way out over the little clearing, and for a while the maze kept the two of us like a secret it was good at.

It was full dark when he asked me back.

“What about you?” His hand moved slowly up and down my spine, warm now, at home there.

Tell him, said the newest part of me. He asked. He is standing in the exact center of everything the money has to save, holding you like you’re the only thing that matters, asking.

And I almost did. The words came right up to the edge of me—there’s another loan, Matt, one nobody knows about, and I don’t know how to fix it—and stopped there, because the older part of me, the part that has run this whole operation my entire life, caught them before they could get out. Not because I didn’t trust him. I trusted him more than I’d trusted anyone in years. That was the problem. Because I knew this man, knew him bone-deep by now, and I knew exactly what he’d do the second he heard it. He’d go still and serious and start solving it. He’d take it on like it was his, the way he took the barn roof, the way he takes every broken thing he gets near, and he wouldn’t stop until it was fixed or it had flattened him trying. He was just like me. Give him one loose thread of somebody else’s trouble, and he’d pull on it until his own hands bled.

And I could not do that to him. Not here. Not tonight, when he’d finally, after a whole guarded life, let himself want a winter and a dog and a place at my grandmother’s table—when he was standing in the cold with his heart out in the open for the first time I’d ever seen. Besides, it wasn’t mine to give away. My grandmother had guarded that secret from the whole family; the least I owed her was not to hand it to a man she hadn’t chosen to tell. This moment was ours, and the secret was hers, and the money could wait at the edge of the field where I’d left it.

“This,” I said, and it wasn’t a lie; it just wasn’t everything. “More of this. All of it, just like this—with you.”

He gathered me in and kissed the top of my head and said he could work with that, and we found our way out of the maze by starlight and memory, his hand in mine at every turn, and the farm stood quiet and dark and mine around us, and if something in me wished I would have told him about Grandma’s secret loan—well. Nobody knew it but me. I was getting so good at secrets, it should have scared me.

Chapter 25

Matt

She ambushed me with a script on a Tuesday.

I’d stopped by the Stop & Go at the dead hour, that flat stretch after the lunch rush and before the after-work gas-and-lottery crowd. Becca was somewhere in the back with the radio going, working through the walk-in. Elizabeth was behind the counter with a legal pad, and when the bell over the door announced me, she looked up with an expression I had already learned to fear and love in roughly equal measure, the one that means she has had an idea and I am inside it now whether I like it or not.

“Good. You’re here. Sit.” She pointed the pen at the stool on the customer side of the counter. “We’re rehearsing. Becca’s buried in the walk-in for twenty minutes, so you’ve got that long to fail in private.”

“I’m on duty.”

“You’re on a break. I can see the cruiser. It’s parked crooked, which means you’re not planning to stay long, which means you’re avoiding this.” She tore off a page and slid it across the counter at me. “Talent round is Saturday, Officer. You have no talent. This is a documented fact and also our opportunity.”

I looked at the page. It was covered in her handwriting, tidy and small, little stage directions in the margins in parentheses.

Every instinct I had said no. I can’t sing, can’t dance, have never once thought of myself as funny, and here she was asking me to get up in front of the entire town and be all three, more or less. The nerves came up fast and cold.

“I don’t do bits, Elizabeth.”

“It’s a stand-up set. Deadpan. You’re going to walk out there in full uniform and do crowd work about this town like you’re filing an incident report, and they are going to lose their minds. Read it. Top of the page. Give it to me flat, no smiling, the way you used to tell me you took your coffee black.”

But I was looking at the page while she said it, at all that small tidy handwriting and the little directions penciled in the margins, and the fight went out of me. She’d done this for me. Sat down and written a whole routine tailored to the one thing I actually am—flat, straight-faced, a man who says the true thing in the plainest voice in the room—and figured out how to make that into something a crowd would love. Nobody had ever taken that kind of trouble over me. I didn’t believe for a second I could do it. I was going to do it anyway, because she’d built it with her own hands and she wanted me to have it, and against that I had no defense at all.