Page 65 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

He shook his head once. You did this, he mouthed back, and then, before I could argue it, you. All of it.

After, the crowd wouldn’t let him go.

A town deciding to love someone happens all at once, out loud. He came off the stage and was swallowed. Becca reached him first, launching up to hang off his neck, hollering something that made him almost lose the stone face at last.

Levi pounded his back and pumped his hand.

Aggie had abandoned me for the front lines and was telling anyone within reach that when he was a boy he wouldn’t say ten words in a row, and look at him now. She was beaming with pride.

I stood back, at the edge of the stage, watching him while holding back tears. It was the best feeling I’d had in a season full of good ones.

He wrapped me in a hug when he finally made his way to me. “They liked me,” he said, out of breath and quiet, like he was reporting something he couldn’t quite believe.

“They love you.” I turned in his arms and looked up at him, this sweet, shy man the whole town had just roared for. “I’m so proud of you I might burst.”

He almost smiled. He came close. “Get me out of here,” he said, low, just for me. “I’ve shaken every hand in this town. I’ve been hugged by people I’ve arrested. If one more person tells me I should do this professionally, I’m going to walk into the corn and not come out.”

I laughed, and I took his hand, and because the whole farm was still roaring along without us—the maze full, the cider table three deep, June somewhere narrating all of it to twelve thousand strangers—nobody was watching the two of us slip around the back of the stage and out toward the field, where Jonas’s hay wagon sat idling at the edge of the light, half-loaded, about to make another slow loop out around the dark acreage and back.

“Room for two?” I called up.

Jonas looked at Matt. Looked at me. Looked at our hands, which I had not thought to let go of.

“You’ll want the back,” he said, and hauled me up before I’d finished asking. “Nice and dark. Nobody’ll see a thing.” A small grin crossed his face. “Same way nobody’s seen a thing for weeks.”

Matt swung up behind me, and we found a corner at the back on a bale away from the family with the little kids, and the wagon lurched, and pulled us out of the noise and the light and into the dark.

It got quiet fast. That’s the thing nobody tells you about a working farm at night—thirty feet past the last string of lights, the festival drops to a hum behind you, and the dark comes up soft and enormous, the corn and the trees whisper on both sides, the stars shining overhead, the mountain a paler black against the black. The wagon swayed. Matt put his arm around me, and I put my head on his shoulder, and neither of us said anything for a while, and it was, after the roar of that crowd, the most peaceful thing I could imagine.

“Come home with me,” he said, into my hair. “Not—I know we’re both worn out and have to be up before dawn. I don’t mean anything by it except I’m not ready to say goodnight to you in a parking field and drive to an empty house. I’ll make you an actual dinner instead of apple cider and a caramel apple. You can leave whenever you want.”

I lifted my head to look at him. The wagon rocked us gently side to side, the lights of the festival swinging back into view now at the far turn, small and gold and full of everyone else’s evening.

“Matt Hartford,” I said. “Are you asking me over for a sleepover?”

“I’m asking you over for dinner,” he said, with great dignity. “What you do after dinner is entirely your business.”

I laughed, and I kissed him, there in the dark at the back of Jonas’s hay wagon with the whole festival we’d built turning slowly past us like something we’d set in motion and were finally, for one stolen loop, allowed to leave running without us.

“Yes,” I said. “Feed me, Officer. Take me home.”

Chapter 27

Matt

Igot as far as unlocking the front door before she pulled me back around by the front of my jacket, and after that I lost track of the plan entirely, and it was a good while before either of us remembered there was a house attached to the doorway we were standing in.

We made it as far as the entryway. I had her backed against the wall by the coat hooks, one hand in her hair and the other flat at the small of her back, and she had both fists in my shirt and was kissing me like she’d been waiting all evening to get her hands on me. Her mouth was warm and certain and a little desperate, and every time I thought about slowing down she made a sound that talked me right back out of it. My hand found the hem of her sweater. Hers found my belt. We were both breathing like we’d run a race.

“Okay,” she gasped, laughing, pulling back an inch with her forehead against mine, both of us breathless and grinning in the dark. “Okay—if we keep going right here against your coat hooks, this is over before it starts.”

“Noted.”

“I need a minute. And some air. And to not be looking at your face for approximately thirty seconds or I’m going to lose all my remaining principles.”

“I can arrange air,” I said, and my voice came out rough enough that she laughed again, and I took her hand and pulled her back off the wall, and instead of down the hall I steered us the other way—through the dark kitchen and out the back door—because there was something out there I wanted her to see, and because thirty seconds of cold night air was probably the only thing that was going to save either of our principles.

The yard runs out to a bluff. Not much of a bluff as bluffs go, maybe thirty feet, grass giving way to rock giving way to a long dark drop down to the tree line and the valley beyond it, and from the patio at night you can see clear across the whole dark spread of it, porch lights and window lights scattered out there like the ground had caught a few stars by mistake. I’d bought the house for that view and put up with the rest of it—wiring from the Nixon administration, a roof that needed six months of my weekends, a kitchen I gutted myself over a winter—because a view like that doesn’t come around twice at the price I paid, and I’d had the sense to see it even when the house itself was barely standing.