Page 84 of Pumpkin Spice and Promises

“Elizabeth—god, you feel so good,” I rasped against her skin.

She leaned forward, capturing my mouth in a deep, messy kiss as her movements became more urgent. I held her close, one arm banded around her back, and let her take everything she wanted. When she came, it crashed through her hard—body shuddering, walls pulsing rhythmically around my cock as she cried out my name. The feel of her coming apart above me dragged me over the edge right after her. I groaned into her mouth, hips jerking up as I spilled deep inside the condom, pulsing in long waves while she kept rocking gently through both our releases, milking every last tremor.

We stayed like that for a long minute afterward, foreheads pressed together, breathing each other in, trading lazy, sated kisses until our heartbeats finally slowed. Only then did she ease off me and curl against my side.

Later—much later, the frost long since burned off the glass and the whole bedroom gone warm and bright—she lay with her head on my chest, tracing something absent-minded along my collarbone, and I lay there thinking that a year ago this house hadn’t known what warm was, and now it apparently couldn’t remember being anything else.

Because that was the truth, once I actually looked. Her boots by the back door next to mine. Two mugs by the coffee maker, hers chipped at the handle and kept anyway because she liked it best. Her sweaters folded in with mine in the dresser, in an order that made sense to nobody but her. None of it had happened in a single day. It had happened the ordinary way good things happen, a little at a time, so slow I hadn’t noticed the exact moment this stopped being a house I lived in alone and started being a house we lived in together.

“I was thinking about how long you’ve actually been living here.” I traced a slow line down her spine, thinking out loud, feeling my way toward it. “Not officially. But actually. I think it’s been a while.”

“A good while, at minimum.” She propped herself up on one elbow to look at me. “Are you about to make this a whole conversation before I’ve had coffee?”

“No conversation. Just this.” I reached over to the nightstand, where I’d been keeping it in the drawer for longer than I wanted to admit, and pulled out a single brass key on a plain ring, and pressed it into her palm. “You already mostly live here. I just wanted you to stop having to knock.”

She looked down at the key a long moment, turning it over once, and when she looked back up, her eyes had gone bright.

“Matthew Hartford.” Her voice had gone soft clean through. “Did you just hand me a house key in bed at seven in the morning with your hair doing something criminal?”

“I did.”

“No speech. No crowd.”

“You already got the speech. This one’s just for you.” I closed her fingers around it and kissed her knuckles, once. “Move in properly. Officially.”

“I have something for you too, then.” She rolled off the bed, entirely unselfconscious about it in a way that still floored me every single time, and came back a minute later with a small flat box she must have smuggled in at some point without my noticing, because I certainly hadn’t seen her hide it. “I was saving it for Christmas. You’ve clearly started early, so… here you go

Inside the box sat a red plastic name tag, blank space filled in with two words.

MR. PUMPKIN

“Had it made special,” she said, watching my face. “Figured a man ought to have something official to pin on when he comes around to see his lady at work.”

“I’m never wearing this in public.”

“You’re absolutely wearing this in public.”

I laughed, the kind that still surprised me a little every time it came out of me that easily, and pulled her back down against my chest, key in one hand, name tag in the other.

“I love you,” I said, because it never once felt like something I could say too many times.

“I love you too.” She kissed me, slow, and settled back against my chest, and outside the window another handful of gold leaves let go of the branch and drifted down through the cold bright morning, and neither one of us moved to watch where they came to rest, because there was nowhere in this house, or this life, that either of us would rather have been.

Epilogue

Elizabeth

Iwas practically living at Matt’s house by December, which is a sentence I’d have bet money against a year ago.

It had happened the way the best things do, without anyone deciding it out loud. First it was dinners. Then it was dinners that ran too late to drive home from. Then it was a toothbrush in the cup by his sink, and a drawer he’d cleared without mentioning it, and my rain boots by his back door, and somewhere in there I’d stopped thinking of it as his house and started thinking of it as the place I went at the end of the day. I still had my room in the little house up on the farm—still had my mother across the hall and my coffee setup on the counter and Sunday mornings that belonged to the Starling women—but most nights, now, I was here, on Alder Street, in the square white house with the too-neat yard.

Which did not stay too neat, because I got my hands on it.

The man had lived for years in that house without so much as a wreath on the door, and I’d been quietly appalled about it since the first night he cooked me spaghetti. So I fixed it. We’d put a Christmas tree up together the weekend after Thanksgiving—Matt hauling it in through the front door swearing under his breath, me directing traffic, both of us arguing cheerfully about whether the lights went on before or after the ornaments—and it stood in the front window now, crooked at the top where neither of us could reach, strung with a mismatched collection we’d started building together. A little tin pumpkin from the festival, a bee ornament my grandmother had given me, a truly ugly felt cardinal Becca had made him keep. And the porch—I’d finally, gloriously gotten my hands on that sad empty porch, and it had greenery down the rail now, and a wreath on the door, and warm white lights I’d strung myself, one evening, in the cold, while Matt stood in the doorway with two mugs of cider and let me turn his bare, careful house into something that looked, unmistakably, lived in. Loved in.

We were at Matt’s house making dinner when the first snow came, right at dusk, drifting down soft and slow out of a pewter sky past the kitchen windows. He took one look outside and reached for my hand. “Come outside with me.”

“It’s freezing.”