Page 43 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

I make my way over to him through the crowd, weaving around folding tables and a very determined toddler chasing a dropped roll, and by the time I reach him the teasing's mostly moved on to somebody's questionable green bean casserole, leaving us in a small, relatively quiet pocket near the drink station.

"You didn't have to say it like that," I tell him, not quite able to keep the smile off my own face. "You could have deflected. Redirected him to the turkey leg conversation. You had options."

"I had exactly one honest option, and I took it." He looks down at me, something easy and unguarded sitting in his face that I don't think he'd have let this town see a month ago. "Eli asked a direct question. Man doesn't lie to an eight-year-old holding a turkey leg like a gavel."

"Our secret's officially dead."

"It was never much of a secret. Dot had a betting pool. I heard about it from three separate people before Thanksgiving decorations even went up."

"A betting pool?"

"Apparently I was the favorite by a wide margin, which either speaks well of me or terribly of this town's standards." He glances around the gym, at Gunny still narrating his pie disaster to anyone who'll listen, at Dot holding court near her recovering turkey, at Eli and Josie now both interrogating Sheriff Cole about some unrelated crime statistic. "I don't think I mind. I thought I would. I really thought I would."

"And now?"

"Now I think I've been carrying around a secret this whole town already knew, which means the only person I was actually protecting from the truth was me." He says it plainly, and somehow that lands harder than a more dramatic version would have.

Across the gym, over the top of somebody's head, our eyes catch, and neither of us says anything for a second, just standing there in a room full of people who've apparently known about us longer than we let ourselves admit it out loud. Then something in his face cracks open into a laugh, helpless and real, and I feel my own following right behind it before I can stop it, both of us laughing at nothing and everything, at Eli's turkey leg gavel and Dot's betting pool and a secret that died in front of fifteen witnesses and somehow feels like the best thing that's happened to either of us in years.

"We were terrible at this," I manage, wiping my eyes.

"Historically terrible."

"Worst secret keepers in Pinewood Ridge."

"Second worst. Dot's still got that turkey convinced it's resting." He reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, unhurried, in front of God and Gunny and the entire gym, and doesn't look even slightly sorry about it. "I'm glad it's out. I'm glad everyone knows. I'm glad Eli's the one who made me say it."

"Me too."

Around us the potluck rolls on, someone finally convincing Dot to let the turkey rest for real, Gunny trying to salvage his pie with a can of whipped cream and sheer optimism, the twins somewhere in the crowd narrating the whole evening to anyone who'll listen. For the first time since this started, I don't feel like I'm hiding anything from anyone, not the twins, not this town, not even myself.

20

RAFE

Nobody hands you a manual when you become the boyfriend. There's no orientation packet explaining the actual scope of the job. I find that out the hard way over about two weeks, one small unglamorous task at a time, until I look up one afternoon and realize these two kids have quietly come to depend on me, and I never agreed to any of it out loud.

It starts with math.

"I don't get fractions," Eli announces, dropping his backpack on the taproom floor with the particular despair of a third grader who's decided the entire subject is a personal enemy. "Mom's on the phone with the compressor guy. Can you help?"

"I can try."

"That's not very reassuring."

"It's honest, which is better." I pull a stool up to his table, and he slides the worksheet over like he's handing off evidence in a trial. Six problems, all fractions, all currently making him look personally betrayed by the concept of denominators. "Show me one you got wrong."

He points to the third one, and I walk him through it the way Gunny once walked me through inventory math when I couldn't tell a ratio from a hole in the ground, slow, concrete, nothing abstract until the concrete part sticks. I use pizza slices, the same pizza cut different ways, still the same amount of pizza no matter how you slice it. Eli's face does something complicated somewhere around problem four, confusion cracking into something closer to understanding.

"Wait." He stares at the worksheet like it personally insulted him a minute ago and now owes him an apology. "That's it? That's the whole thing?"

"That's the whole thing."

"Why didn't my teacher just say pizza?"

"No idea. I'd have listened a lot harder in school if more of it involved pizza."

He tears through the last two problems at a speed that suggests the pizza metaphor did more work than either of us expected, and somewhere in the middle of problem six he glances up at me with a look I recognize, calculating, weighing something before he says it out loud.