Page 28 of The Last Great Omegaverse

“A balloon payment,” she says, before I’ve even got the truck door shut. “Coop mentioned it. Due date lines up with my deadline almost exactly, doesn’t it?”

“Close enough.”

“How close is close enough, Silas?”

“Within the same week.” I don’t see the point in softening it further than that. “The loan comes due the same week as the harvest festival. If it’s not covered, the bank starts talking about the land as collateral, and that conversation gets a great deal more complicated if we’ve suddenly got forty more acres and full water rights sitting in our column instead of yours.”

“So fix it. Sell more. Grow more. There’s got to be something you can do to make sure your farm doesn’t end up in the bank’s hands.”

“There’s one way I’ve found that doesn’t end with one of us losing something.” I choose the words deliberately, watching her take them in. “The shared-resource agreement your grandmother and Cal’s father signed doesn’t just cover water and equipment. It covers supply, if both farms sign onto it jointly. There’s a regional co-op contract, better price per bushel than either of us has ever gotten selling solo, but the tonnage minimum’s steep. Neither farm’s hit it alone in over a decade. Not separately.”

“A co-op?”

I watch her do the math before I have to say it outright. “If we combined our produce, just for this season, I think we can clear it. It’s a long shot. But it’s the only path I’ve found where your farm making its deadline and ours surviving aren’t fighting each other.”

Her face goes very rigid, the stillness of someone figuring out a problem with a disliked conclusion. “So it’s not just theoretical anymore. It’s not just some old easement clause sitting quietly in the background. You genuinely need me to fail. Financially. Concretely. Right now, this month, not someday down the line.”

“I need the payment covered. That’s not the same thing as needing you to fail.”

“Isn’t it, though? Because those two things just became a great deal harder to tell apart.”

“Wren—”

“No.” Her voice cracks on the word, not from tears, from something angrier and more tired than that. She steps down off the porch to close the distance between us instead of letting me keep it. “I need you to actually answer me. Not the version where you say something true but incomplete and let me fill in the rest with whatever’s kind enough to keep me from panicking. Are you helping me because you want to see me succeed, or because some part of you needs me to fail, and you’ve been managing that need so carefully I haven’t been able to tell the difference?”

It’s the question I’ve been avoiding since the night in the truck, since before that even, since the first morning I stood in her kitchen doing math in my head while Coop handed out muffins. I owe her better than another non-answer dressed up as honesty.

“Both,” I say. “The true answer is both, and I hate that it’s both, and I’ve spent three weeks trying to find a version of myself where it’s only one, and I can’t get there. I want you to succeed. Truly. I want to watch you pull this farm back from the dead and stand at that festival with a full crop and prove every doubt this town’s ever had about you wrong. That’s real. That’s not a story I’m telling myself to feel better about the rest of it.”

“And the rest of it?”

“The rest of it is that some nights, when the ledger’s open and the numbers aren’t adding up any better than they did the night before, some ugly, tired part of me does the math on what happens if you don’t make it. And I hate that part of myself more than I’ve hated anything in a long time, because it means I can’t hand you a clean answer. Can’t tell you my wanting you has got nothing riding on it, the way I told you in that truck like it was some kind of promise I could actually keep.”

“You lied to me.”

“I told you what I hoped was true. Wanted it to be true badly enough that I said it before I’d finished earning it.” My voice sounds huskier than I mean it to, control slipping in a way it hasn’t in years, not since the bank took my father’s land and I stood in an empty barn deciding never to let myself feel this exposed again. “I don’t know how to separate wanting you from needing the land, Wren. I’ve tried. I run the numbers and I run my own feelings right alongside them, and I can’t find the seam where one stops and the other starts. Doesn’t mean the wanting isn’t real. Just means I can’t promise you it’s uncomplicated, and you deserve a man who can promise you that much, at least.”

She’s quiet a long moment, arms still crossed, breathing hard in the cold. When she finally speaks her voice has dropped, less angry now, closer to something rawer.

“I don’t need uncomplicated,” she says. “I’ve had uncomplicated. It was a lie dressed up, and it fell apart the second anything real was asked of it. I don’t trust uncomplicated anymore. What I need is somebody who tells me the truth even when the truth’s ugly and inconvenient and doesn’t make either of us look particularly good. Which is, annoyingly, exactly what you just did.”

“That supposed to make me feel better?”

“I don’t know. Does it?”

“A little.” Something in my chest loosens, just slightly, the first real give in weeks. “Doesn’t fix the balloon payment, though. Doesn’t fix that every day this deadline gets closer, the math in my head gets louder whether I want it to or not.”

“Then we hit the co-op’s numbers.” She steps closer, close enough now that I can see the exact moment her anger folds into something else entirely, something tender, more dangerous. “Together. Both farms, one contract. You cover your loan with our crop instead of either of us scraping by alone, and neither of us ever has to find out what happens if it falls short, because it’s not going to fall short. I’m not giving you or this whole town the satisfaction.”

“That’s not why I want you to succeed.”

“I know.” Her hand comes up, flat against my chest, right over where my heart’s currently beating erratically. “But it’s a good deadline to hold onto anyway. It gives us both something to aim at besides just waiting to see which version of you wins.”

I don’t remember deciding to kiss her.

One second we’re standing in the cold with her hand against my chest and three weeks of restraint finally cracking open between us, and the next my mouth’s on hers, claiming, more honest than precise, all the control I’ve spent this whole conversation barely holding onto finally giving out entirely.

She kisses back like she’s been waiting exactly as long as I have, fisting a hand in my shirt, pulling me closer instead of away, and something in my gut that’s been braced for rejection since the moment Coop’s confession landed is subdued, replaced by something hungrier, more certain.