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I set my phone back in my lap face down, but the grin sticks on my face clear as day.

“I need some kind of costume excuse for Walker to be shirtless.” Lottie chews on a Skittle and taps her lip. “What could that be?”

I reach over and slide the bowl of candy toward me, grabbing a handful mostly so I have something to do with my fingers.

“Tarzan and Jane.”

“Shirtless Legolas?”

“We have got to leave Legolas alone, no one is going as Legolas.” Ada pinches her nose and Odelia sighs. “My dreams are just dreams.”

“What about you and Knox?” Lottie asks. “What do you want to be?”

“Let me ask him.”

I text Knox to ask what he thinks about couples costumes and he comes back with a response immediately.

My smile stretches. “He says a pair of Crocs.”

“Knox needs to not be in charge of anything related to party planning…ever.”

I text him back Ada’s quote, word for word.

Knox: Tell them I look excellent in anything blue.

I look up. “He’s…open to compromise?”

Lottie snorts. “You two are going to be unbearable.”

“They’re in love,” Odelia coos, and even with the teasing, I don’t have it in me to deny it. I am in love.

Chapter Thirty-Two Knox

Lover’s Lane is less of a “lover’s lane” and more of a horrendous highway on Halloween night. I knew from years before that Riley’s house, along with the entire street, went all out for the night; every other house was draped in orange and purple lights, fake cobwebs, and those weird hand sensors that try to grab at your ankle if you walk on the grass. There’s plastic skeletons zip-tied to porch railings and fog machines that are mixing in the air with the smell of someone’s dad excessively grilling hot dogs, despite the fact that most everyone’s diet tonight is going to consist of Kit Kats and Twizzlers Pull ‘N’ Peel.

It wasn’t my first Lover’s Lane Halloween by a long shot, having trick-or-treated up here with Felicity nearly every year, but it was my first one with Felicity at my side as something more than a friend or a bodyguard for her pillowcase of candy.

Picking matching costumes this time should have been a bit easier. We’ve avoided anything too…romantic in the past, but now it’s like all the doors have been flung open, and we had too many choices. So many that we ended up waiting until the very last second, aka last night after we swung on my front porch swing for about two hours, and eventually decided I would be a gardener and she would be a bed of flowers.

Fitting, considering how much I care for her, and the older she gets, the more she blooms as her own person.

We’re in front of the Waters’ house—Odelia and Lawson’s parents’ home at the end of the cul-de-sac with a massive wraparound porch and a big enough yard to host the annual Saturday after Thanksgiving football game for the street. A long table stretches across the lawn with multiple bowls of candy and homemade treats and a hand-painted sign that says TAKE ONE (OR TWO, WHO CARES, NO ONE IS WATCHING) taped on the edge.

A herd of kids skirt past us in a blur of capes and cheap face paint, orange plastic pumpkins swinging around their wrists, and someone in an inflatable bumblebee costume face-plants into the raked pile of leaves by the mailbox before popping back up like nothing happened.

Felicity’s hand is in mine, fingers tangled together, and she laughs—warm and brighter than any of the pumpkin-shaped porch lights in front of us.

I glance over at her and smile too. Her costume is way better than I imagined it would be after less than twelve hours of notice; it’s a short, light-yellow dress that rests at her mid-thighs, and when she walks or spins around, the skirt of it inches up just enough to make my heart rate double. There’s little flowers, blue and pink bursts of color, glued or maybe sewn across the dress; even more flowers are tucked into her hair, woven carefully against her long, dark curls spilling down her back in soft spirals.

Her skin glows under the warmth of the porch lights, and she gives me a smile, all soft and sweet like she wants me to believe she’s innocent, while I’m over here having to remind myself how to breathe.

My own costume is less of a costume and more of a typical work outfit but swapped with a flannel instead of a Willow Creek T-shirt under my overalls—it’s so far the least impressive Halloween costume we’ve seen since leaving Riley’s, but Felicity stares at my rolled-up sleeves and messy hair as if she’s forgetting how to breathe too.

“You okay?” She squeezes my hand.

“Yeah,” I say a little too quick and a little high-pitched before clearing my throat. “Feel a bit underdressed.”

She laughs, musical. “But you’re the perfect gardener.”