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“I look like I was just kissed against a building.”

“I like that look on you.”

We walk back into the fall fest like two people who were absolutely just getting cider, casual, a respectable eighteen inches of space between us, and I am doing an excellent job of appearing normal.

We make it about forty feet before we run into the life group. Half of them, clustered around a table, Brandon and Natalie and a few others I’ve learned names for, and they see us coming and there’s a beat. A tiny beat. Where everyone stops talking. And I don’t think anything of it, because I am floating six inches off the ground.

“Hey, you two,” Brandon says.

“Hi!” I say. Trying to act normal. “This is so fun.”

“It really is,” Brandon agrees.

And then Natalie, who has never once in her life let a silence live, tilts her head, looks from me to Luke and back, and says, at full volume, with total sincerity, “I didn’t know you two were dating.”

Luke and I answer at the exact same time.

“We’re not,” I say.

“We are,” he says.

We look at each other.

“It’s... new,” I try.

“Very new,” Luke agrees, and I can hear him fighting a smile, the traitor. “As of about twenty minutes ago.”

“Twenty minutes ago?” Natalie lights up. “Like today? Like right now today?”

But here’s what I can’t figure out, floating in my post-kiss haze, and it must be all over my face, because I’m looking at her thinking, how does she know?

Natalie reads it right off me. Of course she does. She hooks her arm through mine like we’ve been best friends for years, which in Natalie time we have, and lowers her voice to a whisper that is somehow still fully audible.

“We all saw you kissing on the side of the building,” she says, warm and thrilled and absolutely merciless. “It was so cute. I almost cried.”

I would like the earth to open.

I turn, slowly, and look back the way we came, past the cider stand, and there it is. A clear, unobstructed view of the exact stretch of brick wall where I just came apart in a firefighter’s arms.

“Everyone saw,” I say faintly.

“Everyone saw,” Natalie confirms, patting my arm. “Highlight of the fall fest.”

Luke, beside me, has given up entirely. He’s laughing, that low easy laugh, no shame in it anywhere, and he puts a hand on the small of my back, in front of God and the cider table. “Well. Guess it’s not a secret.”

I put my face in my hands.

We stay another hour, because you cannot kiss a man against a church and then leave immediately, that’s a scandal, and also because it turns out I don’t want to leave.

But eventually the crowd thins and the food trucks start packing up, and Bo is running on the last of his battery, gray shorts grass-stained, a plastic duck in one hand and Dottie’s hand in the other.

“I’ve got to take him,” Luke says. We’re by my car in the emptying lot, and he says it like it costs him. “He’s about done. He’ll melt down in the next hour. I can feel it coming.”

“Go. Take care of him.” I mean it. “I’m fine. This was...” I don’t have the word. For once I don’t reach for one. “It was a good day.”

“It was a good day,” he agrees.

Bo, being loaded into the back seat, yells, “Bye, Olivia! I named my duck Gerald.”