Page 13

Ben's thumb moves across my knuckles. Once.

Then he drops his head until his mouth is at my ear, low enough that nobody else can hear it. His voice is the quietest I've heard it.

"Yes or no."

I understand him perfectly. It's the plainest question anyone has ever asked me, and I've never been so sure of anything.

"Yes," I breathe.

His free hand comes up and cups my jaw. His palm hot, his scarred thumb laid along my cheekbone. He tips my face up and kisses me.

It's not the kiss I expected. I expected a performance, a dip, a flourish, the sort of thing you do at weddings for photographs.

But he kisses me slowly, as if he has decided that no one on this green is in a hurry. His mouth warm and firm and a little rough with beard. I make a sound in my throat, a small startled one. His other hand slides down my back and settles at the base of my spine. I step closer, the length of me against him, and my breasts press to his chest, my belly to his belt, every inch of what I've spent a lifetime apologizing for meeting him there in the middle of Bloomfield Common.

My hands fist in his jacket, Bunny's slip crumpling in one fist. The tea cup slides out of the crook of my arm and hits the grass. I don't hear it.

The tuba, the crowd, the cider, the sun-bright Common fall away. There's his mouth, and the low sound he makes against mine, and the way his thumb moves on my cheek like he's learning me by heart.

Somebody whoops. It's Carmen. Somebody else applauds, a few polite claps that spread. I come back to the world one sense at a time. My heart going like a trapped bird, my mouth tender, my forehead tipped against Ben's chin.

His breathing isn't steady either.

"Still there?" he says, against my hair.

"I think so." My voice is a thread. "Are they gone?"

"Don't know. Didn't look."

I peek past his arm. Lacey is standing with both hands clasped under her chin and tears in her eyes, beaming. Grant is a faint, pale shape retreating toward the pie tent with his quarter-zip creased and his jaw set.

I look at Ben. He's looking at me. I start to laugh and hear it come out cracked. He smiles for the first time, a full one. Lopsided, unpracticed. It changes his face entirely.

"That wasn't in the rules," I say.

"Rules had a lot of gaps."

"I'm going to need a minute."

"Take two," he says, and he lets me lean there against his chest in the middle of Bloomfield Common while everyone pretends not to look.

It takes a little more than two.

By two o'clock the crowd has thickened until it's a single organism. Bunny is at the microphone on the bandstand in her pumpkin blazer, announcing the Founders' Day Salute in a voice that could shatter a window. I've been laughing at something Ben said about the Rotary club's hats when the word Salute goes through me like a splinter.

I forgot the cannon.

I forgot, God help me. It's been going off at two o'clock every Founders' Day since 1952, and I forgot that it's sitting on its stone plinth forty feet from where we're standing. That three men from the Historical Society in tricorn hats are rolling a ramrod down its barrel.

I turn. Ben's face is a locked door. His hand in mine has gone cold.

"I saw it this morning," he says, very evenly. "On the run. The flyer says four shots."

"We can go. We can go right now, there's a back way past the Granary—"

"I stay."

"Ben—"