Chapter 22
Joe “showing” me his feelings had to be the single most confusing, but amazing set of experiences in my life. Starting with the fact that he found my address—the same way I’d found his. By going out of his way to ask around town about me.
Which he told me via text.
Because yes, we texted now.
But only after he’d shown up at my house bright and early Monday morning.
I blamed Madison. (She’d been the one to spill the beans.) Because the day after Joe and I had kissed on his porch—I still couldn’t believe that was real—there he was.
Giant and golden and gorgeous.
Knocking at my front door.
I swung it open after checking through the peep hole to see who needed help before the sun had even come up.
Immediately, my eyes widened. To say I’d been surprised would be an understatement.
That had been my constant state of being for the last twenty-four hours, it felt.
Surprise and trepidation. Fighting the fear that Joe had called me out for.
I hadn’t realized Joe would be so…ah…quick about his little plan.
Or so adorable.
JesusfuckingChrist.
When I swung the door open, I was met with the completely arresting sight of Joe in a puffer coat. A puffer coat. He looked like a giant marshmallow, and I wanted to bite him. So serious, standing there, looking down at me with those big dark eyes.
Before I could open my mouth, say good morning, ask him why he was here—any of that—Joe spoke.
“Here,” he said at the same time he literally shoved a cup of piping hot coffee toward me. I grabbed it before it could spill through the little hole at the top. Thank god for lids, that’s all I’ll say.
“No sugar. No cream,” Joe recited. “Black like you said you like.”
Wow.
That was just...I hardly knew what to say to that.
“Thanks, Joe—” I opened my mouth to invite him in but he was already down the steps and heading toward his truck. Inside it, Patrick from the farm sat in the driver’s seat, eyeing me with obvious mirth. He waved. I waved back, still juggling my coffee.
Ah.
So, Joe had been about to run some farm-related errands and he’d still stopped by to give me coffee.
I was half-asleep and therefore didn’t appreciate the full magnitude of the gesture.
Not until I’d headed back inside, drank halfway through the cup he’d brought me, the caffeine kicked in, and I realized what Joe had just unknowingly done.
He’d claimed me.
In public.
Maybe not as his boyfriend—oh god, just thinking about the future possibility of that made me want to scream—but as his something. Someone. As the person he went to before his day even began.
Belleville was going to eat that shit up.
Especially as Patrick had been Joe’s witness. He was worse than I was sometimes when it came to gossip, and I had no doubt by the end of the day, everyone in town would know that Joe Milton was bringing me coffee.
I grinned, then beat my head on the table for good measure, and called my mom.
“I’ve created a monster,” I sighed, head tipped back, coffee clutched to my chest. “An adorable, marshmallow-looking, earnest-as-fuck monster.”
“Sounds like it’s your own fault,” she said in reply, because she clearly hadn’t listened to a thing I’d just said.
She was in “agenda” mode. Which meant nothing that came out of my mouth counted.
“Are you coming to the gala next Friday?” Mom was usually better at chatting.
She ate up gossip the same way I did, especially when it was pertinent to my life specifically.
I could only blame myself for her current state, however, because…I’d been dodging her texts. And her calls. Avoiding all information surrounding the yearly holiday gala. Apparently I could no longer stall.
“Yes, I’ll be coming,” I sighed. “I always come. You know that.” I hated that party with a burning passion. Bumping elbows with the “elites.” Listening to the way a lot of them talked about the “common folk,” like they were royalty and not jerks with silver spoons tucked inside their assholes.
I always went, though.
“If you’re still hoping to get more investors for expanding your Santa Fund project, it’ll be lucrative,” Mom reminded me.
“I know.” I clutched my Joe-coffee close, soaking up its warmth and the reminder of the farm boy who’d given it to me. Letting him and his cornsilk hair give me strength. “It’s just…since Mary stopped coming with me…”
“They look at you strangely, I know.” Mom’s voice turned sympathetic. “Could you not bring another date?”
“No.” My immediate reaction was denial. But then— “Ah…maybe?” Because I realized…
if I was going to let Joe “show me” how he felt about me, I should at least consider being honest. He was wooing only a small portion of who I was.
This might be a way to test the waters before I revealed my big Santa secret.
Maybe.
It might chase him away.
Because there was no revealing the kind of money and status I came from without eventually telling him about the Santa Fund. One day he’d know what I’d done. How I’d lied and tricked him. He might not want to bring me coffee ever again.
A smaller, darker voice in my head whispered that my true worries lay in his reaction.
If Joe knew I had money, would he treat me differently?
My gut response was to say, no. Of course not.
Joe was the kind of guy who froze his nuts off sitting in the snow just so he could watch a doe blink.
He was the kinda guy who lived in a decrepit old house with holes in the fucking walls—only fixing it so that other people wouldn’t judge him.
He didn’t strike me as superficial.
But…I’d been burned before.
Could I tell Joe?
Did I want to tell Joe? To open a door I knew would never shut?
Joe brought me coffee again the next day. And the next. And the next. On the fourth day, he brought me a pastry too. Only popping by for a split second every other time, with Patrick grinning from the truck, his phone out to record us.
We were the talk of the town.
Everywhere I went, someone was making comments.
Leanne—when I was helping her restock her book store before my shift at the grocery store began—congratulated me on my requited feelings.
Baxter—when I was grabbing donuts for work—gave me a wink and told me the pastries were “on the house”.
The Montgomery Smut Club bequeathed me with a hand-embroidered t-shirt that read, “Joeson 5ever.” Which they informed me was Joe’s and my “ship name.” They’d made one for him too—and I’d had to convince them that it was better if I gave it to him.
I had no intention of doing that.
I didn’t know how Joe would handle our…ah…pack of well-wishers.
Truthfully? Unless someone outright told him, “The entire town of Belleville thinks that you and Jason are officially dating because you keep bringing him coffee,” I doubted Joe would even notice.
Joe and I had complementary strengths.
A fact that’d been made very clear to me when I’d been helping him at his house.
And while he knew his way around a hammer—oh god, don’t make that dirty, brain—the social stuff was more my thing.
I knew how embarrassed he’d be to have so much attention on him. Even positive attention. I supposed, in a way, I was protecting him from it. Letting him live in Joe-land where everyone and their dog weren’t speculating about his love life.
“I bet he’s a bottom,” Matilda Deed had said as I’d been on my way out of the B&B. I paused, so shocked she was speculating about my sex life—and knew what a bottom was—that I nearly walked right into the door.
“Which one?” Beatrice Montgomery, the president of the club replied.
She was Ben Montgomery’s mother. Who just so happened to be the person behind the werewolf smut that had inspired the club’s rebranding from Belleville’s Bookish Besties to what it currently was.
Everyone had been surprised to discover that serious, buttoned-up Doctor Montgomery was the king of primal kink.
It’d started an epidemic.
And now, over a year later, that had only expanded.
“Joe, of course,” Matilda said. “He’s an omega if I ever saw one.”
My cheeks were red all the way out the door.
Speculation was not the only thing I was made privy to that week.
While in line at the grocery store on day four of Joe’s “wooing” phase, Marty B.
—not to be confused with Marty K., who lived on Elm—informed me that he, “Hoped Joe and I lived a long and happy life together.” I’d been mid-process adding him to my holiday-help list, and had been caught off guard in a way I normally wasn’t by the comment.
“What?” I finished jotting down his name, address, and the task he needed assistance with. My head was still full of Christmas lights and the logistics of finding a ladder we could borrow to throw them onto his exterior. Suffice to say, I was distracted.
“I just mean, we’re all glad to see you with someone,” Marty said, smiling at me from behind his frankly massive mustache.
The pom-pom on his hat bobbed. “Joe seems like a nice guy. I heard he let Mrs. Lancaster grope his biceps. Won points from me for sure. You get that old and it’s hard to find biceps like that. ”
“Honestly? It’s hard to find biceps like that even when you aren’t old,” I said, still a bit dazed by the entire conversation.
“And boobs,” Madison tacked on unhelpfully from her register. She was checking out another customer, who—when I glanced up—had stopped putting items on the conveyor belt so she could listen in.
“Boobs?” Marty looked perplexed.
“Joe has the most incredible tits known to man,” Madison clarified. “Also, ass.”
Marty considered that, eyebrows knitting together as he pictured it.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this but—can we please stop objectifying Joe?” I didn’t love the idea of anyone else looking at him like that, even if his chest and ass really were legendary.
“Okay, Mr. Jealousy,” Madison teased. “Don’t make me get the spray bottle.”
The front door swung open and speak-of-the-devil, there he was.