7. Do You Want Me To?
Chapter seven
Do You Want Me To?
Sloane
Cider pressing day arrives the way the best and worst days tend to arrive, without ceremony, as simply the next thing on the calendar that has been waiting for you regardless of whether you feel ready.
I have been doing this alone for two years.
Before that, I did it with Jamie, which meant I did it while Jamie provided soundtrack and social coordination and the kind of enthusiastic presence that fills a barn with energy without necessarily filling it with useful labor.
Pressing day under the Jamie model involved music he chose and the rotating appearance of half of Willowbrook's fire station crew who came to enjoy the process and left before the cleanup.
I pressed the apples. Everyone else pressed their luck with the sample cider.
Today the barn lights are already on when I arrive at five-fifteen, which means Beck beat me here again, which is a pattern I find increasingly aggravating and increasingly difficult to attribute to anything other than the fact that he is genuinely committed to this orchard in a way I keep wanting to categorize as suspicious and keep failing to find evidence for.
He is already at the press, checking the gasket seals with the methodical focus of someone who has thought about this specific equipment while not standing in front of it.
He has brought hot chocolate, two cups, one with cinnamon and one without, same as every morning, the same covered-options approach he has never explained and I have never asked about because asking would mean acknowledging the gesture, and acknowledging the gesture would mean something I am not prepared to define.
I take the cinnamon one. We get to work.
Pressing day is labor in the most fundamental, physical sense of the word, the full-body engagement of moving fruit from one state into another, the mechanical rhythm of the press requiring coordination that cannot be faked or worked around.
The barn fills within the first hour with the specific sweetness of apple juice misting into the air, warm and sugary and fermented-adjacent, the smell that means the season has reached its purpose.
We are both soaked inside twenty minutes.
The juice gets everywhere, that is the nature of pressing, and by six o'clock my flannel is dark with it and my hair is pulling loose from my braid and sticking to my face and Beck has apple juice in his curls in a way that I am categorically not finding charming.
The press requires proximity. This is a mechanical reality and not a personal choice.
Two operators, coordinated movements, the pressure valve and the collection gate and the feed hopper all requiring management simultaneously.
The barn is warm from our combined exertion despite the October cold pressing against the walls from outside, and the warmth makes the proximity more present, more impossible to intellectually reclassify as neutral.
He moves behind me to reach the pressure valve, and his chest is close enough to my back that I can feel his body heat radiating through my wet shirt with the specific clarity of contact that is not quite contact, the almost-touch that the vocabulary of my body registers differently than my brain would prefer.
"You're in my space," I say.
"The valve adjustment requires—"
"My space, Calloway. Occupied. Claimed. Non-negotiable."
"The valve is approximately four inches from your left shoulder blade and is unfortunately bolted to the infrastructure of the press, which is in turn bolted to the barn floor, so the relocation options are limited."
"Then relocate yourself."
"I'm trying to help you not blow a gasket."
"I'm fine with the gaskets. Move."
He doesn't move. I don't escalate. We achieve a standoff that is technically a compromise, which I file under: things I am not examining.
The malfunction happens at two in the afternoon, which is peak productivity time, which is the kind of timing the universe deploys when it wants to make a point about hubris.
The gasket goes with the particular enthusiasm of something that has been holding on past its reasonable limit, and the resulting geyser of apple juice is immediate, comprehensive, and absolutely spectacular in its coverage. Ceiling. Walls. Equipment. Both of us.
Beck takes the full initial blast directly to the face and stands there in the aftermath dripping, apple pulp in his eyebrows, juice running down his curls in rivulets, wearing the expression of a man reevaluating the choices that led to this moment.
The laugh comes from somewhere I had honestly stopped checking on.
It arrives without warning, the involuntary, full-body variety that bypasses every filter and defense mechanism I have spent two years constructing, the kind of laugh that comes from a room inside yourself you forgot was still furnished.
I am bent double with it, hands on my knees, genuinely unable to speak for several seconds, and it feels like something moving in my chest that has been stuck.
"My suffering," Beck says, with the solemn dignity of a man covered in fruit pulp, "is apparently the funniest thing you've encountered recently."
"There is pulp," I manage, between gasping, "in your eyebrow. Both of them. It is sitting there like it belongs."
"Where else would it go? It's made a home. I respect the commitment."
"You look like a blended beverage that went badly wrong."
"Thank you. I have always aspired to smoothie energy." He reaches up and pulls a piece of apple peel from his ear with the resigned expression of a man who has made peace with his circumstances, and this detail specifically destroys whatever composure I had been reassembling.
He is smiling now too, and it is the particular smile I have been noticing and not cataloguing, the smaller one, the one that is not the easy social smile he defaults to in public but something more specific and less managed.
The smile of a person watching something they were not sure they would ever see.
I straighten. Catch my breath. My hands move before my brain signs off on the decision, reaching up and wiping apple pulp from his eyebrow with my thumb, the gesture entirely instinctive, the kind of thing you do for someone you have been close to for a long time, except we have been close to each other for three weeks and I have been maintaining a careful, deliberate distance for all of them.
My thumb against his brow bone. His skin warm under the cold juice. My hand goes still.
He is looking at me with an expression that contains several things simultaneously, green eyes that are patient and terrified and certain all at once, the emotional combination of someone who has been waiting for something they were not sure would happen and is now completely unprepared for it to be happening.
"Sloane." My name in his voice, quiet and careful.
"Don't say something clever," I tell him, which is not the instruction I thought I was going to give but is the one that comes out.
"You have apple pulp in your eyebrow as well," he says. "That's all I had."
"That is not what I thought you were going to say."
"What did you think I was going to say?"
"Something ridiculous. Like that you want to kiss me."
The pause that follows is approximately the length of a significant decision. "Do you want me to want to kiss you?"
"I want you to stop asking questions," I say, and then I close the remaining distance, grab the front of his soaked flannel, and kiss him.
This is not a tentative exploration. I do not have the capacity for tentative.
I kiss him the way I haul crates and run perimeter and argue with bank correspondence, with full commitment and absolutely no strategic reserve, and the collision of it is apple-flavored and warm and fierce and nothing, nothing, nothing like kissing Jamie.
Kissing Jamie was fireworks. The big visible kind, the kind you watch from a distance that makes you gasp at the spectacle.
Kissing Beck is a bonfire, the kind that takes longer to catch and burns completely differently once it does, the kind of heat that changes the air around it and takes everything you put into it and gives it back as something new.
His hands find my waist with a careful steadiness that tells me he is holding back, being deliberate and gentle with me, treating this like something that could break, and there is a part of me that wants to tell him I am not breakable and a part of me that wants him to keep being careful indefinitely, and the contradiction is so specifically and exhaustively me that I could weep about it.
I pull back. Step away. The cold air of the barn rushes into the space between us.
He is looking at me with an expression I have never seen directed at me before. Stunned and absolutely certain, the two things together, like a man who has been proven right about something he was terrified to believe.
"That was—" he starts.
"A mistake," I say, before he can finish.
"Sloane—"
"A comprehensive, apple-scented, objectively unprofessional mistake. We have a partnership agreement. We have a harvest to complete. We have a foreclosure deadline in three weeks." I turn back to the press and pick up the wrench. "Consider this a temporary lapse in judgment. It won't happen again."
"You kissed me like you were trying to set a world record," he says, and his voice has that lower register, the one I have been cataloguing against my own instructions, "and you're calling it unprofessional with a straight face. I'm genuinely impressed by the commitment."
"My commitment levels are consistently high. It's a documented character trait."
"Workplace memos are traditionally sent through email."
"Consider it delivered. Moving on."
The barn is quiet except for the dripping press and the October wind finding the gap in the west wall and my own heartbeat, which is conducting itself in a manner inconsistent with the calm professional stance I am attempting to project.
I drop the wrench once. Pick it up. Drop it again when my hands fail to cooperate with my intentions.
Do not turn around. Can feel him behind me with the specific hyper awareness I have been developing and ignoring for three weeks, the way you become attuned to weather that has been building on your particular horizon.
He does not push. He picks up the cleaning cloth and starts working on the press housing, and we clean the barn together in a silence that has changed its composition entirely, charged with something that has been named now, that exists in the space between us with the particular stubbornness of things that have been said out loud and cannot be unsaid.
By six o'clock the barn is cleaned, the press is functional again with a replacement gasket from the supply shelf, and the day's cider is cooling in the tanks with the quiet satisfaction of a job that got done despite everything that happened in the middle of it.
Beck says goodnight at the barn door. His hair is still faintly sticky from the juice. My flannel is a ruin. We look at each other for a moment that contains more than either of us says, and then he goes to the barn loft and I go to the farmhouse, and the October dark settles over the orchard.
Alone in my room, the farmhouse quiet around me, I sit on the edge of the guest bed and touch my lips.
They are chapped from the cold wind and from the specific pressure of a mouth I kissed and have been telling myself for four hours was a mistake.
The logic held up better before I was alone with it.
The carved apple blossom is on the nightstand where I put it two weeks ago and have not moved since, small and precise in the cherry wood, catching the lamplight in the particular way that handmade things catch light.
I pick it up. Hold it against my chest, over my sternum, where the warmth of contact from earlier is still doing something I cannot accurately categorize. The separation papers are in the drawer below. Two truths in this room, both of them mine, neither of them known to anyone who matters.
"Jamie," I say, quietly, to the room and the helmet on the barn hook and the mural on the fire station wall and all the complicated, unresolved grief that I carry in a shape that doesn't match what Willowbrook thinks it looks like, "I genuinely do not know what I am doing right now."
The room offers nothing back, which is appropriate. The room does not have opinions. The carved blossom is warm in my hand.
"But for the first time," I say, to the quiet and the dark and the October night pressing against the farmhouse windows, "I actually want to find out."