Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The truck started making the noise a mile out.
Not loud. Not catastrophic. Just… wrong.
Ivy felt the subtle shift under her hands on the wheel, the way the engine hesitated like it had lost its rhythm. She frowned, easing off the gas as the road curved toward the gated entrance and the Purple Heart Ranch came into view ahead.
The entrance was marked simply: a wooden sign between two posts; the lettering burned in rather than painted. Beyond it, the road curved gently, and the property opened up gradually, as if it was deciding how much to show you.
The wide fields ran gold and unhurried on both sides of the drive, the grass moving in a low wind that didn't seem to be in a hurry about anything.
The mountains behind the property appeared soft at the edges.
A pair of horses moved along the far paddock fence with the easy companionship of animals that had long since worked out their arrangement with each other and with the afternoon.
Everything about it was still. And then there was the truck.
The Sugar and Spite truck came up the drive like the static that came over a loudspeaker announcement in grade school; squeaky, unmodulated, and with a persistent hum.
The truck was pink against the gold fields, the engine doing its uneven stuttering thing; the chassis giving a shudder over the cattle grid that sent the cardamom cakes she'd made this morning sliding in their container on the passenger seat.
A dog near the garden fence lifted its head at the sound. One of the horses shifted.
Ivy patted the dashboard. "I know, I know. Just a little further."
The truck hesitated again, a long, slow stutter that felt more like a complaint than a mechanical failure, and then evened out just enough to get her to the mess hall lot. She pulled in and cut the engine and sat for a moment in the sudden quiet, listening to the truck tick and settle around her.
Then she exhaled and pushed the door open. Finn was already coming out. He must have heard all the commotion.
His expression was set in a frown she recognized now—not frustration, not annoyance, but assessment. He moved toward the truck with purpose, eyes already scanning, taking in what he could before she said anything.
A couple of the guys came around from the side of the building; boots on gravel, easy movement, the kind of presence that filled a space without crowding it.
"We’ve got it," one of them said, glancing at Finn. "Go on. We’ll fix the truck. You two worry about winning the competition."
Ivy stepped closer to Finn without thinking. He reached for her hand. The contact was grounding.
Real. That was the word. This was real.
Maybe she could have both. The show. The platform that would take everything she had built and expand it.
And this.
Him.
This place.
Maybe it didn’t have to be one or the other. Maybe she could go, film what needed to be filmed, and come back. Maybe she could build something there and still keep this—keep him—anchored here, something steady she returned to.
The thought settled in her chest, not perfect, not fully formed, but possible.
Finn’s thumb brushed lightly against her hand, as if he was checking that she was still there.
She looked up at him.
He was watching her.
Not questioning.
Just… present.
Ivy stepped closer.
Let herself lean into him. Just for a second. Just enough to feel the solid warmth of him, the scent of him—earth and sun and something clean beneath it that she had started to associate with safety.
His mouth found hers easily. No hesitation. A brief kiss, not meant to consume, just to confirm.
Still here.
Still this.
He pulled back just enough to look at her. "How was your morning?"
She huffed a small laugh. "Complicated."
"Yeah," he said, like that tracked. "We’ll get to that."
He didn’t push. Didn’t ask for more than that. Just took her hand again and led her toward the kitchen.
When she walked into the space, her first thought was that it was Instagram Ready.
The light had been set to catch the counter at an angle that softened everything without flattening it, the kind of warm, diffused glow that made butter look richer and tomatoes look like they held their own light.
The cutting board had been nudged just off-center, leaving negative space in the frame where a bowl or a finished plate could land naturally, as if it had always belonged there.
Even the utensils had been arranged within reach, but not cluttered; each one placed where it would enter the frame cleanly if she needed it.
It didn’t look like a set. It looked like a kitchen that happened to be beautiful. Like someone understood that the point wasn’t the camera—it was the work—and the camera had simply been invited to witness it in the best possible light.
"Do you want to set up your camera first?"
Finn’s voice pulled her out of it. Out of the light. Out of the framing. Out of the realization that he had built this space for her without asking, without needing credit, just… because.
Ivy turned. Looked at him. At his face; open, steady, unguarded in a way that didn’t belong anywhere near the machinery of social media or the sharp-edged world Devon had just tried to pull her back into.
She could already see it, if she let herself: comments, edits, narratives that twisted something real into something consumable.
She didn’t want that. Not for him. Not for Finn.
She could handle if she went back. She could pull on the facade. But she didn't want to see another Finn, but the grumpy, grinning one in front of her.
"I’m not filming."
Finn blinked, "No? You haven’t posted in a few days."
"I’ve been busy with my new boyfriend."
Oops.
Ivy's stomach dropped, her throat tightening as the realization hit her a split second too late. She had not just said that out loud. Oh, how she wished that had been a take, and she could go back and edit it out of the video. They hadn’t even been on a real date.
Finn had gone still. Not shut down. Not guarded. Just… paused, like he was recalibrating in real time.
Then he grinned. It spread across his face like something he didn’t bother holding back. "That guy sounds awful if he’s not recognizing and anticipating your needs."
Ivy glanced at the camera. The light coming in the window. The careful, thoughtful setup he had built for her without making a thing of it. He had anticipated her.
That didn't change her mind. It made her want to double down. She did not want to share him. Didn’t want to take something that was his—this instinctive way he showed up—and put it out there for people to comment on, to dissect, to claim.
She thought of Devon. Of that world. Of the way it had taken and taken until there was nothing left that felt like hers.
Finn was still watching her, that same grin lingering. "If I were your boyfriend, I’d take you out on a candlelit date and dazzle your palate."
He stepped closer.
Ivy met him halfway without thinking. "I don’t want to go out with you."
His brow lifted, just slightly.
"I don’t want someone else cooking for me. I want to stay in with you. I want you to cook for me."
Another step. Now they were close. Close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, the shift of his breath as it matched hers.
"I want you to dazzle my palate," she finished.
There was barely an inch between them now. Close enough that the space felt intentional. Chosen.
Finn’s gaze dropped to her mouth, then lifted back to her eyes. "So, I guess that makes me your boyfriend."
"I guess that makes me your girlfriend."
The words settled between them, simple and enormous all at once. And then he kissed her.
It started softly. Finn's hand came up to her jaw first, the way it always did, his thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone like he was checking something he already knew the answer to.
She felt the calluses on his palm — three years of farm work, of soil and wire and early mornings — warm against her skin, and the contrast of it, the gentleness of those hands, never stopped doing something to her.
Ivy kissed him back. She had cooked with a hundred flavor profiles and written about all of them, and none of that vocabulary was available to her right now. There was just this. Just him.
Her hands found his flannel and held on.
He made a low sound when she did, and kissed her deeper, his other hand finding the small of her back and drawing her in with unhurried certainty because she was his girlfriend.
She kissed him back — not urgent, not demanding, just absolutely sure because he was her boyfriend.
Her heart was doing the thing. The truck engine thing.
That uneven, urgent pounding that started in her chest and moved outward.
The pounding made her aware of her own pulse in her fingertips, in her throat, in the hand she had fisted in his shirt.
She thought distantly that she should probably do something about her knees, which had developed opinions about load-bearing.
She didn't do anything about her knees.
Finn pulled back just enough to breathe, his forehead dropping to hers, and she felt his breath warm against her mouth and the slight roughness of his jaw against her cheek and the smell of him close like this — flannel and coffee and soil and something underneath all of it that she had no name for except Finn, specifically Finn, no one else — and her heart did the other thing.
The settling thing. Like something had found its correct speed and intended to stay there.