Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
This was working.
Dalene hadn't been sure it would. She'd lain awake at one in the morning running through all the ways it could go wrong; too obvious, not obvious enough, Betty Ann overreacting and blowing the whole thing, Lila seeing straight through it in the first thirty seconds.
She'd made a list. It had been a long list. None of the things on the list were happening.
What was happening was that people were smiling at her. Real smiles, smiles of relief, praising smiles where Dalene was sure she'd seen a few people mouth amen. The smiles of people who were happy to see her happy.
Mrs. Kowalski outside the jam stall. The Hendersons by the apple cider. Old Pete, who gave her a thumbs up.
The market smelled like autumn; wood smoke and roasting corn and the cidery sweetness of pressed apples.
Pumpkins stacked in orange towers by the entrance.
Gourds in colors she couldn't name. Bundles of dried wheat tied with twine, and late-season sunflowers going golden at the edges.
The warm bread smell drifting from the bakery tent made her feel that she should investigate.
She leaned into Eliot. The natural drift of two people walking slowly through a crowded market with nowhere specific to be. He looked down at her. He was grinning. She smiled back up at him.
"This is working," she said. "Nobody is pitying me. I feel like myself. Like things are just… normal. Like I'm just a person at a market with someone she likes."
"You like me?" Eliot said in a chiding voice.
Dalene bumped his shoulder in response. His shoulders were broad, steady. She remembered what it had felt like to be held against them. She wondered how she could orchestrate her way back into them.
She shivered at the thought. The air was barely moving, that still autumn warmth that Montana did in October before the cold arrived properly, the sky a pale clear blue with nothing dramatic in it. She shivered anyway.
"Are you cold?" He was already shrugging off his jacket.
He settled it around her shoulders before she'd finished deciding whether to say yes or no. The warmth of it landed all at once — his warmth, held in the fabric, cedar and something clean underneath it. Dalene was suddenly, completely engulfed in the smell of him.
He took her hand again. Not the easy palm-to-palm grip they'd been doing. He turned his hand and slid his fingers through hers.
"Is this okay?" He held up their entwined fingers.
Dalene nodded. She trusted herself with the nod. She did not trust herself with words.
A bluegrass duo played near the entrance, fiddle and guitar, something that made people's feet move without conscious or self-conscious thought. Children ran between the stalls trailing scarves. Someone was selling hot cider from a copper urn and the smell of it followed them halfway down the row.
She was looking at a display of honey varieties — twelve jars, amber to dark, labeled in handwritten script — when she saw it.
The herb stall. Bundles of dried herbs hanging from a wooden rack, tied with twine and labeled in small chalk tags.
Rosemary, thyme, sage, oregano. And at the end of the row, hanging in a full purple cluster, dried lavender. Hanging exactly like mistletoe.
"Let me just steer you away from your nemesis," she joked. But Eliot didn't budge.
"Is that lavender? I told you I can handle the smell. It's only the taste I object to."
"Progress," she said.
"Don't push it."
She looked at the bundle hanging above them.
Full and purple and pendulous, dried to the perfect density, the scent of it coming off in warm waves in the afternoon sun.
She thought about Vivienne's hand cream.
About the way Eliot had pressed his nose into her hair in the meadow and inhaled like he was taking a reading.
She thought about last night when he'd blown on the cinnamon roll to cool it down before eating, his lips pursing around the breath, and she'd watched his mouth do that and thought about what those lips would feel like.
Whether they'd be as soft as they looked.
Whether they'd be warm the way his hands were warm.
His hands were warm right now. Their palms were still pressed together, fingers laced, the full interlocked hold they'd fallen into somewhere between the herb stall and the lavender.
She was aware of every point of contact.
The press of his palm against hers. The way his fingers curved around hers with easy certainty.
"You know," she said, "it's hanging just like mistletoe."
"It?"
"The lavender."
Eliot looked at it. He looked at her. His lips parted.
His gaze dropped to her mouth. Just briefly. Just a fraction of a second. Long enough.
She thought about how easy it would be. How small the distance was. How their hands were already doing the thing she was thinking about their mouths doing.
She did not move.
Neither did he.
The lavender swayed slightly above them in the market breeze, entirely unbothered. And then everything changed.
Dalene felt it the way you felt a change in air pressure — not dramatic, just suddenly aware that something had shifted, that the atmosphere between them was different from what it had been a moment ago.
Eliot's eyes came back up to hers. He stiffened. All at once, the way a man went still when something behind you required his full attention.
Dalene turned to find Tristan was fifteen feet away by the root vegetable display, looking at them with an expression she could only classify as guarded. His jaw was set in the way it went when he was processing something he hadn't expected.
Brooke was beside him.
Brooke was not looking at Tristan.
Brooke was looking between Tristan's face and Dalene's, back and forth.
Her expression was the one Dalene knew. She knew it because she had worn it herself.
She had worn it the first time she'd seen Tristan and Brooke together after their friendly reunion, standing too close in a hallway, and understood in the space of a single breath what closure had actually meant.
It was the look of a woman doing arithmetic she didn't like the answer to.