Matt #3
Savannah came by with a tray and started setting down pumpkin pie—one slice in front of Becca and Levi, with two forks.
One slice between Harper and Jude, with two forks.
Both took it without blinking, because that’s what you do, that’s what a shared dessert is, and Harper was already stealing the corner of Jude’s side of the crust before Savannah had finished putting it down.
Then she set one slice down in the middle of Elizabeth and me. And laid two forks beside it.
The booth went silent.
Elizabeth looked at the forks. I looked at the forks. Savannah tucked the empty tray under her arm and stood there entirely unrepentant.
“Simon says congratulations,” she said.
“Congratulations on what?” I said.
“He didn’t specify.”
And she walked off, and the table held its breath for one second before Becca broke, and then all of them were gone—Jude slid halfway down the bench, Harper hid in her elbow, Levi wheezed something about the kitchen having eyes—and Elizabeth, pink clear to her ears, laughing, wrecked, picked up one fork and held out the other one to me across four inches of table like she was serving me a summons.
“Well, Officer,” she said. “The pub has ruled.”
“I don’t want to make it weird.”
“It’s already weird. Eat the pie.”
So, I took a bite. We ate the pie, one plate, two forks, in front of four witnesses and a jukebox, her fork fencing mine off the last blob of whipped cream while the table pretended to talk about something else.
If you had told me a year ago that my favorite hour of the entire fall would happen in a booth at Holloway’s, being laughed at, sharing a dessert with a woman who’d made him promise not to fall in love with her—I would have said you had the wrong man.
But somewhere between the pretzels and the pie, sitting in the warmth with her knee against mine and my sister’s whole scheme glowing around us like the amber lights, I stopped pretending I didn’t know what this was.
She walked out with me at the end of it. The others peeled off in the lot with a chorus of goodnights and one long look apiece, and then it was Elizabeth and me under the awning with the rain coming down silver past the neon, her keys in her hand, neither of us moving toward our vehicles.
“About last night,” she said, quieter now, the performance set down with the crowd gone. “You didn’t say anything. In there. You could’ve; it would’ve been a good story—Elizabeth Starling, festival queen, crying in a pumpkin patch. A total stress fest.”
“Wasn’t mine to tell.”
She looked at me a long moment through the neon-pink rain light, and her face was open in a way she seldom let it be indoors, in front of people, in the light.
“Thank you,” she said. “For not mentioning anything. And for sitting in the mud with me. I don’t think I said it last night.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“You sat down,” I said. “You didn’t get up and go inside, and you didn’t tell me to leave.
I knew what that meant.” I looked out at the rain coming off the awning.
“I’ve been the one out in the dark, Elizabeth.
I know exactly what it’s worth to have somebody just sit there and not make you talk about it. ”
She went still for a second. Then she smiled, and for a second the awning and the rain made a room around us, and there it was again—that strand of hair, the one that had come loose in the pub and stuck to her cheek, damp now from the mist blowing in past the neon.
I’d spent the whole evening not moving it.
Sitting on my hands, near enough to do it a dozen times, and not doing it, because there’d been a table full of people and no good reason and every reason.
There was no table now.
I reached out and tucked it back behind her ear.
Slow. One knuckle grazing the cool of her cheek on the way, careful, the way I do everything—and I felt her go completely still under it, felt the breath she’d been about to take just stop, her eyes coming up to mine and holding there, wide and dark in the pink light, all the ready jokes gone out of them.
For a moment neither of us said anything.
She looked at me like she was seeing some new fact about me and rearranging everything else to fit it.
I thought about closing the distance. I watched her think about it too, and neither of us did—not yet, not out of cowardice this time but out of something more like patience, like knowing the season was long and there was no sense rushing what was already, unmistakably, on its way.
“Goodnight, Matt,” she said, and her voice came out a half-step lower than before. She walked backward toward her hatchback, keys spinning once around her finger, her eyes not leaving mine until she had to turn.
“Goodnight, Elizabeth.”
I drove home through the rain and let myself into my dark house, and for once it didn’t feel like a guard post on an empty building. It felt temporary. It felt like a place a man waits, between the good part and the next good part.
I lay awake a while, being terrified about that, and somewhere in the dark the terror quietly changed costume and became something I was even more afraid to name.
Hope, probably. It had been so long I forgot what it felt like.