15. Matt #2
I was working the gate, because they were short-staffed tonight and I had apparently become a man who spent his nights off taking tickets at a family farm for reasons I declined to examine too closely, a sentence I would not have believed about myself two months back.
I was still in the costume, minus the pot, but the rest of it had stayed on, because there’d been no time to change and, if I’m honest, because Elizabeth kept looking at me in it.
I took tickets. I stamped hands. I directed traffic, found three lost children, and reunited two of them with the correct parents on the first try, which around here counts as detective work.
And I watched Elizabeth run the whole night from everywhere at once, lit up under the work lights with her clipboard and her knit cap and a grin for every single person who came through, the hub the entire wheel turned on.
She caught my eye across the crowd a dozen times.
Every time, my heart turned over like an engine catching, and every time I told it to settle, and every time it ignored me.
Around nine, she finally came to me.
She’d been working her way over for twenty minutes—I’d watched her do it, watched her get waylaid every three feet by someone who needed a wristband or a refund or a verdict on a lost mitten.
Then she arrived at my gate a little breathless, cheeks gone pink from the cold and the running, with two paper cups of cider and an expression she was working hard to keep casual.
“Reinforcements,” she said, and handed me one. “It will warm you up.”
Our fingers overlapped on the warm cup, hers cold from the night, and she didn’t pull back, and neither did I, and we stood there for a beat longer than the handoff strictly required with our hands on one cup of cider like a couple of teenagers.
“You’ve held this post for hours straight, Hartford. People are starting to think you work here now”
“Worse places to work.” I took the cup. “Decent cider. Good company, intermittently.”
“Intermittently.” She pressed a hand to her chest, mortally wounded, and leaned a hip against the gate, settling in on her side of it, near enough now that I could see the lights caught in her eyes and the freckles the cold had brought up across her nose.
“I’ll have you know I am excellent company.
I’m just spread thin tonight—there’s a lot of me to go around and a whole festival demanding it. ”
“I’ve noticed.” I let myself look at her then, which I’d been rationing all night.
“You run this whole festival like it costs you nothing. Hundreds of people, and every one of them goes home feeling looked after, like the whole night was put on just for them.” I turned the cup in my hands.
“I just keep wondering who does that for you. Who looks after the woman looking after everyone?”
That got her.
I watched the easy thing she’d been about to say dissolve on her tongue, watched her go quiet, her grin slipping into something softer and more dangerous, and for a second, she just looked at me, and the noise of the whole festival seemed to drop away from the two feet of cold air between us.
“That’s not—” she started, and stopped. Tried again, quieter. “Nobody’s ever asked me that.”
“I’m asking.”
The lights buzzed. Somebody two feet away wanted to know where the bathrooms were, and I told them without taking my eyes off her, and she laughed under her breath, helpless, and pressed her lips together, and looked at me like she was deciding something, or trying very hard not to.
Her gaze dropped to my mouth. Came back up.
The held breath of the whole week pulled so tight between us I could have plucked it like a wire.
“Drink your cider,” she said, soft, not pointing at anything, “Johnny,” and I swear she swayed an inch toward me over the rail before she caught herself.
“Elizabeth…”
I didn’t have anything to say after her name. I’d said it like the start of a sentence, but there was no sentence—just her name on my lips and how much I wanted her, plain and animal.
On a dance floor at my sister’s wedding, in a green dress, she’d asked me what I wanted, and the question had gone somewhere I never looked and left me standing there with nothing—empty room after empty room, no answer anywhere in the house.
I’d never forgotten how it felt to be asked.
And now I watched the same thing move across her face, the easy answer dissolving on her tongue, the guard coming up half a beat too slow to hide that there wasn’t anything behind it.
Same question she’d asked me, turned around. What do you want? Who looks after you? Who are you when you’re not the one holding everyone else up? I’d asked it because she’d taught me it could be asked, and because I wanted, more than I’d wanted anything in a long time, to be the answer.
Every careful rule I’d built my life out of had gone quiet at once.
I could have kissed her right there, in front of the cider press and half the town, and the only thing that stopped me was the last stubborn part of the man I used to be, the one who knew she wouldn’t want her first kiss with me to be something the whole town stood around and watched.
So I held still. I held her eyes. And I let her see all of it anyway, because I was past hiding how I felt, and done wanting to.
“Last sweep’s at close.” She straightened all at once, brisk and bright again, the lighthouse swinging its beam back up before anyone could catch it dark—but her voice wasn’t quite steady, and we both heard it.
“I’ll need a hand walking the rows after we shut the gate.
Make sure we didn’t lose anybody in there.
” She was already backing away into the crowd, into the safety of the noise, but she held my eyes the whole way, a beat past anything the words needed.
“There’s a dozen people I could ask, Hartford.
I’m asking you. Don’t leave before then. ”
“Wasn’t going to,” I said.
And she grinned, and turned, and was swallowed up by her festival, and I stood at the gate with a cider going cold in my hand, counting down to closing time like a man waiting out a lit fuse.