Elizabeth
Ihave been kissed before. Plenty of times, by perfectly nice men, in perfectly nice ways. Not one of them had ever left me lying awake at two in the morning with my heart going like a bird in a box, grinning at a dark ceiling, wondering what on earth I was supposed to do with myself now.
I did not sleep. I lay under Grandma’s quilt and replayed it in a loop I had no intention of stopping—his hands coming up to my face, the sound he made, the exact second he decided he was done letting me joke my way out of feeling it.
I know how to handle whatever gets put in front of me.
Give me a crisis, a schedule, a festival, a family, and I will sort all of it into boxes and label the boxes and run the whole operation on three hours’ sleep.
What I did not have, lying there at two in the morning grinning at a dark ceiling, was anywhere to put this.
It had moved into my chest somewhere in the middle of that maze and showed no intention of leaving—big and warm and faintly terrifying, taking up the room I usually keep clear for worrying about random crap.
I kept waiting for the worry to come back and crowd it out. That’s the part that scared me. The worry didn’t come. Which meant this was bigger than my defenses, and I have very good defenses.
I got maybe four hours. When I finally gave up and went down to start the coffee, I looked like a woman who had either fallen in love or come down with something, and I had to be at the Stop & Go by ten, where exactly one person on earth was positioned to tell the difference at forty paces.
Becca was behind my register when I came through the door. She looked up and she knew.
That was the worst part—she didn’t say anything at first. She just watched me come in with my travel mug and whatever was happening on my face, which, going by the rearview mirror on the drive over, was a great deal, and she let a slow smile spread over her face like sunrise over a battlefield.
“Morning,” she said, far too pleasantly.
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Yeah, but you’re saying it with your entire face.” I stowed my bag under the counter and tried, with no success whatsoever, to arrange my features into those of a woman who had slept. “Becca. I am begging you to let me have a normal morning.”
“Absolutely,” she said. “Totally normal morning. Two normal people. One of whom kept my brother out at her corn maze until close last night.” She popped the lid off a roll of quarters with her thumb, taking her sweet time about it, enjoying herself enormously.
“Here’s what I keep coming back to. The whole town watched the costume round.
We all watched you pin that ribbon on him—very professional, by the way, the whole pinning situation, no notes—and then the night ended, and everybody drove home.
Everybody.” The quarters went into the drawer one at a time as she watched me for a reaction.
“Except you. And him. Leaving you all alone. In a corn maze. In the dark.”
“We were confirming it was empty. That’s a safety requirement.”
“Mm.” She looked up. “And here you are this morning, grinning at the floor like you won something.”
“It gets bright in here.”
“It does not get bright in here. There’s one window, and it faces north.”
The bell over the door saved me—a contractor in for energy drinks and a sandwich—and I rang him up with the bright competent cheer of a woman absolutely not thinking about anybody’s mouth.
Becca let it go, because customers were coming and the rush was building, and even Becca observed the sacred truce of the morning rush.
And then my phone buzzed in my apron pocket, and I made the catastrophic mistake of looking at it.
Matt: Morning. Hope you slept. I didn’t, much. No regrets about that.
And then, before I could even get my face under control, a second one.
Matt: I keep thinking about how you looked last night. You’re beautiful, Elizabeth. Just so you know going into your day.
I am not a woman who rattles easily. But as I stood behind that register and read you’re beautiful, Elizabeth, I felt the heat climb my face all the way to my hairline.
I was helpless, grinning down at my phone like it had handed me a winning lottery ticket, my chest going warm and enormous and entirely outside my control.
“OH,” said Becca.
I jumped. I actually jumped, fumbled the phone, and caught it against my apron, which only made it worse—the guilty bobble of a woman caught red-handed.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s nothing. It’s June. About a vendor.”
“A vendor.” Becca had abandoned the quarters entirely.
She was beaming with satisfaction. “You’re smiling about a vendor like that?
Elizabeth. Your face. I’ve known you since we were kids and I have never once seen that face on you.
That is not a vendor face. That is a—” Her voice dropped to a delighted hush as she stood straight and pointed at me.
“That’s my brother. That’s a my-brother face. Matt texted you, didn’t he?”
“It is a vendor—”
“Show me the phone.”
“No.”
“Show me the phone, Elizabeth Anne. Whip it out. Gimme it.”
“You don’t get to middle-name me. Only my grandmother gets to middle-name me—” I was laughing, which was fatal, because you cannot deny anything while laughing, and Becca was coming around the counter, and I had the phone up over my head like we were kids again.
The bell over the door went off at the exact worst possible moment.
We both froze. Then we spun around as if we choreographed it.
It was Matt.
He had to duck his head a little coming through, broad enough across the shoulders that the doorway always looks built one size too small for him, and he was in uniform.
And whatever warm, giddy thing his text had started in me an instant ago didn’t cool—it doubled.
My stomach dropped clean through the floor.
Heat came up my neck before I could tell it not to, and I forgot, in the space of one breath, that I had a phone in the air and a best friend halfway over my counter and a whole store around me.
There was just him, filling the doorway in that uniform, the broad shoulders and the steady eyes and the jaw I had spent the small hours of the night thinking about, and my own went useless—not one word in it, my brain gone entirely offline.
He took in the two of us—me with my phone still in the air, Becca halfway around the counter, both of us flushed and caught—and something moved across his face fast—surprise, then a flash of pure guilt, then the careful blankness of a man who has decided to act normal and was already failing at it.
A smart man would have read the room and retreated. Matt Hartford is a smart man, and yet he did not retreat because he had clearly come in for exactly one reason—me. Standing by the counter, turning scarlet.
“Morning,” he said. To me. Only to me.
And that one word, aimed past his sister and the whole bright morning to land square on me, went through me like a hand closing warm around my heart.
It came out about three degrees warmer than a man says it to just a random Stop & Go employee, and Becca’s head swiveled between us like she was watching a tennis match.
“Officer Hartford,” I said, and my voice cracked directly down the middle on the second syllable, a clean audible break, and I watched the corner of his mouth go up. “Coffee?”
“Please.”
I headed to the pot. I needed something to do with my hands and my face and my entire traitorous body, and I poured his coffee—large, black, no discussion, no variation, a ritual we’d been running since he started getting his coffee here instead of Violet’s—except this morning my hand wasn’t quite steady on the pot, and we both noticed, and neither of us said one word about it.
“Big night last night,” Becca said into the silence, sweet as pie, to the room in general. “The festival. Lot of excitement. The maze.” She let the pause stretch, watching her brother. “Big win for best costume. Very proud of you and your little pot.”
Matt, who had been studying the gum display with the focus of a man whose life depended on the choice between bubble mint and peppermint, cleared his throat. “Becca.”
“I’m just making conversation.”
“You’re making a scene.” He shifted his weight. Hooked a thumb in his belt, unhooked it, picked up a packet of gum and set it back down—a man who does not, as a rule, fidget, fidgeting like a kid called to the principal’s office.
“A scene? In a quiet store? With my brother? Who came in for coffee he can get free at the station.” She said it lightly, but her eyes were shining, and under the teasing was something soft and pleased and nearly tearful.
She was destroying me because she was happy. It’s a Hartford trait. I was learning the whole set of them.
The tips of Matt’s ears had gone red. I had never seen that happen—not fighting a tarp loose off a barn roof in a driving rainstorm, not standing in front of the entire town in a cooking pot—but his little sister got one soft remark in, and the man went pink to the ears and developed a sudden deep interest in the floor.
He took his coffee. His fingers brushed mine on the cup, deliberate, and stayed there a half second longer than they needed to, and the whole store went quiet and far away—the lottery display, the chip rack, the hum of the coolers Jonas just fixed—all of it dissolving into corn husks and lantern light and the strap of his overalls in my fist—until Becca, two feet away, cleared her throat in a manner suggesting she could see every thought in my head.
This was the trouble. There was nowhere in this entire town to have a private conversation.
Becca was busy radiating joy at my elbow, Donna was banging trays in the back, the bell over the door went every ninety seconds, and the two of us were standing in the most public square footage in Sweetbriar trying to hold a conversation made entirely of things we couldn’t say out loud.