Elizabeth #2
“You want a burrito, Matt, honey?” Donna called through the pass-through, gloriously oblivious, with three hundred burritos on her mind and not one bit of suspicion in her heart. “You look tired. Take one, on the house—you keep our girl safe out there, and we appreciate you.”
And she was gone again into the steam, having detonated the phrase our girl in the middle of the room without the faintest idea what she’d done, and Becca made a sound like a kettle coming to temperature and had to turn and face the cigarette display.
He leaned in for a napkin he didn’t need, to whisper, close enough that only I could hear him. “I want to see you tonight. Properly. Not—” a flick of his eyes at Becca’s pointedly occupied back “—like this.”
And that did something to me that no amount of clever banter ever had.
He just said it. Plain, sure, no coyness in it, nothing for me to puzzle out or second-guess on the drive home—I want to see you tonight—and something bright and silly and enormous came bubbling up in my chest so fast I nearly laughed out loud in the middle of my own store.
He’d been thinking about it. About me. And instead of dancing around it, he’d walked in and told me, and the flutter of it went all the way down to my feet.
“Tonight,” I breathed. “After close. There’s an overlook on the farm up the ridge road past the bees. Gravel pull-off, no streetlight, nobody’s up there after dark this time of year.” I straightened a stack of cups that did not need straightening. “And Matt—could we keep it—”
“Quiet. Yeah.” His mouth tipped up at the corners.
“I was about to ask you the same thing. Not because I’m not—” He stopped.
Started again, lower, just for me. “I’d put it up on the marquee out front if that’s what you wanted.
I just don’t want to hand it to the whole town before we’ve had it to ourselves for five minutes. ”
And that got me worse than the texts had. Worse than his fingers on the cup. Not the heat—the care. He’d already thought about protecting this fragile new beginning between us before I’d even finished asking him to.
“Okay,” I said. “Secret. Ours.”
“Ours,” he agreed, low, and the word went straight into my chest and set up housekeeping somewhere in the middle of my heart.
His radio saved us both.
It crackled at his shoulder, a clipped dispatch voice, something about two Buicks that had backed into each other in the hardware store lot.
No injuries, no real speed, just two retirees and a dented bumper and a big difference of opinion about whose fault it was.
The laugh went out of him, and the officer came back into his face in an instant.
He answered the call and said he was rolling.
Then he set his coffee down on the counter to free his hands, and looked at me, and the officer went away again. “Walk me out?” Low. Just for me.
I came around the counter. I could feel Becca watching us with the ferocious intensity of a woman pretending not to stare, and I led him toward the door, and at the last second I steered us left instead, into the little blind corner by the propane cage where the security camera has never once reached in three generations of Starlings, a fact I know the way I know where the spare key is hidden and which floorboard creaks.
He understood immediately.
He backed me into that corner with one hand already at the small of my back, and I got a grip on his forearms where the sleeves were rolled, and the second we were out of the sightline he kissed me like he’d been thinking about nothing else since the maze—slow and certain and in no hurry whatsoever, even with the radio still murmuring at his shoulder and a fender bender waiting and the whole town mere feet away buying lottery tickets and breakfast burritos.
It took me apart in about two seconds flat.
The breath went straight out of me. My heart slammed up against my ribs and stayed there, my stomach turned right over, and the strength in my knees quietly excused itself, so that the hand at my back stopped being romantic and became essential.
He kissed me like leaving was the last item on a list he had no intention of getting to, and the accident could take a number, and my whole body went hot and weightless in the same instant, lit up and floating, every ordinary thing about the morning burning off like fog.
His hand came up to my jaw, his thumb along my cheekbone, and I went up on my toes into him because there was nowhere else to go, and felt him smile against my mouth, and the cold morning and the propane fumes and the hum of the coolers turned, briefly, into the most romantic place I have ever stood.
“Duty calls,” he murmured against my lips.
“Then go answer it.”
“Working on it.” But he didn’t move for another few seconds, and neither did I.
“I’ll see you tonight,” I whispered.
He kissed me once more, soft, a period at the end of the sentence. “The overlook. Don’t be late.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
I let go of his shirt one reluctant finger at a time and smoothed out the wrinkles I’d put in it, and he caught my hand on its way down and pressed his mouth to my knuckles, quick, his eyes on mine the whole time.
Then he was gone—out the door, into the patrol car, lights on, off to defend Sweetbriar from a parking lot incident—and I stood in the propane corner with my heart going like a parade drum and my mouth kiss-stung and a grin I was going to have to do something about before I could face Becca and Harper.
By the time I got back to the counter, Becca and Harper had appointed themselves a two-woman protection detail, sworn to silence with their hands over their hearts, already bickering about logistics.
Harper thought we should “just tell people, it’s adorable.
” Becca held that the fun was in the hiding.
Both of them agreed, loudly, over my objections, that they had called it ages ago and were owed credit.
“You can’t tell anyone,” I told them, for the fourth time, stacking cups. “I mean it. Not Levi. Not your mother. Not the knitting circle, not the Wash and Fold, not whoever you talk to in line at the pharmacy—”
“I would never.”
“Harper. You told half of Main Street when Gwen got her promotion before Gwen had finished telling my mother.”
“That was good news. It needed to travel.” Harper hopped up to sit on my counter, which violates four separate health codes, and looked at me with her whole heart in her face.
“This is different. This is yours. I’m a vault.
” She put a hand over her heart. “A historically leaky vault, I’ll grant you.
But a vault that loves you. Elizabeth. He looked at you like you hung the moon and then went back up and strung sparkling lights on it.
I’m not going to say a word. But I’m so happy for the two of you I could cry, so don’t push me. ”
And I let them have it. The fussing, the plotting, the credit they had not earned and were taking anyway.
I stood behind that counter with my best friend sitting on it and my secret love interest’s sister guarding my register and Donna’s breakfast burritos perfuming the whole bright morning, and I let myself be, for once, the one they were all delighted for.
It felt like learning to breathe a slightly different way. Terrifying. And good.
All I had to do was get an entire festival through the next stretch of the season without my face giving me away—and my face has never kept a secret in its life. It’s the reason I’ve never won a hand of cards in this family.
We were doomed. I knew it even then, ringing up lottery tickets with a grin I couldn’t get rid of, thinking about the overlook at the end of the day and a man in a patrol car somewhere across town, probably smiling at his windshield like a fool.
The both of us sunk. Gloriously, terrifyingly, completely sunk.
I could not wait for tonight.