Chapter 24 #3
He’d come straight from shift. Still had the uniform pants on, a canvas jacket thrown over his shirt, and he came around the front of the truck saying, “I know I said tomorrow—” and got exactly that far before I reached him.
“You’re here,” I murmured against his neck.
“Hi,” he said, into my hair, both arms around me, lifting me half off my feet with the whole working farm looking on. “I was going to say something smooth about being in the neighborhood.”
“You live nowhere near this neighborhood.”
“I drove past three neighborhoods to be in this one. Let a man have his line.” He set me down but didn’t let go, and looked at me in the porch light the way he’d looked at me over the wooden spoon, and dropped his voice.
“Long shift. I kept thinking about you out here. Wanted to see your face before the day ended.”
Somewhere behind me, distinctly, I heard the stand’s window slide shut and my older sister say called it to somebody, and Jonas’s tractor took a diplomatic detour, and I grabbed him by the front of his jacket and towed him across the lawn before this town loved us any louder.
“Where are we—”
“You’ll see.”
The maze was closing. The last stragglers were funneling out the exit with their prize pumpkins and their overtired kids, my mother cheerfully shooing the final carload from the gate, and I walked Matt straight in against the current like the owner’s daughter I am, past the entrance flags, into the corn.
Mom laughed as she waved us in and turned to head toward the little house. “Have fun, you two. Don’t get lost in there.”
Dusk in the maze is like magic. The walls rise gold-black on either side, higher than you can see over, and the sky narrows to a purple ribbon overhead.
The sound of the whole farm drops away behind you in ten steps—no stand, no tractor, no town, just the dry rustle of a hundred thousand leaves conferring and the cold coming up out of the ground.
I know the turns asleep. I took his hand and took them fast, left, left, long straight, right at the scarecrow, while the light died, and hauled him out at last into the little clearing at the very heart of it, the center nobody finds on the first try, with the first stars coming out in the strip of sky and the corn standing all around us like a held breath.
“The center of the maze,” he said, looking around.
“We’re alone. Nobody watching, no phone, no town.” The corn rustled and settled. “Just us and the crows.”
“Just us and the crows,” he agreed, low, and bent his head, and we kissed each other absolutely stupid in the middle of the maze with the cold biting and the stars blazing overhead.
It was slow at first, then not slow, his cold hands finding their way under my coat and up my spine, my fingers wrecking his hair past saving, the two of us stumbling into the corn wall once and setting off a dry green avalanche of rustling and laughing into each other’s mouths and going right back to it, thorough, greedy, until my heart was going like the tractor at full throttle and neither of us had spare breath to spend on words.
We came up for air eventually. He kept me in the circle of his arms, my back tucked against his chest, his chin on my head, both of us facing the little gap in the corn where you could just see the farm going dark—the stand lights clicking off, the last taillights leaving the lot, the ridge holding its final bit of orange—and he swayed me a little, side to side, no music anywhere but the corn.
“Talent round’s next,” I said, into the quiet. “You ready?”
I felt the groan start in his chest before I heard it. “Becca keeps sending me links. One of them was tap shoes, Elizabeth.”
“I’ll write it for you. I have been punching up this festival for years. You give me ten minutes and a straight face, and I will hand you two minutes that kills.”
He turned that over. “You’d write my bit?”
“I’d write your bit. Consider it a conflict of interest. I’m compromised, the whole town knows I’m compromised.
” I felt him laugh behind me, and filed the plan away with real joy.
“And after that it’s the last weekend. The Harvest Ball, in the barn and on the lawn if the weather behaves—lights strung everywhere, the whole town dancing, the crowning of Mr. Pumpkin.
You’ll love it. There is nothing like it all year. ”
“The crowning.” His voice went carefully neutral in that new way I was learning meant he cared and was pretending not to. “June says the Johnny Appleseed pot has a following.”
“June is correct. The pot polled extremely well.” I turned in his arms so I could see his face in the starlight, and asked it plain, because his sister had taught me it worked. “And after the festival, Officer? What’s next for you? What does the man want, now that he wants things?”
He looked down at me, and he took the question seriously, because he takes everything seriously.
“I want to finish the season,” he said. “Win or lose. Becca would kill me if I quit, and I find I don’t want to quit anymore.
” He pushed a strand of hair off my face with one cold finger, tucking it away with more care than the job required.
“I want to dance at the ball with you. Middle of the floor. Whole town watching.”