9. Aria
ARIA
I did not move four hundred miles to fall for a man who owns a tool belt unironically.
I told myself that twice on the walk into town, once passing the gazebo strung with lights for Founders Day, and once passing Bev's diner, where a hand-painted banner announced the whole event like Cedar Cove had been waiting all year for an excuse to close the streets and set up a dunking booth.
Ellen had hired me for the day too, camera around my neck instead of slung over my shoulder like usual, tasked with capturing what she called "the authentic small-town spirit" for next year's brochure.
Lily had informed everyone within earshot that she was my official assistant, a title she had assigned herself and defended with the seriousness of someone guarding state secrets.
"I carry the extra battery," she told a woman selling kettle corn. "It's a very important job."
"The most important job," I agreed, and got a look from the woman that suggested she believed us both completely.
We found Noah and Jake by the ring toss booth, Noah with three bottles already lined up on the counter in front of him and a look of quiet, devastating concentration on his face that made the teenager running the booth visibly nervous.
"He's beaten the game four times," Jake said, by way of hello. "The kid running it is starting to think he's cheating."
"Is he cheating?"
"He's six. He doesn't know how to cheat yet. He just doesn't miss."
Noah landed a fifth ring dead center without looking up, and the teenager handed over a stuffed frog with the resigned expression of a man who had made peace with his losses.
"That's terrifying," I said. "In a good way. Mostly good."
"Wait until you see him with a slingshot."
"Please tell me that's not a real event at this fair."
"It's not." A pause, the kind I'd learned meant he was deciding whether to finish a thought. "Yet."
Lily abandoned her assistant duties the second she spotted Noah's frog, and the two of them disappeared into the crowd toward the face painting booth before either Jake or I had finished agreeing it was a good idea.
That left us standing side by side at a ring toss booth with nothing to do but follow them, which we did, at a pace slow enough to count as strolling.
"You're good at this," I said. "The fair thing. The kid wrangling."
"I've had practice."
"I meant it as a compliment. You don't have to look so suspicious about it."
"I'm not suspicious. I'm cautious. There's a difference."
He said it without looking at me, watching the kids weave through the crowd instead, and something about the careful way he held that sentence made me wonder how many compliments he'd learned to duck before they landed.
We ended up at the pie stand behind the girls, mostly because Lily had declared, loudly and to the entire line, that face paint made her hungry, which was not a scientific claim either of us bothered disputing.
I ordered two slices out of habit. Jake ordered one and then, after a beat, changed it to two.
"You don't like pie?" I asked.
"I love pie. I just don't usually order it in front of an audience."
"What audience?"
"You. Apparently I care what you think about my pie choices now, which is a new and unwelcome development."
That got a real laugh out of me, the kind that came from somewhere lower than my chest, and he watched me laugh with an expression I couldn't fully name, somewhere between surprise and something warmer he hadn't decided to let me see yet.
We found a bench in the shade to eat, kids sprawled on the grass in front of us comparing their face paint, Lily's tiger stripes already smudged from her own thumb, Noah's dinosaur scales holding up considerably better under his more careful hands.
"Carol says I bring him here every year and every year he beats the ring toss and every year I act surprised," Jake said, watching Noah trace a finger along his own painted scales.
"Who's Carol again?"
"Neighbor. Self-appointed. She watches Noah when work runs long and watches my parenting the rest of the time, whether I ask her to or not."
"That sounds like Deacon."
"Cedar Cove runs on unsolicited opinions. It's the local economy."
A commotion near the dunking booth pulled us both off the bench before we'd finished the pie. Deacon sat perched on the little platform above the water tank, arms crossed, glaring down at a line of teenagers who had apparently made him their personal target for the afternoon.
"Come on, old man," one of them called, winding up. "Show us that famous aim."
"I built that platform," Deacon shouted back. "I know exactly how sturdy it is. Try me."
The ball missed by a wide margin, and Deacon laughed loud enough to carry over the whole fairground, pointing at the teenager with the particular delight of a man who had never once let a losing streak slow him down.
"He's been up there an hour," Jake said, watching with the fond exasperation of someone who had clearly seen this exact scene play out before. "He says it builds character. Mostly it just builds a line."
"Does he ever actually go in?"
"He never misses a year, usually right around the time he starts bragging too hard for the universe to ignore."
As if summoned, the next kid in line landed a direct hit, and Deacon vanished into the tank with a splash big enough to soak the front row. He surfaced sputtering, wringing out his shirt, already laughing at himself before he'd even climbed the ladder back up.
"That's more like it," Jake called over, grinning in a way I filed away carefully, next to everything else I was collecting about him without quite meaning to.
Carol turned out to be a broad-shouldered woman in her fifties who found us twenty minutes later with two lemonades she handed off without being asked.
She looked me over with open, friendly curiosity and said, "So you're the neighbor," in a tone that made the word neighbor sound like it had air quotes built right into it.
"That's me," I said. "Guilty of owning the house next door."
"Uh huh." She looked at Jake, then back at me, then at Jake again, clearly enjoying herself.
"Well. Somebody around here's finally smiling at these things again. I'm not saying who."
"Carol," Jake said, in a warning tone that had absolutely no effect on her.
"I'm just making an observation. I'm allowed to make observations. It's a free country and a small town, which is basically the same thing with worse gossip."
She wandered off toward the dunking booth before either of us could argue, leaving a silence that wasn't uncomfortable so much as loaded, the kind where both people know exactly what was just implied and are deciding whether to acknowledge it.
"She's not wrong," Jake said finally, eyes on the fireworks setup crew working near the water. "About the smiling."
"I noticed that too. It happens more than you'd think, for a man who claims he's cautious."
"Only around certain people."
I didn't have a comeback for that one, which almost never happened to me, and I covered the silence by pretending to check my camera settings for several seconds longer than the camera actually required.
The evening wore on the way small-town evenings do, unhurried, thick with the smell of funnel cake and cut grass, string lights coming on one strand at a time as the sky went from gold to purple.
Carol reclaimed the kids somewhere around dusk, declaring herself in charge of face paint removal and popcorn distribution with the confidence of someone who had done this every year of her life, which, as far as I could tell, she probably had.
"Go watch the fireworks," she told us, already herding Noah and Lily toward a blanket near the other families.
"I've got these two. Go be adults for twenty minutes. Try not to waste it."
Jake looked like he wanted to argue and didn't, which told me more about how badly he wanted those twenty minutes than any actual words would have.
We found a spot near the old dock at the edge of the park, far enough from the crowd that the noise softened into something more like a heartbeat than a roar, close enough to the water that I could smell it under the smoke and sugar smell drifting over from the fair.
"This is a good spot," I said. "You scout it in advance?"
"I've lived here my whole life. I know where to look."
"That sounds like something a local tour guide would say right before overcharging me."
"I'd never overcharge you. I'd just quietly judge your tipping."
The first firework went up without warning, a low whistle and then a burst of gold that lit up the water like something had cracked the sky open just to show us what was underneath.
Lily's laugh carried across the whole park, high and delighted, and somewhere in it I could hear Noah's silent version, all shoulders and stomping feet, translated for me the way I'd learned to read him.
"They're good together," I said, watching the two of them silhouetted against the light. "Better than good. I don't know what I expected when we moved here, but it wasn't this."
"What did you expect?"
"Isolation, probably. A fresh start that mostly meant being alone in a new place with better scenery."
"And instead you got the whole circus."
"Instead I got the whole circus." I glanced at him, caught him already watching me instead of the sky, and something in my chest did a slow, unwise flip. "This circus included one very specific neighbor."
"Is that a complaint?"
"I haven't decided yet."
Another firework went up, red this time, and in the brief flash of light I watched something shift in his face, the careful distance he usually kept dropping away like it had finally stopped being worth the effort.
He was closer than he'd been a minute ago.
I wasn't entirely sure which of us had moved.
"Aria."
"Yeah."
"I've been trying very hard not to do something for weeks now."
"Which is?"
He didn't answer with words. His hand found the side of my face, slow enough that I had every chance to pull back and didn't, and for one suspended second the whole fair, the fireworks, the noise, all of it went quiet around the small distance left between us.
Thunder cracked somewhere behind the fireworks, close enough that for a second I thought it was part of the show, and then the sky opened without any further warning at all, cold and sudden and completely unimpressed by the moment it had just ruined.
We broke apart laughing, both of us instantly soaked, Jake already pulling his jacket half over my head in a gesture too late to do any real good and too kind for me to point that out.
"Of course," I said, water running down my face, laughing in the specific helpless way you laugh when the universe has just made an extremely pointed joke at your expense. "Of course it does this."
"I did not plan that," he said, laughing too, hand still resting where it had been a second before the sky fell in. "For the record."
"I believe you. Mother Nature clearly has opinions."
We ran for the tree line with everyone else, soaked and breathless, kids shrieking with the pure, delighted chaos only rain at a fair can produce, and somewhere in the scramble I lost track of exactly where his hand had gone and exactly where mine had ended up, only that neither of us had quite let go yet.
The rain came down like the sky had an opinion about almost-kisses. Mine, apparently, was that I did not move to this town to fall for my neighbor, followed immediately, traitorously, by too late.