20. Silas
TWENTY
SILAS
I am completely and utterly in trouble. I’ve also never been as sexually sated as I am now.
Even as I stare at Vaughn while he’s driving us into Pine Ridge for the pumpkin festival, I know he couldn’t draw another orgasm out of me, but I’ll be damned if my body isn’t already up for trying.
“You know,” I say, “You could try being a little less good-looking. I’m in physical pain here. My dick is begging for mercy while my brain is checking out that white shirt with the forearms, and damn, Vaughn.”
He gives me a quick glance and raises an eyebrow. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m not the one waiting at the end of my working day, naked and ready to play.”
“Not my fault. Just the thought of you in that white lab coat gets me going, and then you come out of this big truck like you’re some kind of cowboy, and I’m done. I don’t even take the clothes off. They take themselves off.”
He laughs. “So I’m a geek and a cowboy?”
“In one sexy package.”
I shift my gaze to the moving landscape outside. The mountains in the distance and the farmland transition into the edge of town, and then I see the first clues of the festival.
Banners across the road, bales of straw and pumpkins everywhere.
Pine Ridge has grown on me, and I don’t know how I’m going to leave. I also don’t know when.
Which is its own problem.
Zuza has been pulling threads for days, every but one of them has gone cold.
HelixGen seem to be focusing on other projects, and there’s no documentation or even a single email to indicate they’re interested in Pine Ridge.
And Musgrove, who seemed like the obvious thread to pull, turned out to be the most unexpected dead end of all.
Richard Musgrove, former architect of the Pine Ridge acquisition attempt, the man I was certain was behind all this, sold his investments eight months ago, closed his accounts, and moved to a nudist commune in Florida.
When Zuza told me, I thought she was pulling my leg.
So Musgrove is out, and HelixGen seems to be a dead end too.
Which means I have nothing.
No lead. No suspect. No timeline. No idea when or if someone else is coming.
Not knowing is the worst part. I can manage a known threat. I’ve been managing that for ten years. It’s the unknown ones that make the back of my neck feel this tightness like something’s about to happen but I can’t put my finger on it.
“You look lost in thought,” Vaughn says as he parks the car.
I jump out and go around to meet him on the driver’s side. “Just admiring the town and the decorations. Is it always like this?”
“I’ve missed every festival since I moved here,” he says. “But growing up, there were festivals like this one. My parents used to take me every year. I’d forgotten how it feels as an outsider.”
The now-familiar Main Street of Pine Ridge is unrecognizable as we walk up.
The storefronts are still there, but everything between them has been transformed.
Stalls run the length of the street in both directions, bunting has been strung between the lamp posts in orange and gold and deep red, and the air is filled with the smell of food and woodsmoke and something sweet I can’t identify but intend to investigate.
People are everywhere. Locals and visitors.
Somehow, I’m able to tell the difference.
Ever since Vaughn told me to use his car, I’ve been coming into town to do the grocery shopping and get anything we’re not growing in the garden.
I’ve gotten used to that particular trip taking far longer than it would in Atlanta, just because there’s always someone to say hi to or someone who asks about Vaughn.
Children with painted faces and dogs wearing small pumpkin costumes are running around, and at least three people are carrying gourds of various sizes.
“Silas!” I turn to the voice calling my name and find Tess behind a stand she’s sharing with Teresa Navarro.
It’s a long table covered in baked goods.
A hand-painted sign above it reads Bakes For Good: All Proceeds To Pine Ridge Pride Fund, and a line of people suggests the baked goods are more than worth the donation.
“You came,” she says, when she sees Vaughn.
“I don’t think I could have missed it this year,” he says.
She beams at him and hands me a slice of salted caramel apple cake.
“Oh my god, this is delicious,” I say between mouthfuls.
“Come back tomorrow morning and I’ll give you a taste of the special. We’re having a new one every day.”
“Come back tomorrow? Tess, at this rate, I’m moving in with you.”
“No, you’re not,” Vaughn says way too fast for someone who agreed to keep this thing between us a secret.
“Don’t worry, honey. He’s all yours,” she says.
Teresa waves at us in between serving people.
“I better help now,” Tess says. “You should check the giant pumpkins. Clayton is there. I think they’re about to weigh them. That’s a spectacle in itself.”
The pumpkin weigh-in is at the far end of the festival ground, where Main Street opens into the town square. There’s a crowd moving in the same direction.
“What are the cranes for?” I ask.
“They need them to lift the pumpkins.”
“Exactly how big do they get?”
Vaughn laughs. “You’ll see.”
We get closer and I see them better. Two cranes positioned on either side of the weigh-in area. A crowd has gathered three deep around the perimeter, and in the center of it, beside a pumpkin I can only describe as bigger than my first apartment, is Clayton Briggs.
“That is Brenda?” I’ve seen the photographs, but I was not prepared. She is vast. She is deeply, magnificently orange. Clayton is beside her with his hands in his jacket pockets looking exceedingly proud.
“Clayton.” I wave.
“Silas. Vaughn. Welcome to the festival.”
“Brenda’s magnificent,” I say.
“She is,” he says.
The crane operator gets the harness around Brenda with care, and the crowd goes quiet.
“Oh my goodness, is she going to break?” I bite a nail on one hand and cross my fingers on the other. It would be a tragedy if something happened to Brenda.
Phones come out, and even Vaughn snaps a few photos.
The crane lifts Brenda, and the crowd makes a sound that is part gasp and part cheer. Clayton is bitting his lip, hands clasped tightly together. Everyone goes silent as the crane lowers Brenda onto the scale.
The weight is announced. Two thousand, five hundred and seventy-six pounds.
The number means nothing to me other than the pumpkin is fucking heavy, but from immediate and loud response from the crowd, I take it it’s a good thing.
“Is that good?” I ask Vaughn quietly.
“That,” Vaughn says, “is very good.”
“Is Clayton about to cry?”
“Probably. He has a good chance of winning this year. Growing a giant pumpkin is an almost round-the-clock job that starts before the seed germinates. Clayton has done great.”
Everyone takes photographs. Clayton takes photographs of Brenda. People take photographs of Clayton taking photographs of Brenda. I take a photograph of Vaughn watching all of this and looking every bit the man of my dreams.
I check out the crowd while everyone is focused on Brenda. The mass of onlookers is dense now. The weigh-in has drawn people from all over the festival grounds.
A chill crawls up the back of my neck, so I study the faces around us for anyone who seems out of place.
A man near the farm equipment display at the edge of the grounds catches my attention.
Forties, unremarkable clothes, an even more unremarkable face.
His eyes aren’t on the cranes or the pumpkin or the crowd’s reaction.
They’re moving across the crowd in a pattern I recognize because I use it myself.
It’s systematic, searching, looking for something.
I raise my phone, pretending to snap a photo of the action in front of us, but instead I manage to take one of the man. While I’m at it, I take a few of the crowd and send them all to Zuza.
Then a woman with two children appears beside the man, and his attention shifts entirely. He crouches down to the smaller child’s level and points at Brenda, and the child’s face lights up. The woman takes the child’s hand, and the foursome move toward the weigh-in area together.
I watch them go.
They’re probably from out of town, drawn by the festival, the children excited about the enormous pumpkin. The man was searching for his family in the crowd.
The fact that right now I can’t tell the difference between a man looking for his children and a man hunting for a target tells me I’m off my game. The development in my relationship with Vaughn is affecting my judgment, and that’s not something I can afford.
Zuza. I need help from Zuza.
“You okay?” Vaughn asks beside me.
“Fine,” I say. “Just taking it all in.”
He eyes me skeptically, but he lets it go.
By late afternoon, we’ve covered most of the festival. The food stands, the craft displays, the children’s competitions, and the agricultural show, where Vaughn gets into a detailed conversation about soil composition with a farmer from another town.
We get dinner from a stand run by a woman named Rosa, who makes a green chili so good it requires a moment of silence afterward.
We find Hux and Chris running an adventure sports information booth, which leads to a conversation about the Arkansas River trip. Vaughn asks questions that mostly sound like he’s interrogating Hux about safety. It’s kinda cute.
As the afternoon light starts to go golden, I ask Vaughn, “Can we stop by the Ridgeline on the way back?”
“Of course. But I don’t think I can eat or drink anything else today.” He pats his stomach. “Or for the next three days.”
“Not for that. I want to see if Sir Squash-a-nova made the cut.”
“Sir Squash-a-nova?”
“That’s the name of my dick squash,” I explain after looking around for any little ears.
“I submitted it a few days ago. You have to give them a name. Technically, it’s your dick squash because it grew mostly under your supervision, but I’ve been trying to convince it to grow some balls so we can enter the competition, and wouldn’t you know it? It actually has.”
“I have no words.”
“It’s a good name, right? I asked Clay for some ideas.”
“It is a good name.”
We walk toward the Ridgeline, and with Vaughn beside me, it’s hard to fight the temptation to hold his hand. Instead, I bump my shoulder against his, and he bumps back with an almost imperceptible smile on his lips.
“You know,” Vaughn says, after a moment, “in a dick comp … I mean, in the phallic gourd competition—”
“You can say dick competition. Everyone says dick competition.”
“In the phallic gourd competition,” he insists, “I imagine you would win any day.”
“Thank you. That’s very affirming.”
“I meant the squash,” he says.
“I know what you meant.”
He’s definitely smiling now.
“For the record,” I say, “my actual dick is exclusively for private consumption. Very selective. Discerning clientele only. Sir Squash-a-nova, however, is a gift to the public. The Knot Today folks deserve to see the best of what this valley can produce.”
Vaughn laughs.
The kind, full laugh that makes me think about how I don’t know how I’m going to leave this.
I don’t know how I’m going to leave him.