CHAPTER 7
Mae
The south tent still had two crates of evaluation packets nobody was coming back for, and I was sorting them because my hands needed a job.
Saturday’s showcase was over. Sandra’s group had driven north an hour ago, notebooks closed, lanyards collected, the machinery of judgment packed into a rented Suburban and taken somewhere I couldn’t manage it.
Diane had left at five with a nod that meant either we nailed it or you’ll hear from me Monday.
The vendors were gone. The volunteers were gone.
The green was empty except for stacked chairs, extension cords coiled on the grass, and me, standing inside the south tent with a crate of folders I’d already alphabetized twice.
I was not hiding. I was completing a task.
The task did not require completion. The packets were destined for recycling. I was sorting paper I intended to throw away, and I kept sorting because the alternative was standing still long enough to feel everything I’d been outrunning since I kissed Theo Hart in this exact spot five hours ago.
I had kissed him. That was the fact. Not a thing that happened—a thing I did.
I grabbed his shirt and pulled him forward and put my mouth on his, and my hands had decided before my brain filed the paperwork.
Then I’d walked back into the showcase with his taste still on my lips and briefed a federal committee on vendor retention rates while my pulse did something unprofessional.
I didn’t regret it. That was the worse fact.
The regret I’d been waiting for—the tidy kind that would let me classify the kiss as a lapse and move on—had not arrived.
What had arrived instead was a low heat behind my sternum that pulsed every time I remembered the sound he’d made when my teeth caught his lip. I remembered it now. I stopped sorting.
The tent was dim. Late light came through canvas in gold strips that hit the folding table and died on the grass.
Somewhere on the green, a tent stake clinked where the wind caught a loose guyline.
The air smelled like cut grass and the ghost of vendor smoke—kettle corn and charcoal and the sweet burnt edge of Linda’s honey samples.
I squared the last stack of packets and set them in the crate with the precision of a woman whose body was not behaving as neatly as the paper.
My hands were the problem. They kept finding tasks and losing them—a folder edge, the crate handle, the hem of my own sleeve. I pressed my palms flat on the table and held them there, fingers spread, the way you'd hold down paper in a wind. The table was steady. I was not.
A guyline snapped lightly against the tent’s outer wall.
The green was the kind of empty that happens after something—not abandoned, spent.
I could still see the pressed lines in the grass where vendor tables had been, the scuff marks where Gus had dragged his crate display, the half-circle of flattened dirt near the honey stand where Linda had stood all day.
Evidence of a day that had worked. I should have been thinking about whether it had worked enough.
I heard him before I saw him. Not the camera—no shutter, no lens cap turning. Footsteps on grass. The tent flap moved.
Theo came in carrying two bottles of water and nothing else. No camera bag. No lanyard. No professional excuse slung over his shoulder. He looked like a man who had taken everything off except himself and wasn’t sure that was enough.
He set the water on the table. Just on the table, because the table was there.
“Diane left,” he said.
“I know.”
“Everyone left.”
“I know that too.”
He didn’t fill the silence. The old Theo would have—charm, a crooked comment, something easy to let me file him under handled.
This Theo stood with his hands at his sides and looked at me the way he’d looked at me after the kiss: like he’d recalculated something fundamental and the new math was still running.
His sleeves were pushed to his elbows. His hair had lost whatever shape it started the day with—flattened on one side, like he'd been leaning against something or running his hand through it too many times.
He stood differently. Looser in the shoulders, heavier in the feet, like something load-bearing had shifted and he hadn't rebuilt around it yet.
He looked tired. Not the performative exhaustion of a long event day—something underneath it. The kind of tired that happens when you stop holding a shape.
I picked up a packet from the crate. Put it down. Picked it up again.
“These are for recycling,” I said, holding a folder like evidence.
“Okay.”
“You don’t need to be here.”
“I know.”
He wasn’t leaving. He wasn’t advancing. He was just present—still, unhurried, watching me with an attention that had nothing to do with framing or angles.
His jaw was set the way it had been this afternoon right after I’d kissed him—a man holding something back not because he didn’t want it but because he wanted it too specifically to risk getting it wrong.
I put the folder down.
My mouth remembered his before my brain caught up.
The specific pressure. The sound he’d swallowed.
Five hours of competent public performance, and underneath all of it my body had been running a separate count—every time I’d thought about his hands, his jaw, the heat coming off him when I’d pulled him in.
The count was long. I’d stopped trying to shorten it around hour three.
I walked to the tent flap. Pulled it closed. The canvas fell heavy, shutting out the green, the empty chairs, the public world where Mae Lane made sensible decisions with full committee approval.
When I turned around, Theo was watching me. His hands hadn’t moved. His breathing had.
“Mae,” he said. Just that. My name in his mouth sounded like a question he was letting me answer.
I crossed the four feet between us. Took the water bottle out of his hand—not because I wanted water but because I wanted his hand empty—and set it on the crate without looking.
His fingers stayed open where the bottle had been.
I put my hand there instead. Closed his fingers around mine.
Felt his grip tighten before his expression caught up.
I kissed him.
Not like the first time—not angry, not settling a debt. This one I started slowly and meant completely. His mouth was warm and I took my time with it. My free hand went to his jaw, and I felt the muscle working under his skin, felt him hold himself still while I decided the terms.
Then his hand came up to my waist. Careful—not hesitant, careful, the way you handle something you’ve been told you can have but haven’t entirely believed yet.
His thumb found the strip of skin between my hem and my waistband, and my breath caught hard enough that he heard it, and his hand went still against me, waiting.
I pulled him closer by the collar. Permission and instruction in one gesture.
The stillness broke.
His other hand found my hip, and he walked me backward until my back met the tent’s center pole.
The aluminum was cool against my back and the rest of him was not.
He kissed me with his whole mouth, one hand sliding up my spine and spreading wide between my shoulder blades, and I arched into it because my body had stopped consulting my brain several seconds ago.
My fingers slid into his hair. I pulled, and he made a sound—low, rough, caught between his teeth—and it went through me like current.
I pulled again. His mouth dragged from mine to my jaw, my neck, the skin below my ear, and I tipped my head back against the pole and let him, and wanting this felt nothing like losing.
His hand tightened at my hip. Bracing. Holding himself in place.
I could feel the restraint costing him something physical, and I wanted to take it apart.
I slid my palm down his chest, his stomach, hooked one finger through his belt loop and pulled his hips flush against mine.
His forehead dropped to my shoulder. His breath came ragged and hot through the fabric, and his hand trembled once at my waist before going still.
“Mae.” Rough. Almost nothing. “Tell me where to stop.”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
His laugh was barely a sound. More like surrender against my collarbone. I found his mouth again and kissed him until my back ached from the pole and his hand in my hair had gone tight enough that I felt each finger.
My hand was on his belt. Not the buckle—the leather, warm from his body.
One decision away from something I could not classify as a lapse.
I wanted what came after it. Wanted his hands with less restraint and more skin.
Wanted to know if the sound he made would get rougher if I stopped being careful.
His mouth was on my neck again and my eyes were closed and the tent was nothing but canvas and grass and late gold light and the sound of his breathing against my skin.
I could feel the seam of his jeans against my hip.
The buckle of his belt, warm metal through cotton.
His body against mine and I was losing the edges of the plan I hadn’t made, and the worst part was that losing them felt like relief.
My hips shifted against his without my permission. His hand slid from my waist to the small of my back, fingers spread, pressing me closer, and the sound I made was not one I recognized from any version of myself I had previously administered.
I took my hand off his belt. Set it flat against his stomach. Held it there. I could feel his muscles tighten under my palm, the effort of holding still when everything in his body was pulling the other direction.
He went still. Forehead against mine. Both of us breathing like we’d been running.
“Not here,” I said. Quiet. The tent was canvas and temporary, and what I wanted from him was going to require a door that locked.
He didn’t argue. Didn’t ask what I meant or where or when. His thumb moved once across my hip—slow, deliberate, an answer to a question I hadn’t asked out loud. Then he stepped back. One step. I missed the weight of him immediately, like a draft where a wall had been.
He handed me the water bottle. His fingers brushed mine on the plastic, and neither of us pretended that was accidental.
I drank because my mouth was dry and because I needed three seconds to become a person who could walk across a green without looking wrecked.
The water was warm. I drank it anyway. He watched me drink it, and his eyes tracked the movement of my throat, and I let him look because I was done pretending I didn’t want to be looked at like that.
I ran my hands through my hair. Pulled it back.
Held it at the base of my neck for two seconds like I could wring the last ten minutes out of it.
He didn't do anything equivalent. His collar was turned wrong and his breathing was still visible in his chest and he left all of it exactly as I'd made it, and that small refusal to reassemble himself did something to my chest that was harder to manage than the kiss.
I picked up the crate. Recycling. The task I’d invented to keep my hands busy.
“I’ll lock the supply room,” I said.
“I’ll get the chairs.”
Ordinary sentences. Practical things in separate spaces. We would not touch each other for the next fifteen minutes, and we would both know exactly what we were not doing and why.
He held the tent flap open. I ducked under his arm with the crate and did not look at his face because I knew what I would find there, and if I found it I was not going to make it to the supply room with the recycling.
The air hit me—cool, late June, cut grass and the last trace of vendor smoke.
The green stretched empty and gold in that long light that makes everything look like the end of something.
Stacked chairs threw shadows across the grass.
A paper cup rolled in the breeze near the bunting post, and the normality of it—a cup, wind, an event that was over—felt absurd against the fact that my hands were shaking around a crate of paper I did not need and my spine still held the memory of aluminum and a warm hand and his mouth on my neck.
I walked across the green. Behind me, I heard the scrape of folding chairs—Theo, doing exactly what he said he would do, being exactly where he said he would be.
Metal on grass. The ordinary sound of a man stacking chairs at the end of a public day, and it shouldn’t have done anything to me, but my body was running on a different system now and every sound he made landed somewhere it hadn’t landed this morning.
I thought about the way he’d looked at me when he stepped back.
Not careful. Not polished. Just open, like a man who’d stopped deciding what to show me and was standing there with all of it visible.
The supply room was at the far end of the market building.
Small. Concrete floor, metal shelves, the smell of old bunting and zip ties and extension cords stored in loops that someone—me, probably, last October—had coiled with too much care.
A door that locked. A deadbolt I’d requested from the town council in March for inventory security, which had felt responsible at the time and now felt like something else entirely.
I set the crate on the bottom shelf. It scraped against the concrete, too loud in the small room.
I straightened the rolls of banner vinyl that didn’t need straightening.
My lips felt swollen. I felt like someone who made different kinds of decisions than I usually made, and I was not giving her back.
The key sat in my pocket. I locked the door from the outside because that was the task, and I stood there for a moment with my hand on the deadbolt.
The metal was cool. The hallway was empty.
I could hear my own breathing, still not quite even, and somewhere outside the building a car door closed—not his, wrong direction—and the ordinary sound of it made me aware of how far from ordinary the last twenty minutes had been.
I pocketed the key again, and it sat against my thigh warm from my hand.
I walked back toward my car. The green was almost dark now, the gold gone to blue, and the first fireflies were starting along the tree line the way they did every June—unremarkable, ordinary, the kind of thing that happened whether or not your life had rearranged itself inside a canvas tent.
Theo’s truck was still in the lot. The chairs were stacked.
The tent flaps were tied. Everything was done except the thing we hadn’t finished, and I could feel it in my body like a current that hadn’t been switched off—just routed somewhere I couldn’t reach yet.
I did not look back at the tent. I did not need to. I was already thinking about when.