12. Sunshine, S’mores and Sexual Tension #2
I was about to fire back a joke about the past few weeks, and his “avoid Felicity” strategy, but Selma Lockhart appeared back at the registration area at exactly that moment, taking Dean’s arm and steering him through the crowd like a runway model corralling her reluctant co-host. I watched her glide him toward the barn, explaining something animatedly, and for a second I let myself enjoy the view.
Then a shriek of pure joy erupted from the hay bale sculpture, followed by the thumping sound of a four-year-old in rubber boots.
Maverick was already in his element, leading a parade of smaller kids straight through the middle of the crowd, waving a foam pool noodle like a sword.
Blake jogged after them, all business, her voice raised in a command that would’ve made a drill sergeant proud.
In the next hour, I didn’t have time to think about Dean, or pheromones, or anything except the relentless machine of registration.
The line snaked halfway to the stables, and it was anything but smooth sailing.
I reunited a lost child with her parents, cleaned up a juice box spill, and convinced an entire family of gluten-intolerant siblings that the s’mores station had their dietary needs handled.
I was in my zone, and if anyone noticed the high-pitched edge in my laughter or the way I fussed a little too long with the schedule, they were kind enough not to mention it.
It wasn’t until the last family came through that I allowed myself a breath. I scanned the area for Mav and spotted him at the corral fence, holding a carrot out to a horse with the reverence of a priest presenting an offering. Next to him, Blake flashed me a thumbs-up.
I closed my binder, filed the leftover name tags, and stood up to stretch for the first time in what felt like years.
I was about to head to Mav, Tabitha, and Blake when a hand brushed my forearm.
Before I even turned my head, my body responded to the touch.
Somehow it just knew it was the man who had occupied every thought, waking and dreaming.
“Congrats on the turnout,” he said, voice pitched low.
I made myself laugh, light and easy, even as every cell in my body suddenly woke up, alert and absolutely on fire. “Thanks. I might actually survive this weekend. That is, if I survive goat yoga.”
He didn’t smile, exactly, but his eyes crinkled at the corners. “I’m serious, I’ve never seen this place so organized. It’s all running like clockwork.”
“Every department chipped in. The support for this was incredible.”
His lips curled at the edges, and I noted his shift in demeanor as he grinned, actually grinned. “You’re really bad at taking compliments.”
It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.
One I had every intention of refuting, but I just couldn’t seem to find the words.
He was standing so close that I could see the muscle jump in his cheek when he looked at me, and I told myself the butterflies in my stomach were because of the weekend and had nothing to do with him. I knew I was lying.
My phone vibrated with the alarm, indicating it was time for me to go check on…something, I couldn’t even remember now.
“I have to…” I licked my lips and his stare only intensified. I felt caught in his web of sexiness. It took every ounce of self-discipline to move my feet away from him, out of his tractor beam of sexiness. “I have to go.”
Once I managed to extract myself from his hotness, the spell he had me under momentarily faded.
The afternoon settled into a pattern: I flitted between the activity zones, checked on the grills, wrangled a couple of misplaced toddlers, and tried not to notice the way Dean drifted through the day like a fixed point on my radar.
No matter where I turned, he was always at the edge of my vision, talking with a vendor, calming down a panicked mom whose kid got a splinter, or—more often than not—keeping one steady, watchful eye on Maverick, even though Mav was being looked after by Blake.
At the five minute mark to the scavenger hunt, I was flagging families over to the starting line when Dean appeared at my shoulder, holding two bandanas and a clipboard. “We’re a team,” he said.
I blinked, thrown by the “we.” “You’re volunteering for a scavenger hunt?”
“Team Maverick. He insisted.” His voice held an exaggerated resignation, but I could tell he wasn’t really complaining. He handed me the red bandana, and for a fleeting, stupid moment, I imagined him tying it around my eyes, blindfold style.
I quickly shook off that rated R thought and I knotted it around my neck and gave him my best don’t-mess-with-me smile. “Bring it on, Sunshine.”
“We’re on the same team,” he reminded me.
“Oh yeah, right.” Once I got those competitive juices flowing, they just sort of splattered on anyone in the splash zone.
The next hour was pure, undiluted chaos.
Dean had the sort of mind that treated even a low-stakes competition like war games: he read every clue with Talmudic precision, negotiated our route for maximum efficiency, and even—politely, but firmly—dissuaded a rival family from skirting the course’s official boundaries.
Maverick, who’d never met a rule he didn’t immediately try to bend, sided with Dean every time.
By the time we’d completed the circuit and returned triumphant to the prize table, I was winded in a way that had nothing to do with running and everything to do with how easy it had felt to be a trio.
In fact, it felt so natural that when one of the other parents snapped a candid photo of us at the finish line, I had to actively stop myself from clutching Dean’s arm.
Instead, I let Maverick do it; he wrapped both little hands around Dean’s wrist and declared us the “winningest team in the whole world.” Dean grinned, which, for him, was basically a ticker-tape parade.
It wasn’t until the third time a stranger referred to Dean as “your husband” that I realized how we must have looked.
I quickly corrected her by saying he was, “just a friend, not even that, really…he’s my boss and it’s just for the event…
” but my cheeks burned every time. The truth was, a not-insignificant part of me wanted to see what it would look like if we were a real team. If there was a “we.”
Turns out, when you spend enough time pretending to be a family, something in your mind starts to forget it’s an act.
I wasn’t prepared for how much I liked the mental snapshot of the three of us—me, Dean and Maverick—moving as a unit.
Not just for the scavenger hunt, but for the weird, ineffable things: how we’d instinctively cluster together in the shade while tallying points, or the way Dean’s hand would find Mav’s shoulder to keep him from darting into the next clue station, or how Maverick kept looking up at Dean after each accomplishment, hungry for approval, and how (miracle of miracles) Dean always gave it, if only with a subtle nod or a low, “Nice work, little man.” I was supposed to be immune to fantasizing about this kind of domesticity, but the more I watched them, the harder it became to keep my imagination locked down.
The rest of the day passed in a Technicolor blur.
The scavenger hunt led straight into a flurry of icebreaker games on the lawn, then into a raucous, slightly chaotic cookout on the long barn tables that I’d covered in brown paper and artfully arranged buckets of crayons.
Maverick, naturally, took this as an invitation to create a full-scale mural featuring stick-figure horses and a very detailed, slightly disturbing rendering of a cowboy duel, which I only noticed after he narrated it for a circle of new friends, complete with sound effects.
After the food vanished, families dispersed to try out their chosen activities: pony rides, roping lessons (which quickly devolved into an impromptu lasso-throwing contest between rival dads), and goat yoga.
It was during the marshmallow break, while Maverick inhaled his body weight in sugar and then ran off to the obstacle course, that I caught a fragment of conversation that lodged in my chest like a splinter.
Mav, mid-explanation to a new friend from the next town over, said, “No, Dean’s not my real dad, he’s better because if he says he’s going to do something, he does it. ”
I felt the words like a physical blow. I wanted to correct him, to reassert boundaries, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
So I busied myself with refilling hot chocolate urns and herding foam-sworded children toward the s’mores pit.
I was so distracted, I almost missed it when the dusk fell hard and fast, the temperature dropping by ten degrees in as many minutes, and suddenly the entire festival crowd migrated to the bonfire circle for the evening program.