13. Hunter
Hunter
The Founders Day sun hit Copper Creek square at an angle that turned the whole town gold, and the smell of Clara Mae Henderson's funnel cakes was so thick in the air it was practically a weather system.
Stalls lining both sides. Music from the bandstand drifting over everything — something fiddle-heavy, something that made old men tap their boots and young couples sway against each other near the stage.
Kids running between stalls with painted faces.
Tom Morrison's horseshoe pit behind the courthouse already drawing a crowd.
Billy Walker's daughter, Shelly, at the barbecue stall by the oak tree, smoke rolling off the smoker her father had built from an old water tank, the smell of brisket cutting through the funnel cake sweetness like a dare.
Mom and Dorothy Sullivan were circling each other near the cobbler competition table with the focused intensity of two generals planning a siege.
Neither of them was looking at the other.
Both of them were aware of exactly where the other was standing.
The cobbler rivalry predated my memory and would outlast my life, and nobody in the family was permitted to take sides.
Clay was on his third funnel cake. Callie had stopped counting.
Maisie was running the entire festival from approximately knee height, reporting to no one, issuing directives to anyone who crossed her path.
She had commandeered a clipboard from somewhere and was carrying it under her arm like a general's baton, and the clipboard appeared to contain a schedule she had written herself in purple crayon.
And Jessica was everywhere.
She hadn't planned this event — June Parker's committee had run Founders Day long before Jessica arrived — but she was woven into it.
Checking the stall placements Clara Mae had redesigned.
Adjusting the speaker angle I'd mounted last week.
Stopping at Shelly's stall to taste the brisket and say something that made Shelly throw her head back and laugh.
Jessica crouched down to help a kid who'd dropped his snow cone, scooped the ice off the ground with a napkin, and sent him to the stand for a replacement with a wink and a dollar bill she pulled from God knows where.
She stopped to listen to Dorothy Sullivan explain the cobbler judging criteria, and I watched her nod, her attention complete in a way that three months ago hadn't existed.
She was wearing a sundress — white, thin straps, the hem above her knees — and cowboy boots.
Aer hair was down, and the sun was on her bare shoulders, and the skin across her collarbones was glowing with a thin sheen of warmth, and I was trying very hard not to look at her every time she crossed the square.
My eyes didn't listen. Every time she moved through a group of people, I found her before my brain cleared the search.
Every time she laughed my hands tightened on whatever I was holding and my breath shortened.
She crossed in front of the bandstand, and the light caught her hair, and the sundress moved against her thighs, and my jaw clenched so hard my back teeth ached.
She bent to pick up a program someone had dropped, and the straps shifted on her shoulders, and the neckline gaped.
I caught the shadow of her cleavage and looked away so fast I nearly gave myself whiplash.
The sun was on her skin, and she was laughing at something Clara Mae said, while I stood at the horseshoe pit with iron in my hand and the ache so wide and so deep that breathing around it had become a skill I was learning and mastering in real time.
The horseshoe pit was a fixture, and this year I was paired with Tom Morrison.
He complained about the bracket every year, won it every third.
I was partnered with Tom because I was always partnered with Tom, and neither of us had ever discussed why.
We threw in comfortable silence, the silence of two men who had been doing this for a decade and didn't need to fill the air between throws.
Tom drew back and released. The horseshoe left his hand on a flat arc and landed with a clean ring around the stake.
He didn't look at it. His eyes were across the square — on Jessica, who was standing with June Parker near the music stage, both of them studying the sunset angle, both of them nodding.
Three months ago, June Parker would have crossed the street to avoid this conversation.
Now they were shoulder to shoulder, looking at the same horizon.
I picked up my horseshoe. Weighed it in my palm. Drew back.
"That girl's not going back to New York."
Tom's voice came out the way he said everything — quiet, unhurried, the tone of a man commenting on the direction of the wind. His eyes didn't leave the square. His hands hung loose at his sides.
The horseshoe left my hand. It sailed wide — missed the stake by three feet, skipped off the packed sand, and came to rest somewhere near the property line. The worst throw I'd made since I was nine years old. Tom didn’t say anything. Didn’t have to, he’d said enough.
Each word had landed in me like a nail driven flush with the wood — clean, permanent, the kind you didn't pull out. My heart was hammering. My mouth was dry. Across the square, the sun caught the line of Jessica’s jaw, and my lungs forgot how to expand.
I picked up the next horseshoe. My hand wasn't steady. I threw it, and it rang clean around the stake because my body knew how to do this the way it knew how to breathe even though my brain was across the square with the woman in the white sundress.
Tom nodded once. At the horseshoe. At the square. At the thing between us, he'd said out loud so I couldn't pretend I hadn't heard it.
The afternoon deepened. The light went from white to gold, and the band shifted to something slower. The crowd thinned at the edges as people settled into the part of the evening that felt like a town exhaling after holding its breath all day.
Jessica and I walked side by side down the aisle of food stalls. Maisie was with us, instructing us which stalls had the best food. My arm was draped over Jessica’s shoulders, my fingers grazing the soft skin of her arm as we walked.
She leaned into me when we stopped. There was nobody to perform for — just the two of us at the edge of the crowd and the warmth of the evening and her body tilting into mine with a weight that wasn't calculated. My arm adjusted around her, pulling her closer.
A vendor from Austin — artisan candles, table near the bandstand — approached to introduce herself. Jessica straightened. Extended her hand. Smiled the professional smile.
"This is my boyfriend, Hunter."
My breath caught. She'd said it before — at events, at introductions, in the careful framing of the arrangement. But her voice did something different with the word this time. Dropped it lower. Said it softer. Let it sit in the air without wrapping it in performance.
She said it like it was true.
Her eyes flickered to mine — quick, involuntary, a reflex she hadn't planned — and the look that passed between us spread through me like heat through cold metal.
The vendor was still talking. Jessica was pretending to listen, and I was trying.
Truly trying. But all I could think about was the word boyfriend.
It sat in my ribs, heavy and loaded. I pulled her in closer, my hand now on the curve of her waist, fingers spread down to her hip.
The vendor and Jessica said goodbye, and she turned to look up at me. She opened her mouth to say something, but something must’ve caught her attention because she looked past me. The light in her eyes fizzled. And when I turned, I found Garrett across the square.
He was leaning against a stall post with a cup in his hand and a posture that read as casual from fifty yards.
He was watching Jessica. He was watching my hand on Jessica's back.
His face was pleasant — the mask in place, the smile calibrated — but I could feel his eyes the way you felt a shift in temperature when a door opened to a cold room.
The texts had stopped. The flowers had stopped.
The showing up had gone subtler — he was just at events, just across the room, just within sightline.
My shoulders tightened. The muscles in my forearm contracted where my arm was wrapped around Jessica, and she glanced up — felt the change, read it in my jaw.
I shook my head. A fraction.
She held my eyes for a beat. Her body pressed closer to mine, and she turned back to the square, and I could feel her reading me through the contact — through the tension in my arm, through the set of my jaw, through years of a language we'd built without words.
Garrett lifted his cup. Took a slow drink. His eyes didn't leave us.
He was drifting closer.
I tracked him through the crowd — the stall post to the food line, the food line to the horseshoe pit, the horseshoe pit to the edge of the bandstand.
Each move brought him twenty yards nearer.
Each move was perfectly defensible. A man at a festival.
A man working the crowd. A man whose trajectory was a straight line to where Jessica and I were standing, and the line was tightening with every pass.
“Is he still watching?” she asked without looking at me.
I leaned down to her ear. Close enough that my lips almost grazed the shell of it.
Close enough that I could smell her — perfume and sunscreen and the warm-skin scent underneath that had been in my nose all day and was lodged so deep in my system now that I could taste it at the back of my throat.
My breath moved the hair at her temple, and she went still against me — her breathing pausing, her ribs expanding and holding, her weight settling onto her toes like a woman bracing for something.
"Yeah," I said. Low. Just for her. "Ten o'clock. He's been working his way toward us for five minutes."