CHAPTER TWELVE
EVELYN
I grunt as I reach for the handle of the bakehouse door, seventeen layers of clothes thick and warm around me. Beckett had glared at me as he forced a sweatshirt over my head in the kitchen this morning—an old green, faded thing with a giant badger across the chest.
“Stay away from water today,” he ordered, lips tilted downward. I had gone to pull my hair loose from my collar but he had gotten there first, gathering it up in his fist. He had paused, just for a second, and then released it down my back.
There had been a handful of memories in that second. I could see it in the single flash of darkness in those bright eyes. He remembered, same as I did. His hands in my hair, tilting my head back as he guided me towards a bed with too many pillows. Sticky humidity against my skin. A deep, indulgent moan from me. A shaky exhale pressed right between my breasts from him.
The ribbon of silver bells above the door announces my arrival and successfully disrupts my little daydream.
Layla and Stella glance up from behind the counter, Stella’s face twisting in confusion at my marshmallow man layers. It’s not even cold today. I can feel a single bead of sweat slipping down my spine.
“Cute sweatshirt,” Layla says immediately, a sly grin on her full lips. She has a cake in front of her, white buttercream and hunter green icing. A trail of delicate, pale blue forget-me-nots cascade down the side, her hand poised above. She adjusts her grip on the bag and tilts her head to the side. “I like your new farm look. It suits you.”
It suits me too, when I’m not sweating half to death. I putter over to the countertop and pick up a broken cookie, Layla’s stack of imperfect discards on a tray for anyone to grab.
I’m supposed to be helping her with her weekend orders, but maybe I’ll eat all her scraps and call it a day. I feel like I’ve earned that.
“I saw the ambulance pull in yesterday.” Stella wipes her hands off on a towel and steps around the counter. “I was going to stop by if I didn’t see you today. Everything okay?”
The ambulance. God. I had never felt like more of an inconvenience than when Gus came rumbling into Beckett’s driveway with his red and white behemoth. At least he didn’t have the lights and sirens going. I’m pretty sure I would have crawled under the bed in the spare room and never come out.
“I’m okay. Beckett took good care of me.” With the blankets and his warm skin pressed to mine, his arms tight around me, his chin on my shoulder. I feel another flush of heat that has nothing to do with my layers. He hadn’t hesitated at all, instantly scooping me up and holding me close.
Layla snickers down at her cake, a practiced flick of her wrist as she pipes a tiny, perfect leaf on the corner. “I’m sure he did.”
I give her a look around a mouthful of oatmeal chocolate chip cookie. “Very mature of you.”
I finish my cookie and tuck my elbows into my chest, an attempt to pull my arms from the sleeves of my top two layers. The thick material bunches around my biceps and I make a helpless sound as I attempt to twist out.
Stella takes mercy on me and grips the hem. “I’m glad you were able to get to Beckett. It’s a long walk from the pond to the fields.”
Even longer when you’re soaking wet and shivering so badly you can hardly breathe. I lost my coat somewhere on the way, the thing so heavy with water it felt like seventy-five extra pounds of weight. I’ll have to go grab it at some point.
Stella tugs the sweatshirt up and over my head and I breathe out a sigh of relief. Movement. Oxygen. Sweet, sweet freedom. She drapes the jumble of cotton over a chair. “What were you doing out at the pond anyway? We really only ever use it in the summer.”
“Trying.” I offer in an explanation that makes absolutely no sense at all. But Stella always seems to read between the lines. The confusion on her face settles into a soft understanding, her hand squeezing at my arm once.
“Everything okay?”
I nod, shrug, and then shake my head. “I don’t know.” I tuck my hands into the cuffs of my shirt and glance at the picture hanging just behind the counter—Beckett, Layla and Stella together with a giant pair of scissors, cutting a big red bow in front of the bakehouse. “Do you ever feel like—do you ever want to slow down? Not be responsible for everything, all of the time?”
She breaks off a piece of my cookie as she considers her answer. “About six months into owning the farm, I started sleepwalking. Most of the time, I’d wake up somewhere in the house. Going through drawers in the kitchen. Inexplicably taking all my clothes out of the dresser. Rearranging houseplants. Other times I’d wake up in my office, sitting behind my desk.” She huffs a laugh. “Once I woke up in the middle of typing an email to a supplier, asking for four times the amount of everything. Beckett would have had enough topsoil for years.”
“The office is pretty far from your house.” At least in the middle of the night, it is. When one is presumably asleep.
Stella nods. “Yeah. One night I fell in the middle of the field. Sprained my ankle. I had to hop my way home in my pajamas.” She shakes her head. “I was covered in dirt, sitting in my kitchen, with my leg propped up on the counter.”
I take another nibble of cookie. “Was Luka mad?”
She nods. “Furious. He was upset that I never told him about the sleepwalking. That it had been happening for a while and I never thought to mention it, or slow down.”
She glances out the window to the trees beyond, a half-smile tugging at her lips. “I’m not great at listening to myself. Some days I push myself too hard. Some days we don’t get a single customer and I panic about losing everything. Some days I make up an elaborate story with my best friend and pretend we’re in a relationship so a social media influencer likes us more.” She gives me a rueful grin. “Some days I’m so tired I can hardly remember my name. And that’s what’s expected, right? When you own a business. I think—I think we’re told that we should embrace the grind. The work. That everything will be worth it in the end. But sometimes we need rest more than we need another thing on our list. And that’s okay. I’m learning that’s really okay.”
I blow out a noisy breath. That’s what I’m looking for, I think. A little rest. Something slower. I’m so tired of everything else.
Stella watches me carefully. “It’s okay to want different things,” she says. “People change. You’re allowed to change. Doing less doesn’t make you less.”
Seasons change and so do we. I wonder if Stella made the banner that hangs in the center of town.
“Nice shirt,” Layla calls, a laugh hidden in her voice. I look down at the oversized flannel tied in a knot at my waist and pluck at one of the buttons.
“It’s comfortable,” I say.
“Mmhmm.”
“It’s really soft.”
“I’m sure it is.”
Not as soft as the look on Beckett’s face, though, when he helped me slip the material over my shoulders, his knuckles grazing the inside of my arm and then my collarbone. Mine, that look had said, possession in the nimble work of his fingers against the buttons. But then he had cleared his throat and looked away, staring at his mug of tea like it held the meaning to life.
I have no idea what he wants from me, if he even wants anything from me at all.
Stella studies me with a knowing look. “Have you talked to him?”
“He knows I have his shirt.”
“That isn’t what I meant and you know it.”
I haven’t. What could I possibly say? That night in Maine was one of the best nights of my life. I want to keep sitting on your back porch.
Every day we spend together, I only like you more.
I can’t. There’s still too much to figure out. I’m confused about work and that confusion is bleeding out, jumbling up the rest of me.
Specifically my feelings for a very handsome and very stoic farmer.
Our conversation is interrupted by a knock against the thick glass of the front door. Caleb Alvarez edges the door open and pokes his head through, the rest of his long body lingering on the small porch. Dark hair, bashful grin. Eyes only for Layla.
“You open for business yet?”
Layla waves him in from behind the counter, tongue between her teeth as she finishes piping her flowers. “Always for you, Deputy.”
Caleb straightens and slips through the door, a pleased blush high on his tanned cheeks. He gives us a wave and a sheepish smile that causes twin dimples to blink to life in his cheeks. Stella and I sigh in unison. “Told you to call me Caleb,” he calls to Layla.
“Your cake will be ready in a sec,” Layla offers. “Help yourself to a coffee while you wait.”
Caleb ducks behind the counter to the coffee pot and Stella leans closer to me, hiding her mouth with the back of her hand. “This is the third custom cake he’s ordered this month,” she whispers. “I think he’s gained fifteen pounds.”
I take in his trim body, legs crossed at the ankles as he leans against the counter and stares at Layla like she’s made of sugarplums and fairy-dust. Maybe all those calories are going right to his gigantic heart. I grin.
“Has she noticed?”
The smile slips from Stella’s face as she shakes her head. “She’s so used to men treating her like garbage, I don’t think she recognizes when someone has genuine interest in her.” She sighs and rubs a fingertip across her eyebrow. “I’ve got faith in Caleb, though.”
So do I, if Layla’s laugh is any indication. It bursts out of her at something he quietly murmurs over the countertop, an answering grin blooming on his handsome face.
I narrow my eyes. “Does that mean you’ve got money on Caleb?”
The last time I was here, I stumbled upon a town-wide betting pool with odds on Stella and Luka making it official; a surprisingly organized and efficient white board in the back of the firehouse with scribbled names and amounts.
Stella snickers. “Luka does.”
I eat oatmeal chocolate chip cookies until I have to unbutton the clasp of my jeans, reclined in the back kitchen across three sacks of sugar. I make a moaning sound as Layla walks by with a tray of brownies, a small square dropped neatly on my chest.
“You’re gonna kill me,” I groan.
“Death by chocolate.” Layla drops the tray on the large metal island in the middle of the room and wipes her palms against her apron. “There are worse ways to go.”
I sit up and watch as she cuts the brownies into perfect two-inch squares, her movements graceful and efficient. The whole day I’ve watched her spin around this bakehouse like a dancer, every single movement a step in an elaborately choreographed routine.
“You moved to Inglewild when you finished college, right?”
Layla hums and nods, reaching for some plastic wrap at her elbow. “I met Stella our freshman year at Salisbury. I decided to move here on a whim, really. Not much of a plan.” She presses the back of her hand across her forehead, fingertips covered in dark chocolate. “I lived with Stella for a while. We shared a tiny apartment above the service station. I’m pretty sure I smelled like oil and grease for six months straight. Beatrice hated it.”
“Ms. Beatrice?”
“Ah, yeah. I worked at the cafe for a while. She taught me everything I know about baked goods.”
Huh. I had no idea. I’m guessing Ms. Beatrice kept her shortbread recipe to herself. Layla’s eyes narrow in a secret smile, her pink lips curled at the edges. “I know Beckett gets cookies on the side. It amuses me to watch him sneak around.”
Her phone begins to rattle across the countertop and she glances at the screen. “Speak of the devil,” she mutters. She reads whatever message pops up and snorts a laugh. “Beckett says he’s running late and you should head to trivia with me. He also says we should not, under any circumstance, walk by the fountain in town. You might go careening in.”
I roll my eyes. “How long am I going to be teased about this?”
“Oh, a decade or so. Is your phone still in the pond?”
“Probably,” I say. I imagine it sitting at the bottom with the silt and the mud, an endless stream of social media alerts pinging like bubbles. The image is oddly satisfying. “What’s the likelihood Beckett is avoiding trivia?”
“Depends,” Layla hangs up her apron on a peg by the door and rolls out her neck. The amount of things this woman creates in a day is astounding. Peach tarts and warm butter croissants and donuts with fresh vanilla custard inside. She should have her own Food Network show, an entire line of cookware. “Who did he promise? You or Nova?”
“Me.”
She smiles. “Then he’ll be there.”
The bar is crowded when we arrive, several large folding tables filling the space that was empty only a few days ago. There are groups clustered together along each, chairs pushed together and everyone is dressed in—
“Are those costumes?” There is a man at the far end with his elbows resting on the table, leaves in his hair, his chest wrapped in what looks like brown paper.
Layla nods and waves to someone by the bar. “Yup. One of the rules for trivia is you have to dress to the theme if you’re on a team.”
I see a pretty young woman standing behind the man with the butcher’s paper wearing all yellow, top to bottom. She has fake vines twisting up from her sneakers to her knees. “And tonight’s theme is …”
Layla bends over a couple having a spirited discussion about mozzarella sticks and grabs a flier off the table. At the top in big bold letters, it reads GARDEN PARTY. I glance back up at the man who must be a tree, and his partner who, I guess, is a … sun?
Layla laughs. “The interpretations are always creative. Ah, there’s Beckett’s family. We can sit with them before it starts, but I want to be out of swinging distance when the questions get going.”
I follow after her through the crowd, stepping around someone with actual feathers stuck to a majority of their body. A sparrow? Who knows.
“Swinging distance?”
“It isn’t trivia night if a stool doesn’t almost go through the window.”
“What?” Her statement has me pausing right at the edge of the table we’ve been working our way towards, five heads with varying degrees of dark blonde hair bent close together and whispering. Layla clears her throat and the man closest to us shoots up in his seat, grin already pulling his mouth wide.
“Laaaaayla,” he sings, voice tilting down an octave at the end as he does his best Eric Clapton impersonation. Layla laughs and bends at the waist to kiss him on the cheek. His eyes slant to me and hold, and his grin turns mischievous. He has the same features as Beckett, but lighter somehow. Laugh lines deep by his eyes and around his mouth. I don’t notice the wheelchair until he pulls back slightly from the table, turning the wheels in my direction with one sure hand. “You must be Evelyn. My son is awfully evasive about you.”
“He’s evasive about everything,” the woman at his elbow mumbles, but she’s smiling too, familiar blue-green eyes on her kind face. Everyone at the table is wearing a different version of a flower crown, thick with seeded eucalyptus and magnolia leaves, perfect blooms of bright purple statice woven between. She pats the space across from her with a cat-that-got-the-canary smile. “Come sit with us.”
“Try not to sound like such a creep, Ness. Christ.” A small woman gripes, a french fry hanging out of her mouth like a cigarette. She gives me a little wave. “I’m Nova. I’m his favorite.”
“Favorite headache, maybe.”
“At least I didn’t put my foot through his spare bedroom ceiling.”
Nessa blanches. “Shut up. He still doesn’t know about that.” She glances at me. “Does he know about that?”
“I have no idea.”
I make a note to check the ceiling in the other two bedrooms when I get back to Beckett’s and slip into the empty seat. An older woman with streaks of gray in her honey blonde hair smiles at me, nudging a pitcher of beer in my direction.
“It’s good you got here early,” she says. “Now we can talk without interruptions.”
There are plenty of interruptions. All in the form of Beckett’s family eagerly asking questions over one another.
“Which of his tattoos is your favorite?” Nova asks.
I’ve only consumed a quarter of my beer, but answered close to one-hundred-and-seven questions. Apparently Beckett has shared nothing with them at their weekly dinners, and they’re rabid for information. I’m happy enough to indulge, delighted by the way they banter with one another, love in every single smile and snap and spilled drink. They remind me of nights with my parents and aunties and all of my cousins.
This question feels like a trick, though.
“Did you do any of them?” I remember Ms. Beatrice mentioned that she’s an artist.
Nova nods proudly. “All of them—my first when I was sixteen.” She taps the inside of her wrist where I know Beckett has a small leaf. “I was having trouble finding clients and Beckett volunteered. He kept volunteering,” she laughs.
I think about the art that covers every square inch of his arms, from the backs of his hands to the strong line of his shoulders. I picture a much younger Beckett sitting with his arm outstretched, allowing his little sister to carve her mark on his skin and my heart swells in my chest.
“The galaxy one,” I answer her question and rub my finger along my tricep. “The one right here. The coloring is gorgeous.”
It hides under his t-shirt most of the time, a bright blue streak poking through when his sleeves are slightly rolled or when he’s reaching for something above his head. A rich cobalt with streaks of purple, the ink so smooth it’s like someone pressed their thumb and dragged it across his skin. Tiny, delicate stars outlined in crisp white.
Nova beams, pleased. “I gave him that for his birthday a couple of years ago. It’s my favorite, too.”
“What’s your favorite?” Beckett’s deep voice rumbles against my back as a big hand appears over my shoulder and lifts the beer out of my grip. I tilt my head back and watch as he takes a long pull, the strong column of his throat working.
“Hi.”
I want to lean my head back until it rests against his hip. I want to tell him I’ve been thinking about him all day.
He looks tired, a little frustrated. But a small smile quirks his lips when he glances down at me with a raised eyebrow. “Hey. My sisters getting you drunk?”
“Not yet,” his mom smiles softly and accepts the kiss he leans over to press to her cheek. “But we’ve got time. Now sit down and put your flower crown on. Trivia starts in three minutes.”
Beckett drops into the seat next to me and dutifully puts on his flower crown without complaint. It dips over one eye and I push it back on his head until the blooms are resting in his hair. He looks like something out of Greek mythology, unfairly beautiful.
“Damn,” Harper pouts. “I was hoping you’d look ridiculous.”
Beckett’s eyes slant towards her, sitting cross legged at the end of the table with a piña colada in front of her. “Glad to see you could make it.”
She shrugs. “Can’t participate,” she gestures towards her fair blonde hair, twisted back in a braid, unadorned with a flower crown. “Didn’t dress up.”
Beckett reaches for the leaves on his head. “You can have—“
“Oh, hey Jenny! Hold on a sec, I’ll be right—”
She stands up without finishing her sentence, disappearing into the crowd that surrounds the bar. Beckett releases a defeated sigh and finishes the rest of my beer.
“You okay?” I ask.
“It’s loud,” he says with a wince. He reaches for the pitcher in the center of the table and almost topples it when Gus climbs up on the bar top with a megaphone, announcing the start of the games. He shakes his head slightly, a short, reactionary movement like he’s flicking off a fly or shaking water out of his ear. He secures the pitcher and pours himself another glass. “It’ll be fine.”