Emily was grateful that the Barton clan ate their Thanksgiving meal as a massive luncheon. Noah was spending the holiday with his mother, so the adults could indulge in plenty of catch-up conversation.
Grammy and Grandpop told about how they’d been recruited as featured speakers at some couples retreat; they were supposed to share their secrets for a long and loving relationship. Grammy had, of course, taken the opportunity to discuss women’s health and access to low-cost contraception, the foundation for equality in relationships. Grandpop had countered with the lessons he’d learned from studying Lyndon Baines Johnson, especially the former president’s flawless negotiation skills. Somehow, Grammy and Grandpop had managed to tie their pet hobbyhorses into a successful presentation about family.
Mom had just received an invitation to a prestigious craft show, a high-end one sponsored by some museum Emily had never heard of, but that didn’t mean much because Emily had never been a museum-going sort of girl. She wished she enjoyed that sort of academic field trip, but the halls of DC’s Smithsonian museums always seemed like a reminder of the life she hadn’t chosen, of the college she’d decided not to attend. Invariably, Emily left feeling lectured, scorned, like the lessons she’d learned working in half a dozen businesses around town meant nothing. But Mom was thrilled about her museum gig, and that’s what mattered.
Her siblings were thriving as well. Charlie had figured out some complicated new method of distributing strategic goals across different corporate silos—no one else understood a word of what she was saying, but she seemed serenely happy. Bran was following in their mother’s early career footsteps, publishing a new article in a prestigious academic journal, analyzing the recurring use of the color white in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Shirley. Anne was testing new recipes for brunches, exploring more elegant offerings to complement her first class pancakes, waffles, and omelets.
And then there was Emily.
She could show everyone the Estonian lace she’d made and explain how excited she was that Harmony Skeins had a new supplier of handspun yarn so customers could experiment with the technique. She could trot out the self-striping shawl yarn Theresa had discovered, with long repeats that made the simplest designs look elegant. She did work on the grey heather sweater while everyone talked, at least until she discovered an uncharacteristic mistake she’d made twelve rows back. She spent the better part of an hour ripping back to the problem site and getting the knitting back on her needles.
But none of that mattered. None of it was interesting. Not in the way her relatives’ lives were interesting.
She recognized her emotions. These were the same feelings that had made her skip going to college, made her jump from job to job for over a decade. Why waste tens of thousands of dollars on tuition when she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life? Why invest years moving up through management, maybe even buying a storefront, when Harmony Springs’s future was so precarious?
Better not to get too attached. Have fun instead. Don’t worry about Success, the one with a capital S that everyone else seemed to achieve without trying.
Emily kissed everyone goodbye and headed for home before the sun set. Pulling into her parking space—available for once, with the downtown streets utterly empty as everyone celebrated Thanksgiving with their families—Emily vowed to make this holiday season the most profitable one Theresa had ever seen. And she had some concrete ideas on how to do that, starting with shifting the autumn displays upstairs, to the storage in her apartment, so she had room in the store to knock the socks off customers with her Christmas displays.
That wasn’t a bad idea for a theme: Knock your socks off. She could cut out some word-balloons from poster-board: “Pow!” and “Bam!” Surround them with a variety of sock yarn, all exploding from a central core. Sprinkle around a few completed socks, add some still on the needles to inspire folks who couldn’t envision a finished project.
First things first.
She collected clean plastic bags from under the counter and started loading them up with the stock she was storing away. As she worked, she automatically did some sorting. Some of the yarn would go on sale, offering great bargains to lure shoppers through the door. Other yarn would stay in storage, waiting until the seasons turned around or some customer came looking for a special purpose. Yet other yarn would be donated; Olivia was always looking for arts and crafts materials for the kids she taught, and there were charities down in DC that collected yarn to share with prison inmates.
Each skein had to be accounted for in inventory. Emily had learned the hard way, eighteen months ago, when she’d first switched over the store displays from winter to spring. Then, she’d thought she would remember what she’d squirreled away upstairs and what she’d tossed into the sale basket. But it had taken her weeks to reconstruct the inventory, and she’d needed to expedite shipping on some goods to fill unexpected gaps on the shelves.
Theresa didn’t care. She was an absentee owner, willing to hand over every last bit of day-to-day responsibility. But Emily had vowed she’d never face that sort of confusion again. Better to invest the time now than pay the penalty of disorganization later.
The project was deceptive. Each individual hank weighed almost nothing but taken together, compressed into a plastic bag and tamped down to fill as little space as possible in the closet, the wool became heavy. She lugged a dozen bags out the front of the shop, lining them up by the door that led upstairs to her apartment.
Culling the shelves took time. Entering the data took time. Bagging the yarn took time. So she shouldn’t have been surprised to discover it was after eight when she was finally ready to drag her haul upstairs.
The first trip was easy; she grabbed a heavy sack in each hand and lumbered up the stairs. She shifted things in the closet built beneath the eaves, digging out the bags of holiday yarn she’d stored away last year. She carried two of those bags down and deposited them just inside the door of the shop.
The second trip was a repeat of the first, but she was beginning to tire. Her knees hurt a little on the steps, going up, and it took her longer to catch her breath.
The third trip felt like torture. Back at ground level, she tossed the recovered bags of yarn into the shop and put her hands on her knees, breathing hard to catch her breath. Only when her heart rate had slowed to something close to normal did she turn back to her task.
Four more bags. Two more trips.
As she steeled herself, she heard a car door close. The sound was surprising. Harmony Springs seemed deserted.
But when she looked up to see Matt Dawson standing on the curb, his presence seemed oddly inevitable.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Happy Thanksgiving, Matt,” he replied. “How has your holiday been? Isn’t Harmony Springs lovely this time of year?”
She twisted her lips in grim acknowledgment that he had a point. “Happy Thanksgiving,” she said. And then she realized she hadn’t heard his car pull up. “How long have you been sitting there?”
“Long enough to know you’ve got to be sick and tired of those stairs. Want some help?”
“I don’t need any help.” Her response was immediate. She couldn’t help it. She didn’t want him to think she was weak. She didn’t want anyone to think she was weak.
Instead of taking offense, he laughed. “Let’s try this again. Stipulating that you are totally and completely capable of carrying each of those bags upstairs, along with a dozen more if you had them, and that you aren’t the least bit tired, and that you could work on this throughout the night without taking a break for anyone or anything, keeping all of that in mind and accepting it as gospel truth… Do you want some help?”
She couldn’t help herself. She laughed. “Yeah,” she said. “Thanks.”
Maybe it was the breather she’d taken, talking to him. Maybe it was the fact that she walked in front of him on the stairs, excruciatingly aware that his eyes were at the exact level of her butt. Maybe it was because the last bags she’d packed were lighter than the earlier ones—but this trip was the easiest one yet.
“You can dump them over there,” she said, waving toward the closet. And because she was only human, she watched as he crossed the room, studying the khaki cloth across his backside as he bent to deposit his bags in storage.
“Do you have more to go downstairs?” he asked as he turned around, and the question gave her warning so her eyes were on his face by the time he straightened.
“Nope,” she said. “That’s it.” And then, because she really did owe him something for his help, she said, “Can I offer you a drink?”
“Yeah,” he said, after a pause so quick she could pretend she hadn’t heard it. “A drink would be nice.”
She opened the fridge. “I’ve got cider,” she said. “And, um, cider.” But there was something else in the refrigerator, nestled in the door. She saw it, like a beacon blazing across the sky: the bottle of champagne that Rachel had given her for her birthday.
His eyes flickered up, and she knew he’d seen it too. “Cider it is, then.”
She hated that she felt grateful to him for not saying anything. She opened two bottles of Angry Orchard and led the way to the couch. She planted herself in one corner, pulling her knees up to her chin. After a swig of cider, she put her bottle on the end table and pulled her sleeves over her fingertips.
“So,” she said, because the silence was getting awkward. “How was your Thanksgiving?”
He shook his head. “Pretty sad, actually.”
She didn’t know how to respond to that, so she just nodded. That turned out to be the right thing, because Matt sighed and went on.
“I knew it was going to be tough, first holiday without Jon. I was ready for that. But I’d pictured all these scenes—our holding hands, saying grace. Mom and Dad sharing memories of what things had been like when we were growing up. Really talking about him, saying his name out loud.” He shook his head. “But Dad hid out at the factory. And Mom went insane, like Martha Stewart and Betty Crocker all rolled into one. And I just sat there, trying to figure out what I could have done, how I could have made it right.”
“Sometimes you can’t make things right,” she said.
“I know that!” He seemed surprised by his anger. He drank some cider and repeated in a calmer voice, “I know that, in my mind. He was a soldier. He signed up for a dangerous job. He was killed by a roadside bomb, in a stupid accident, driving a convoy to get supplies to a village after a landslide. I know all that.”
Again, she waited. Because she’d never heard Matt say so many words at one time. And if he had that much bottled up inside him, there had to be more.
“One of my first memories is standing by his crib when he was a baby. He had one leg over the side, and he was swaying on top. I didn’t know if I could catch him, if I could keep him from hurting himself. And before I could figure it out, my father came in. He had shaving cream on his face, streaks where he’d missed with his razor, and he saw Jon hanging there and he put him back in the crib. Then he turned to me and said, ‘That’s your baby brother. He’s too little to protect himself. You’re the one who has to keep him safe.’”
“That wasn’t fair,” Emily said. “You were just a kid too.”
“But it was fair. I was his big brother. And I should have kept him from doing stuff. From crossing Harmony Run during spring melt. From climbing Old Man Marshall’s hayloft.” Matt’s eyes flickered toward Emily, then darted away. “From screwing around with Kaylie behind your back.”
Her mouth went dry. She hadn’t thought they were going to talk about that. “You couldn’t stop him,” she said, but she didn’t recognize her own voice. “Not with any of that stuff.”
Matt’s laugh was bitter. “Tell that to my father. It was so fucked up, all of it. Dad told me to watch out for Jon, and Jon did whatever the hell he wanted to do. Whenever things fell apart for Jon, he came to me, and I had to fix it. I had to tell Dad he’d lost his house key in Harmony Run. I had to tell Dad he’d broken his arm.”
Desperate not to hear more, Emily said, “Please tell me you didn’t say anything to your father about me.”
Matt flicked his gaze past her. “Of course not. But Jon came to me that day, just like he always did, whenever there was a mistake to clean up. Kaylie terrified him, talking about how he’d broken your heart, how he couldn’t know what you’d do, how he’d be responsible the rest of his life if you hurt yourself.”
Emily shook her head. It took her a moment to search for the words she wanted. “I was angry. Embarrassed. Hurt. But even as it was happening, I kind of knew I’d get over him. You’re the one who told me—he was like a puppy, always getting into trouble. He annoyed the heck out of people, but no one could stay mad for long.”
“I was mad at him.” Then Matt corrected himself. “I was jealous. I was down in Richmond, working so hard to make my grades, to hit the gym, to get control of my slider. Every single day, I wondered if I had what it took, if I would ever make it in the majors. And there was Jon, tumbling through life, knowing the Army was waiting for him when he graduated, not caring if the best he got was a C. He had fun on varsity baseball because it wasn’t important. He even had a girlfriend. He had you.”
This time, Matt didn’t look away. This time, his gaze pinned hers, hot and fierce, like he was daring her to contradict him. His look was too direct, too bare, and she pulled at her sleeves like they could offer shelter, like they could make her disappear.
“You didn’t know me,” she whispered.
“I knew about you. You were Bran’s little sister. And then you were Jon’s girlfriend. Mom sent me your picture from The Herald—Homecoming King and Queen. You came around every day for the two weeks I was home for Christmas Break.”
She flushed. She had practically lived at the Dawsons’ house. For the week between Christmas and New Year’s, she and Jon had camped out in the family room, watching crappy TV and making out when they thought they could get away with it.
And she’d known about Matt, of course. He’d hung out in his bedroom, cranking tunes until his mother made him turn the volume down. He’d left college textbooks on the counter in the kitchen: Microeconomics and Critique of Pure Reason. She’d been in awe of him, and just a little bit scared, because she was supposed to go to college the following year. She was supposed to be an adult.
“I didn’t think you noticed,” she said.
“I noticed.”
Those two words sizzled across the room. Neither of them had moved; they still sat at opposite ends of the couch, but the air had somehow shrunk between them. A liquid heat glowed in Emily’s belly, fed by the charge of Matt’s unblinking gaze.
“That day,” she finally said. “By the river…”
“I didn’t plan it.”
She believed him. Neither of them had planned it. If they’d planned it, she wouldn’t have been half-drunk. He wouldn’t have pushed her away.
He set his bottle of cider on the coffee table. She couldn’t look away from him. She couldn’t forget what his fingers had done to her, how he had known exactly what she needed, precisely what to do.
But she wasn’t a naive girl anymore. She’d learned how to speak for herself, how to say what she wanted. So she put her own bottle on the table. And she swung her feet to the floor. And she planted her hand on the sofa, closing the distance between them, meeting him halfway.
“I guess there’s one thing,” she said. “One thing I’ve never gotten over about that day.”
She smiled when she said it. It was important that he understood her, that he knew how she felt about what had happened under the apple tree. How she felt about him.
And he did. He understood. “Yeah,” he said, shifting his own weight to look at her more directly. “What’s that?”
“I still feel like I owe you. You gave me what I needed. You made me feel beautiful. Desirable. But you never let me do that for you.”
“Is that an offer?”
“Are you accepting?”
~~~
She smelled like cinnamon. She tasted like apples. She sighed when he kissed her, a little sound, like she’d been waiting for him to make a move forever.
She laughed when he tugged her closer, when she slipped her leg over his, riding the edge of his thigh. He wasted no time taking advantage of the angle. His hands edged under her sweater so he could fan his fingers against the soft warmth of her bare skin.
It wasn’t enough to feel her. He wanted to see her too, so he moved his hands up her sides, taking her sweater with him. She tossed her hair as her head worked free, and her eyes glinted with amusement. He wanted to take in the look of her, the simple cotton bra that rose and fell as her breath quickened, as her nipples tightened into buds.
But she wasn’t sitting still, waiting to be admired. Emily would never stay like that, never be so passive.
Instead, she pulled at his shirttails, stripping them free of his pants. She worked the buttons quickly, marching from the top, one, two, three. And when she was satisfied with her handiwork, she tugged his shirt over his head, capturing his undershirt with the same maneuver.
His wrists caught in his buttoned sleeves, angling his elbows behind his back. She laughed as he thrashed, but then she distracted him by straddling his lap. His cock leaped at the pressure, and she squeezed her thighs tight in response.
He wanted to kiss her, long and deep and slow. But she was the one in charge here. She was the one drawing up a game plan to answer the match-up they’d had twelve years ago.
Her teeth closed on the lobe of his ear and she tugged. He groaned and flexed his shoulders, testing whether she’d let him free his arms. She laughed, though, and shook her head, stroking the bulge in his pants to reinforce her command. He threw his head back, yielding control.
She wasn’t a girl anymore. She wasn’t awkward and shy. She knew exactly what power she held in her fingertips, in her fingernails, in the palms of her hands, and she wasn’t afraid to use it. Her teeth scraped along his jaw. She nipped at the side of his throat, and then she sucked hard enough to make his breath catch.
She traced his pecs with her nails, smoothing her palms over his shoulders and down his arms. The motion brought her breasts inches from his lips and he tossed his head, straining as she laughed and pulled away. That retreat shifted her weight across his thighs, and he bucked up, needing to ease the pressure, knowing he was dangerously close to exploding.
She let him work his hands free then. He tore off his shirt and tossed it halfway across the room. She shrieked as he pounced on her, as he stripped away her flimsy bra, as he suckled the prize she’d teased him with. He kissed his way down her belly, supporting her back as she arched toward him.
He worked the button on her pants and slipped down the zipper. Her panties were as plain as her bra, simple and sweet, the elastic flat across her belly as she panted like a long-distance runner. He slipped her pants over her hips, easing them down her legs, and then he ran his hands up the inside of her thighs. He started to hook the edge of her panties, to reach for her sweet, damp heat, but she closed her hands around his wrists.
This time, she knew how to unbuckle his belt. She knew how to ease his button open, how to edge his zipper home. She didn’t hesitate to slip her fingers inside the front of his boxers, even when his breath caught, even when his cock kicked hard against her palm.
He’d stopped her years before, beneath the apple tree, because he hadn’t trusted himself, because he hadn’t been certain what he would do, what she could handle. But they weren’t kids now. He didn’t have to protect her. They were adults, equals, able to give as good as they got.
Her lips were hot around him. He arched his back and dug his fingers into the cushions of the couch. “My God, Em,” he moaned, as she framed his hips with her hands.
She brought him to the edge in seconds, which wasn’t saying much, because he was dying to plant himself inside her. But she pulled away before he spent himself. She laughed and wiped the back of her hand across her lips. She leaned back and tossed her hair, and that was all the advantage he needed to shift her weight, to get his fingers inside her panties, to finally slide the cotton down and look at her, naked, bare, ready for him.
She was so beautiful—proud and bold and unafraid.
But now she wasn’t laughing. Instead, she raised her hands to his chest. She ran her palms down his arms. She laced her fingers between his and squeezed once, twice. She released his right hand so she could cup his face, and then she pulled herself upright, pulled both of them to their feet.
Still holding his left hand, she led the way into her bedroom. She released him then, so she could pull open her nightstand drawer, so she could dig around in the shadowed space inside. He watched her come up with a box. She slipped out a foil square and turned to him, displaying the condom on the palm of her hand.
He closed the distance between them, tangling his fingers in her hair, guiding her back to the bed. She was liquid heat beneath him, soft and wet and smooth. He pulled back enough that she could tear open the packet, and he sucked in his breath as she covered his throbbing length.
They rose together, fast and hot and heavy. Their bodies matched as if they’d rehearsed this moment; their pace was perfect, their pitch exact. He felt her tense beneath him, knew the arch of her back, the iron in her thighs. He drove home again, and he felt her start to shudder. Again, and she clutched tight around him. One more time, and she shattered, pumping hard with her inner muscles as she raked his shoulders, as she cried his name.
He broke against her then, gasping out his own release. He buried his face in her neck, breathing, just breathing. And when he could see again, when he could move, he reached for the blanket across the foot of her bed and pulled it up to cover them. It settled over their shoulders, light and soft as apple blossoms blowing on the breeze.