“Many a Blue Willow fool has poured their wishes into this thing,” he says. “Year after year. Spilled half the cider on their boots, too. Call it tableware if you want, but here, tradition’s scripture. You should know that by now.”
I do know that, but knowing it doesn’t mean I understand it. Or feel it the way he does.
His thumb traces the crack up the side, slow and careful, like he’s following the path of an old river. There’s something reverent in the way he touches it. Something I shouldn’t notice.
His hands are too steady, too sure, too. I wonder what they would—God, no. I shake the thought loose before it lands.
“Are you going, then?” I ask, clearing my throat. “To this thing tonight?”
“Hell yeah, I am.”
I fiddle with the towel so I don’t have to look at him looking at me. “Then I guess I should go, too.”
We stand in it for a moment—first one breath, then another. We can be careful when we choose to be. The other night, though—the wine, the blanket, the sound of his laugh low in his chest—left the air between us thick and uncertain. Nothing about it felt simple.
But we have to keep our distance now. Keep our footing.
Because this man unsettles me. He’s steady where I’m restless, rooted where I run. We want different things and come from different worlds. And yet, somehow, that night proved we recognize the same shapes of loneliness.
Still, I’m sure he sees me as fleeting. Feckless. Already half-gone. And yet, there’s something in the way he looks at me, like he hasn’t quite decided whether to let me go.
“I need to check the lantern stakes on the lane,” he says. “Wind tipped a few last week. We can take my truck.”
I blink. “We?”
“If you want.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I want.”
I lean against the counter while he finishes dusting the bowl. A single lamp above the sink keeps us in a pool of golden light. I wonder how many nights my grandmother stood here with him, sharing this same easy quiet.
I’m sure she didn’t look at him the way I do—admiring the shape of his shoulders, the rough grace in his hands. Or hell, maybe she did.
Grandmothers notice things, too.
When he passes the bowl to me, he forgets to let go. Our hands bump, knuckles grazing, and the contact catches like a spark under my skin. I want to say something. To tell him that, for whatever reason, his simplest of touches sets my every nerve alight.
It’s my nature to name what I feel, to call it plain: hot, sharp, too much, too good. My mind races ahead of my mouth, always ready to confess. But years of being told to hold my tongue, to stay small and agreeable, have taught me he wouldn’t want to hear it anyway.
He’s ignoring whatever this is between us. Pretending not to feel it. And I should, too. Anything else would be asking for trouble.
18
WELLS
Lantern light threadsthe orchard lane in a patient line. It wobbles where the ground heaves and steadies where I sank the stakes earlier to string them up.
Kids thump pot lids with wooden spoons. Someone wrestles with a brazier that won’t catch until it suddenly does, fire climbing in a clean, bright column.
Old Twelvey. The night we wake the trees and remind the town it knows how to outlast a season. There’s something about these rituals I’ve loved since the first year I moved here. It’s not like home, where the calendar changed but nothing else did.
Blue Willow’s traditions return each year without being asked, holding their shape even when everything else tilts or fades. It’s something to admire, something to cling to.
“Last ten,” Isla calls, appearing halfway down the row with a crate of beeswax tapers from Honeywild. “If you break them, I’m billing you personally.”
“They’re recycled candles, Isla.”
“They’re my candles,” she says, mock stern. “And they’re perfect.”
