“Okay,” I said, reciting those words over and over until they imprinted on me. “Okay. Thank you.”
He grabbed the radio and pushed it toward me. “Take this. Stay on channel four. If I don’t hear from you within twenty minutes, I’m calling for the cavalry. I mean it. I’m calling everyone. All-points bulletin. All hands on deck.”
“Understood.” I took the radio and tucked it into an interior pocket to keep it dry. To Gennie, I said, “You know what to do. I don’t have to remind you.”
She dropped two cherries into her glass. “Nope.”
I wasn’t an expert when it came to this land. I didn’t know it the way Noah did, not even the way Gennie did, but I knew where that pumpkin patch was because it leaned up against the Twin Tulip border. I’d spotted a bunch of stray pumpkins when I went for a walk down there earlier in the week. Without that knowledge, I would’ve been driving blind.
I was about ten minutes from the house and clutching the wheel so hard my fingers were numb when I caught sight of white goat fur. I slowed to a roll, waiting for the goat to wander through the headlights again. But it wasn’t a goat I saw next. It was muddy jeans.
Noah held a hand up to his face, shielding his eyes from the glare of the lights. There was blood running down his forehead and he had his other arm cradled against his abdomen in a way that said something wasn’t right. A pair of goats milled around him. “Bones?” he called.
I turned off the vehicle and sprinted toward him. “Noah!”
“Shay? What the fuck are you doing out here?”
“Someone had to rescue you this time.”
“You could’ve been hurt or killed out here,” he roared.
“But I wasn’t.”
“Goddammit, Shay—”
“I love you too,” I said. “And I’ll love you as long as you’ll let me if—”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” he called.
We could barely hear each other over the wind and rain but this had to be said and it had to be now. “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to trust someone all the way and I don’t know how to put myself in a position where I could get abandoned all over again.”
“Shay—”
“But I think I want to do it anyway,” I said. “I think I have to do it, even if it scares me. Even if I think it could fall apart or that you might change your mind, I have to stay here and I have to love you.”
“I swear to you, I’m not changing my mind. I’m not letting you go. I couldn’t. Not after all these years.”
Right here, with goats nosing at my hand and a storm around us, everything shifted for me. It was a lot like being in my wedding dress and having the rug pulled out from underneath me again. My entire world flipped upside down. And just as I’d known then that all the fondness and affection I’d built for the ex was gone, I knew now that Noah loved me. He loved me and there was no way to force that into existence. Love like this couldn’t be cornered, it couldn’t be contrived. It was real and it wasn’t about rescuing each other.
But I had to yell at my husband about cracking his head open first. “What are you standing over there for? We need to get that cut looked at and please explain what happened to your arm.”
He trudged toward me. “I think I broke it when the ATV rolled.”
“Yourolledthe ATV? What the hell were you thinking, coming out here in the dark, in a storm, on the ATV? Don’t you have rules about this sort of thing? Don’t you know better?”
“Yeah, I do.” He caught a fistful of my coat and yanked me closer. “So, why don’t you tell me what the hellyoudid the same thing, wife?”
“It was my turn to save you, husband.”
He pressed his lips to mine and Iknew. This was all the proof I needed.
* * *
After Bones assuredus that he could stay with Gennie a little longer—and Gennie assured us there would be no escape attempts—we headed to the local emergency room. Noah grumbled the entire drive. He insisted his forehead wouldn’t require stitches and that he didn’t have time to deal with a broken arm and therefore it probably wasn’t broken. Maybe a sprain, maybe a pulled muscle or a bad bone bruise. Nothing that would require a cast. He went so far as to explain this to the triage nurse, who promptly laughed her ass off and pointed us to the closest exam room while muttering “Farmers!”
Once we were alone, Noah scowled and grumbled about everything in the entire world until I pushed out of the metal chair and tucked myself in beside him on the gurney. “It makes sense now,” I said.
“What’s that?”
