Liv laughs out loud. "Do I ever date my grooms? No, certainly not."
"That's probably smart business practice."
She laughs again, and it’s infectious. It makes me want to keep talking just to hear it.
"So you don't date at all?" I ask.
"No. Not anymore."
Not anymore. Someone left a mark. "And you don't miss it?"
She arches a brow at me. "Miss what? The drama? The disappointment?" She shrugs. "My vibrator doesn't cheat. It doesn’t leave dirty dishes in the sink, or expect me to pretend its fantasy football league is fascinating. I'm good, thank you."
9
LIV
The rental convertible purrs as we cruise through the hills of Maryland, the September sun warming my shoulders. I'm driving because Blair forgot her license—something about it being in her purse back in New York. The excuse seemed flimsy; I doubt she even owns a purse, but I didn't press. Maybe she doesn't have a license and she's embarrassed. Living in the city, plenty of people get by without driving.
The weather is great for this—mid-seventies with a pleasant breeze that carries the scent of hay and the last crop of summer corn. Blair has her head tilted back, letting the wind tousle her hair. Every few minutes, she'll point out something that catches her attention—a red-winged blackbird perched on a fence post, a weathered barn with hex signs painted on its sides, a tractor moving slowly across a distant field.
My hands, meanwhile, are gripping the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles have gone white. The closer we get to Crayfield, the more my stomach churns with anxiety. It's been six months since I was home last, and even then it was just for a quick visit. I always have an excuse—client emergencies,venue walk-throughs, vendor meetings that simply cannot be rescheduled. Coming home feels uncomfortable. Once I turned my back, it became hard to return.
"This is beautiful," Blair says as we pass a sprawling farm with black and white Holstein cows dotting the pasture like scattered dominoes. "Look at all this space. It just goes on and on forever."
I glance at the view she's admiring—endless green fields stretching toward a horizon broken only by the occasional farmhouse or red barn. Ancient oak trees provide shade, their leaves just beginning to hint at the colors they'll become in a few weeks. Stone walls built by farmers a century ago still mark property lines, covered in wild grapevines and Virginia creeper. It's postcard pretty, I'll give her that. It’s the kind of scenery that makes city people dream about a "simpler life" and "getting back to nature."
"Yeah, it's nice," I say with a shrug, downshifting as we approach a small town's speed limit. "But too quiet for me."
"Is that why you left?"
I could give her my standard answer—that I wanted career opportunities that don't exist in rural Maryland, that I needed the energy and pace of city life. It’s true, but it’s not the whole truth.
"I wanted more," I finally say, keeping my eyes on the road. We pass a farm stand selling late summer tomatoes and sweet corn. There’s a coffee can where you leave money on the honor system. "More excitement, more challenge, more... I don't know. Just more than this place could offer. My parents have lived the same routine for thirty years. They wake up at dawn, tend the farm, eat dinner at six, watch the evening news, go to bed by ten. I wasn’t like them, satisfied with small-town life and small-town dreams.”
"Nothing wrong with wanting more," Blair says. "Sometimes you have to leave to figure out who you're supposed to be. I couldn't stay in North Carolina either."
I glance at her. "Ever want to leave New York?"
"Sure," she says with a laugh, but there's an edge to it that wasn't there before. "But I have no idea where I'd go."
We pass the Crayfield town limits sign, and my heart rate picks up another notch. Main Street looks more or less the same as it did when I left for Columbia—family-owned shops with hand-painted signs, a single traffic light that still blinks yellow after 10 PM, the diner where I had my first job waiting tables for tips that barely covered gas money. Mrs. Henderson is still tending her flower boxes outside the hardware store, her white hair pinned back the same way it's been for decades. Mr. Ruben still has newspapers stacked on the sidewalk outside his corner market, weighted down with a brick against the breeze.
It's charming in that frozen-in-time way that tourists love and locals either embrace or flee from.
"This is it," I announce as we cruise past the town center. "Downtown Crayfield in all its glory."
"It's like something out of a movie," Blair says, craning her neck to look at the storefronts. The barbershop has a spinning pole, and the pharmacy still displays hand-lettered sale signs in the window. "Does everyone know everyone here?"
"Pretty much. Mrs. Henderson over there—" I point to the woman arranging marigolds in wooden planters. "She taught my mother in Sunday school. Mr. Ruben from the convenience store helped my dad fix his combine harvester last spring and refused to accept payment. The mailman went to high school with my sister." I shake my head, navigating around a pickup truck that's moving at approximately fifteen miles per hour. "Nothing happens here that isn't everyone's business within an hour."
"Including your mysterious girlfriend making an appearance for the first time?"
"Oh God, don’t get me started." The reality hits me fresh, a cold wave of panic. "By tonight, half the county will know I brought someone home. By tomorrow morning, the other half will have heard, and they'll all have opinions about whether you're good enough for me." I grip the steering wheel even tighter, and my palms start to sweat. “I'm one of maybe five openly gay people in a twenty-mile radius, so bringing home a girlfriend—or what they think is a girlfriend—is going to be the talk of the town for months.”
“You’ve never brought a woman home?” she asks.
I keep my eyes on the road. “Once,” I say. “But that was a long time ago.”
