Asher is a flurry of tiny movements. I watch his chest rise and fall with his breath, the way his hands adjust on his crutches, a thousand tiny movements in his face while he swallows.
I take a deep breath and catch his eye with my nervous gaze. “I don’t even know if you like me…”
“I like you.” The words hang in the air between us, as if he spit them out by accident.
“What?” I breathe.
“I like you.” He says it like it costs him something. Like each word is being dragged out by force. “I like you, Eva. I’ve liked you since you startled at me in the woods, and I definitely liked you when you brought me coffee every morning, and I especially liked you when you held my nephew and he stopped crying and looked at you like you were the secret to everything good in the universe.”
My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat. “Then why did you push me away?”
“Because you’re leaving.” His voice cracks on the word. “Because everyone leaves.” He stops, runs a hand through his hair. “You make me want things I trained myself not to want, and I don’t know how to do this.”
“So we both don’t know anything.”
He stares at me. “What?”
“I don’t know if I’m leaving.” The words come out before I’ve fully thought them through, but they feel right. “What if I’m staying? What if I turn this place into a bed-and-breakfast and learn to tap maple trees and build a life here?”
“Eva—”
“I’m serious.” I step closer to him, close enough to see the flecks of gold in his brown eyes. “I didn’t plan this. I didn’t expect any of it. But Fork Lick got under my skin. The property, the town, the people—” I swallow hard. “You. You got under my skin, Asher. And I’m tired of pretending I’m not into you.”
“You barely know me.”
“Then let me know you. Stop pushing me away. Stop acting like this is already over before it’s even started.”
He’s silent for a long moment. I watch emotions flicker across his face—fear, hope, want, doubt.
“I’m not good at this,” he says. “Relationships. Feelings. Any of it.”
“Neither am I.”
“I’ll probably screw it up.”
“So will I.”
“I’m too old for you.”
This last one has me rolling my eyes. “Oh, please. You’re what, thirty-two? Thirty-three? I’m twenty-three. That’s nothing.”
He spits out a laugh. “I’m thirty-five. And I’m a hermit with no college degree and no prospects if I ever lost this job with Meow Mobile. I haven’t been with a woman in any capacity in…” He stops, calculating. “Christ. Four years.”
“I’m the youngest sibling from a broken home, with codependency issues and a pathological need to make everyone comfortable, and I just decided to turn a maple farm into a B&B despite having no experience whatsoever.” I shrug. “We’re both disasters.”
Something shifts in his expression. “This is why I like you.”
I reach up and touch his face. His beard is softer than I expected. “I like you, too. Mostly.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. Almost a smile. “Good enough.”
And then he kisses me. Or I kiss him. Or we meet somewhere in the middle—I’m honestly not sure, and I don’t care. His mouth is on mine and his hands are in my hair and the crutches clatter to the floor as he backs me against the kitchen counter.
It’s not gentle or tentative. It’s weeks of tension and frustration and wanting finally released, and I grab fistfuls of his flannel shirt and pull him closer, needing to feel him solid and real and here.
He kisses as if he’s been starving for it, like he’s been thinking about this as much as I have, lying awake at night, replaying every almost-moment. His hands slide down my back, pulling me against him, and I gasp against his mouth.
“Eva,” he breathes. My name sounds like a promise.
