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“Of course not. We’re strolling. Aris, come help. We’re strolling.”

They strolled me, one at each elbow, past the pie cart and the dunking stool, where Zeph sat dripping. They stood me in the back of the kissing booth line with four foreheads ahead of mine and them at my back so retreat would mean making a scene.

Aris put the copper she’d been carrying in my hand.

The queue moved. I didn’t watch him kiss the last four foreheads. I watched the decorations, and my own feet, and the copper in my palm while my heart clanged like a smith’s hammer.

And then there were no more foreheads ahead of mine. Just the counter between us.

The meadow went quiet.

He’d known I was in line. Ogre ears. Gold had climbed up to his hairline.

I put my copper on the counter in front of him.

“For the roof,” I strangled out.

His hand closed over mine, coin and fingers and all, my fist inside it.

He didn’t bend to my forehead. He didn’t move at all.

When his nostrils flared, I understood. He was reading me. He’d been reading me the entire time I stood in line. Four foreheads’ worth of knowing exactly what I wanted.

Nothing had shown on his face. A male who’d agreed to terms in a kitchen was standing here keeping them in front of the entire Hollow. You didn’t act on what my body told your nose unless my mouth said so. Agreed. The mouth was the authority.

He would’ve let me go. That was the part that undid me. He’d have taken my copper and kissed my forehead and driven home three miles east with me on the bench seat beside him, and never once mentioned it for the rest of my life.

“Goran.” His name came out of me cracked. “Not the forehead.”

“Say it.” Two words. He’d spent his ration on the one thing his nose couldn’t give him.

“Kiss me.” My voice found itself somewhere. “On the mouth. In front of all of them.”

The counter went away, though he didn’t come around it. He took me under the arms and lifted me clean over it, the way he’d lifted me onto his kitchen counter with an onion burning behind him. He sat me on the edge of this counter, our eyes nearly level.

One of his hands spread across the small of my back and covered all of it. The other went into my hair and cradled my skull.

Goran Brack kissed me in front of the Hollow the way the ground takes rain. Slow. Sure. Like it had been arranged seasons ago, and we were only now catching up.

He was hot. Nobody warned you. A hearth that walked, and I was inside it, and his mouth was careful for about a heartbeat and a half and then it was not careful at all. I got a fistful of suspender in each hand with no memory of reaching, and hauled. You couldn’t move an ogre unless the ogre wanted to be moved, and this one did. He groaned against my mouth. It came up from the bottom of him. Low and rolling.

Under it, he flinched.

His left side. The stitched side, where a horn had opened him almost two weeks ago.

He didn’t stop. He didn’t slow. I’d be furious about that later. I was not furious now.

The green exploded. Somewhere someone was shrieking, people were stomping their feet, and Asha was screaming my name.

The Moonbell tower began to ring, though not the bell that clanked on the hour. The deep one, the one that hung in the bottom of the tower only rang for special things. Mateboneds, though not always. Nothing to concern myself with now.

It rolled out over the village and the meadow and the rooftops and the stubbled golden fields, wave after wave.

The fair went silent, and everyone turned toward the tower before turning back toward us.

Goran had gone still against me, his heart drumming against my palms.

“Rain,” he said. “That’s the⁠—”