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“What? Can’t a guy ask the woman he’s working with a harmless question?”
“Not if the guy just got rejected by that woman.”
Ouch. “Talk to me about your schooling, then. That’s professional, right?”
She falls for my digging, and as we fill the remainder of my truck—the tossing terminating so I can carry the larger pumpkins—she shares more about her major in business, what she’s studied over the course of the last three years, and how her senior year has been.
“Difficult,” she says.
“Hence the break,” I guess.
She nods, hoisting the final pumpkin of this load into the truck before I close the tailgate.
“Are you wanting to go back in January?” I ask.
She stares at the pumpkins billowing above the edge of my truck, orange, heavy, bubbles in a large, metal tub.
“If I have to.” There’s that high pitch again.
“Do you have to?”
She eyes me. “My dad’s not forcing me, if that’s what you mean.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Tell me you weren’t thinking it.”
I can’t. “Why wouldn’t I wonder if he’s the reason you went to college in the first place? Especially when you haven’t told him you don’t like your degree and have no intention of going back.”
She stares. “I never said any of that.”
I lean toward her, propping my arm on the back of the truck. “You didn’t have to. I may be a college dropout, but I ain’t too dumb to read between the lines.”
Her eyes brighten a degree. “You dropped out of college? After how long?”
“About a week and a half.”
She laughs, then instantly sobers. “Sorry, that was rude.”
“Laugh away. I get it. It’s pathetic. But I’ve never been much of a scholar or student. I like my freedom too much. Hence the horse riding.”
I wink, but I wish I hadn’t because it pulls her out of the conversation. She takes a step back. “Maybe our college dropout statuses are the reason we’re the only ones heaving pumpkins right now.”
“That’s not why I’m moving pumpkins.”
Our eyes catch. Despite the cool weather, sweat beads on my upper lip. I lift the bottom of my shirt to dab at it, and her eyes drop to my exposed torso.
Approval shines in those deep blue depths, but she looks away before I can swim in them for too long.
“We better go,” Juliet says. “Meet you at Main?”
“I’ll follow you.”
She heads to the SUV and climbs inside, so I hurry to my truck, not wanting to get left behind. Every second away from Juliet is a second wasted. I have a feeling I’m going to need every minute I can get with her to convince her that she needs to go out with me as badly as I need to go out with her.
Juliet
Moving the pumpkins takes the better part of seven hours. I don’t like to think about how much longer I would have been doing it had I been alone.
