Page 10

The strip’s gone violet by the time I hit Prospect, the lights strung overhead and lit now, the whole street amber, hay bales, mums, the shops shut for the night. Punkin’s sits dark at the far end. Not dark—there’s a lantern on the counter—but quiet. The stack of pumpkins. The kettle, cold and covered. And Nikki, alone on the wood step I built her, elbows on her knees, chin in her hands, watching nothing.

I’ve never seen her still. Three days and she has not once been still. She isn’t talking. There’s nobody here to be bright for, and with the strip gone home she’s just a tired woman on a step in the wind.

Something goes through me, low and hard, at the sight of her like that. Not the show. Her.

I pull to the curb. She looks up, and for half a second, before she finds the grin and fits it on, I see the whole day sitting on her.

“Tree man.” She stands, brushing off. “Come to check a fitting that’s fine again?”

“Wind’s up.” I’m already reaching into the truck bed. “Your canopy won’t hold a gusty night on four stakes. First real gust down the valley, you’ll be chasing canvas down Prospect at midnight.”

“I—” She looks up at her canopy, and her face falls. “I didn’t think about the wind.”

“I did.” I pull the spare stakes, the mallet, the coil of guy-line. “Sit. Eat first.”

That stops her. “Eat?”

I hand her the paper sack off the seat. Two foil packets, still warm from the diner on the county road, because I passed it and thought about a woman who’s fed cider to every stranger on this street for two days and hasn’t sat down once herself.

“You’ve been on your feet since seven,” I say. “You feed this whole strip. Somebody feeds you. Sit.”

She takes the sack. She looks inside it. She doesn’t say anything, which from her is the loudest thing she’s done all day. When she looks up, her eyes are too bright again and it isn’t the wind.

“You bought me dinner,” she says.

“Diner had a special.” I crouch at the first corner and drive a stake, because if I keep my hands moving I don’t have to watch what a hot dinner just did to her face. “Eat it before it goes cold.”

She sits on the step. She eats. I work my way around the canopy in the amber light, driving stakes deep, running guy-lines corner to ground and cinching them tight, dropping the windward panel and lashing it down until the whole rig quits shivering and sets solid. The wind hits it and it holds. I built it to hold.

Behind me, she’s quiet, eating the food I brought her. But she’s watching me the whole time, and it’s the easiest quiet I’ve stood in with another person in years.

“That’s the most anyone’s done for me in longer than I want to say,” she says when I tie off the last line. “And you did it without asking. And you brought me a hot dinner. Wade, I run out of jokes eventually, and then I’m just a person on a step, and you’re the first one who⁠—”

She stops. I turn around.

She’s set the food down. She’s looking at me, the loud all the way off, and this is the version of her she’s certain sends people out the door. I cross the gravel to her instead.

“Say the rest,” I tell her.

“You’re the first one who came back for the quiet side of me.” Her voice cracks in the middle. “Everybody likes the show. You drove across town twice for the girl on the step.”

I get a hand to the side of her face. Her skin’s cold from the wind, and she leans into my palm. I feel the give of that go all the way down through me.

“That’s the one I came for,” I say. “The show’s fine. I came for you.”

I don’t have more words than that. I’ve spent my whole allotment and then some today. So I do the thing I know—the thing my hands have been asking for since she put a mug in them yesterday. I tilt her chin up with two knuckles and kiss her.

She makes a sound against my mouth, soft, and her hands come up and fist in my shirt, and she kisses me back, no more intention of using words than I’ve got. The wind pulls at the canopy I staked down and the canopy holds.

I hold her. One hand in her hair, one flat against her back, the whole tired brightness of her folded into me on a step I built out of the tree that scared her.

I understand, kissing her, that I’ve walked past the point where stacking wood is going to be enough. There’s something coming she’ll need me to say. Out loud. In words.

I don’t know how to say it yet.

I kiss her instead, and tell myself there’s time.

She pulls back an inch, breathing quick, forehead against mine, and she laughs.