“What do you mean? It’s not like you’ve never been in a relationship before.”

“Yeah, but look how well that went.” I tossed down my fork. “I met Jake at a frat party when I was nineteen. We were drunk, we . . . you know.” I shrugged. “We were just together after that. He never asked me out; I never accepted.”

“So what’s different now?”

“Nothing. Well, we weren’t drunk, but . . .” I shook my head. “A month ago I hated the guy, and I thought he hated me. This is like a summer romance on steroids. What if he’s done with me once Faire is over?” It was too soon for me to ask him for any promises, and it was certainly too soon for him to offer any. The uncertainty of it all gnawed at the pit of my stomach.

April chewed on her bottom lip. “Love is always a risk, isn’t it? But here’s a question for you: how does he make you feel?”

I thought about that. I thought about Simon and the word “love” and my heart felt buoyant. It must have shown on my face because April nodded.

“There you go,” she said. “Okay, look at it this way. What if someone else came to you with this? What if I came to you with this? What would you tell me to do?”

I didn’t even need to think. “I’d tell you to give it a chance. That this could be the real thing.” I groaned and hid my face in my hands. Why was it so easy when it was someone else’s problem? Why couldn’t I give the same advice to myself?

“Exactly. Dummy. Give the guy a chance. Don’t write him off, don’t decide he’s going to fuck it up before even letting him try. That’s all I ask.”

“Okay.” But so much still seemed uncertain. How should I act when I saw him again? Would we make an announcement at the Saturday meeting? Start making out in the middle of town and see who noticed? Relationships were confusing.

* * *

• • •

Turned out, I didn’t need to do anything.

“So.” Chris had a Cheshire cat grin the moment I walked into the bookstore on Tuesday. “Anything you want to tell me about you and Simon?”

My mouth fell open, while my heart thrilled. Simon and me. There was a Simon and me. “How do you know already?”

She started unpacking her Tupperware containers of pastries she’d made at home on Monday, smile still firmly in place. “Nicole saw Stacey, who told her that she saw Mitch at Jackson’s on Sunday night—”

“Stacey wasn’t at Jackson’s on Sunday. I was there.”

Her smile widened. “You’d already left. Mitch told Stacey you were going over to Simon’s to talk stuff out with him. Then I ran into Simon at the grocery store yesterday, and he looked happier than I’ve ever seen him.” She shrugged. “I put it together myself, and just now you confirmed it.”

I opened my mouth, closed it again. She was right, I had confirmed it. Good thing I’d never wanted to be a spy. I would have been terrible. “Fine. Yes, I went to visit Simon on Sunday night.”

She raised her eyebrows. “And?”

And we banged the hell out of each other all night. I can still feel his lips on my skin, and I want more. I cleared my throat. “And we talked stuff out.” I let my smile fill in the blanks, and Chris definitely got the message.

“I’m glad to hear it. I think he’s been crushing on you for a while. He’s a good person, and so are you. You both deserve to be happy.”

“Thanks.” I flushed at the compliment. “I mean, I don’t know where this is going yet, but . . .” The smile wouldn’t leave my face, though, and was this turning into a slumber party? I fully expected that in a half hour the first customer would come in and we’d be braiding each other’s hair, still talking about boys. “So I take it everyone’ll know by Saturday?” I stowed my bag under the cash register and helped Chris set up the café counter. She’d made cookie bars, brownies, and lemon squares, and our supply of danishes from the local bakery had arrived. Everything was individually wrapped and ready to go. We were fully stocked.

“Welcome to Willow Creek.” Chris arranged some of the baked goods into a little display under a domed glass lid and stowed the rest under the counter while I got the coffee and espresso machines up and running for the day. “News travels fast around here.” She cast a glance my way. “Is that bad? Do you not want people to know about it? Are you two keeping it secret or something?”

“No. At least, I don’t think so?” I thought about going to Faire on Saturday, seeing Simon again, and pretending this hadn’t happened. His eyes looking through me as we got ready, not acknowledging the way we’d reached for each other in the middle of the night when sleep wasn’t an option, the perfect way we fit together, the sounds he made when he was inside me. The sounds we both made. My heart trembled at the thought, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it. He was a part of me now, and all I could do was hope I was a part of him too. “No,” I said again, more definitively this time. “Hell, no. I’ll send a group email to everyone in Faire if you want me to.” Kids were on that mailing list, but what the hell.

Chris looked at me closely for a second, then smiled. “Good.” I felt like I’d passed some kind of test. I got it. Simon was a lifelong resident of this town, and Willow Creek looked after its own. For all that I’d gotten involved around here, I was still the newcomer. She wanted to make sure Simon wasn’t going to get hurt. So did I.

“Okay. New topic.” I flipped open the notebook I kept under the counter near the cash register. “Book club. It’s getting too late in the summer to do one before Labor Day. But if we decide on a book today, I can get an announcement out on social media, and hopefully get some interest, and the event itself can be sometime in late September.”

Chris nodded. “Give everyone time to order books.”

“Exactly.” I tapped my pen on the page. “This will work, believe me.”

“Oh, I do.” She headed back to the front of the store again, and I followed. “Come on. While I’m thinking about it, let me show you how special orders work. You like all that online stuff, you’ll pick it up quick.”

As the lazy summer morning turned into a lazy summer day without a lot of foot traffic, Chris stood up and stretched.

“I’ve made an executive decision. I’m going home.”

“What?” I looked at the clock. Not quite lunchtime. “It’s way too early to close.”

“I didn’t say anything about closing. I said I was going home.” She got her purse from under the front counter and rummaged for her keys. “You’ve covered the register plenty of times. You know what you’re doing.”

My instinct was to argue with her, but she was right. I did know what I was doing. Our midweek traffic was small enough that I could man both the cash register and the coffee counter with a minimum of trouble.

“Okay,” I finally said. “I can handle it.” She was probably taking advantage of having an employee while she could. I couldn’t blame her for snatching a few hours off here and there.

The bell over the front door chimed, and I caught my breath as Simon walked in. After all this time, we hadn’t interacted much outside of Faire. (Unless you counted one pretty significant interaction in his bedroom the night before last. I for one counted the hell out of it.) He looked like a strange amalgamation of his identities: the crisply ironed shirt and immaculate jeans of Simon Graham, but with the longer hair and face-framing beard of Captain Blackthorne. The juxtaposition was . . . well, I squirmed a little and fought the urge to hop the counter and wrinkle that shirt in the best possible way.

Simon stopped short inside the doorway when he saw me, and Chris nudged me with her shoulder. “Now, I know for a fact you can handle him.” While my face flamed with mortification and Simon’s eyebrows knit in confusion, she snickered at her own joke and walked out of the store with a wave. Simon held the door for her, then turned back to me.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” I dropped my head to the counter and let the cool glass soothe my forehead. “God, it’s like working for my mother.”

“What was that about?”

I shook my head as I stood back up. “She knows. Apparently, the whole town does.”

“Knows?” After a beat his expression cleared and his eyes widened. “About us?”

“Yeah.” I bit the inside of my cheek and waited for his reaction.

“Huh.” He looked over his shoulder in the direction Chris had gone, as if he could still see her. “Well, if Chris knows, that’s as good as taking an ad out in the paper.” He tilted his head, thinking. “Do people still do that?”

“Do what?”

“Take ads out in the paper. Do people still even read the paper?”

“I . . . I guess?” I was a little confused by the direction the conversation had gone, but now that he mentioned it I was curious too. “I mean, my mother does. The Sunday paper has coupons, you know.” Coupons that she still clipped and sent once a week to April and me, inside greeting cards where the coupons fell out like oversized confetti when we opened them.