“They’re nice,” I said.
“They’re expensive as hell,” he said. “But they last. This is my third year with these.”
“Hmm.” Okay, maybe that dickhead of a leather guy knew his craft. I still wasn’t buying anything from him.
Mitch wasn’t kidding. Even though his job right now was “walk around and look good” he was still busy. Patrons stopped him for photos, and I found myself dragged into a few of them myself. “Try and look happy about it,” Mitch murmured in my ear, but he couldn’t see how I was already smiling. It felt so right to be here with him, doing nothing in particular. Just existing next to him. I’d made it to the other side of the chasm, and I loved it here.
We stopped for my now-traditional frozen lemonade, which I forced myself to eat instead of dumping directly down my dress. He checked in on the volunteers up front, making sure they were staying hydrated and weren’t screwing around on their phones when they should be handing out maps or otherwise interacting with the guests. We lingered in the back of the crowd when the Gilded Lilies sang, and I enjoyed watching Caitlin’s eyes pop out of their sockets when she caught sight of me. I bobbed an awkward curtsy in her direction before the set ended and we moved on. We took the circuitous route to the back of the grounds, where the last joust of the day was in full swing.
It wasn’t far from there that Emily flagged us down. “Oh, thank God. I need your help.”
“What’s the matter?” Mitch’s attention snapped to her with a concerned expression.
“Oh, no. I’m fine. I just need warm bodies.” She tugged on the both of us, pulling us toward the Chaucer Stage. “The crowd’s thinning out, since everyone’s heading up front for pub sing. But the kids have one more show, and there’s like three people in the audience. Just come sit and pretend to enjoy their performance, okay?”
That didn’t seem like much of an inconvenience. “I don’t mind sitting for a little bit. What’s the show?”
“It’s theatre,” Emily explained. “It’s a few scenes of Much Ado About Nothing with some of Simon’s honors kids. They get extra credit next fall for surviving the whole experience.”
I smirked. “That seems fair.”
But Mitch groaned at Emily. “Aw, come on, Park. You know I don’t like all that Shakespeare stuff.”
“Well, I do.” I led the way into the clearing of trees where the Chaucer Stage was set up. Behind me Mitch grumbled out another protest but he followed me to one of the benches in the back. I picked a bench that was under a tree, and the shade was pure cool bliss. Emily was right; the audience was sparse for this last show of the day, so it was fortunate that between my skirts and Mitch’s sheer size we took up a good amount of space.
Caitlin had never been too interested in theatre. She’d done Shakespeare scenes with Emily one summer of Ren Faire but otherwise had steered clear. I didn’t realize until now just how I lucky I was, because high school students mostly murdering Shakespeare was painful.
“Are we gonna have to sit through this whole thing?” Mitch’s voice was low in my ear and just for me.
I elbowed him in the ribs and tried to deny the rush of heat I felt from his voice in my ear. “Hush. This is art.”
“This is crap.” That earned him another elbow and he caught my arm with a snort, capturing it while he wrapped his other arm around my shoulders, keeping me from injuring him any further. I grinned and relaxed into him, even going so far as to rest my head in the hollow of his shoulder.
I got it now. I understood why Emily did this every summer, and how it had become such a part of my friends’ lives. Dressed like this, with my hair braided and my skirts hiding my sneakers, wrapped in the arms of a strapping-looking, kilted faux Highlander, I didn’t feel like a fortysomething single mother. I wasn’t introverted me at all. I was someone who got to do this. Who got to stroll through the trees with the guy she liked, subsist on frozen lemonade and funnel cakes, and live in a world where swords and kilts and knights on horseback were an everyday thing. No nosy neighbors or judgy mothers. No lists of women in his phone. No decade of years between us. No leaving town.
I was someone who got to sit here in the shade, nestled against Mitch’s side, his heart beating under my ear and the rise and fall of his chest against my cheek. Yes, I could see the appeal of this. In being someone else. Because in this moment, all I wanted to be was this woman in his arms.
Onstage, the teenage Beatrice and Benedick had stopped their bickering and had fallen in love. The girl was sitting on a rough-hewn bench, the boy kneeling at her feet, his voice earnest. “I do love nothing in the world so much as you: is that not strange?”
The words hit me full in the chest, where I felt something shift. That wall around my heart had never felt so precarious. “Is that not strange?” I repeated in a whisper, dashing away a tear that had sprung to the corner of my eye.
“Hmm?” Mitch glanced down at me, his face softening as he took in whatever expression was on my face.
I shook my head and patted his thigh, enjoying the way the muscle felt beneath the kilt despite those infuriating bike shorts he wore. “Nothing.” I left my hand where it was. His arm tightened around me and I remembered the most wonderful thing: Caitlin wasn’t going to be home tonight.
“What are you doing after this?” I whispered, still looking ahead at the stage.
“Going out, like always,” he said with a general lack of enthusiasm. Or maybe he was just being polite and staying quiet because the show was still going on. “Why?”
“Oh, no reason. It’s just that I’m home alone tonight.”
He froze, muscles tensing. I continued talking like I didn’t notice. “So I was wondering if you . . .” I let the sentence trail off while my heart pounded in my throat. Was I really going to do this? But it wasn’t me inviting Mitch over, was it? It was the woman who wore this dress. And she was a lot more fun than I was.
“Oh,” he said. Then his eyes went wide. “Oh. Well.” He cleared his throat quietly and shifted a little on the bench. His fingertips had found the slice of skin between my drop-shouldered underdress and bodice, and he drew little circles there. “I mean, going out isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Especially if staying in with you is an option.”
My shrug was a slight twitch of my shoulders, an excuse to snuggle more into him. “I don’t have anything exciting planned. Maybe just order some takeout and . . .”
“I bet we can think of something.” He was still murmuring in my ear, but his voice had dropped an octave, going a little gravelly, and I felt it all the way down in my bones. “Maybe something involving attachments?”
I snorted a laugh that tried to be scandalized, but that was an emotion for someone else, not the woman in this dress. Instead I gave his thigh a squeeze. “I think I can guarantee that.”
Onstage, the girl was saying to the boy, “I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest,” and I felt that down in my bones too.
Nineteen
The magic of being the woman in this dress ran out about halfway home. Probably because I had to unlace the bodice before I could comfortably sit behind the wheel to drive, and the magic drained out that way. Whatever it was, by the time I pulled into my neighborhood I was practically vibrating with tension. I could picture Marjorie, Caroline, everyone from book club and everyone who’d ever gossiped about the single mother who lived on the block, all of them looking out their windows. Clucking their tongues over how I was dressed, raising their eyebrows when that bright red truck showed up again in my driveway. And, if everything went well tonight, when it was there the next morning.