“Are you excited?” she asks, squeezing my hands as she climbs out of the truck.
She flattens her dress and straightens the straps and she looks so fucking good I’m considering if we should go back to Honey Acres at all. “That depends, are we going to the famous tea cozy museum? The only one of its kind and Meadow Springs Gazette-awarded tourist attraction of the year 1973?”
She throws her head back as she laughs and I just soak it all in. “I’m not sure you’ll be able to handle the excitement.”
Threading Rory’s fingers through mine, the realization hits me that we don’t have to pretend here, I can hold her hand and kiss her and don’t have to worry. She realizes it at the same time as I do, squeezing my hand tightly and looking at me with a soft expression on her face.
We’re not even out of the parking lot before I’m pulling her to me. My hand cups her face, tilting it up to mine so I can kiss her again. “You look so beautiful today.”
She huffs playfully, her hands finding the front of my t-shirt, keeping my body close to hers. “You say that every day.”
“Because I mean it every day.”
She lets me go, rejoining our hands and pulling me in the direction of the stores. “You just like me in this dress.”
The fire station comes into view and it’s the size of my house. “I like you in everything,” I say honestly. “And also in nothing at all.”
She gasps dramatically, stopping in her tracks just before we round the corner. “You can’t say that here, Russ! You’ll outrage the townspeople.”
She tuts and I realize she’s joking. “There aren’t any here right now to hear me.”
“People will just know. There’s a nosey old lady somewhere with her spidey-senses tingling because she knows you want to rip this sundress off and do disgusting and deviant things to me.”
“That’s exactly what I want to do to you.”
“And you will, later. But for now,” we turn the corner, “welcome to Meadow Springs shopping district.”
On first appearances, it appears that the shopping district is just two rows of family-owned stores running parallel from a fire station to a police station. I know they’re family owned, because the words appear at least three times on every store. “Wow, it’s exactly like being on Rodeo Drive,” I say looking at the three different bowling ball stores. “How do they have three different places to buy bowling balls, but not a drug store? And how can that possibly be economically viable?”
“Ooh,” she squeaks. “Big drama. So it was one family business—”
“Surprising.”
“—and when the dad died, the three sons couldn’t agree on how to run it, so they split into three stores and they all directly compete with each other. It’s a great source of stress for the people who just want to respect the sanctity of bowling and not get involved in family feuds.”
“Sanctity of bowling?” I’m amazed and confused—and unusually invested. “How do you know all this?”
She stops outside a bookstore and I realize we’ve walked the full length of the street in a couple of minutes. “Jenna keeps me updated. She goes to the Meadow Springs Committee of Commitments to Town Improvements and Other Important Announcements. We call it MSCCTIOIA for short.”
She sounds it out like misk-tea-eye-owe-ah but it just sounds like a sneeze. “I honestly feel like you’re fucking with me.”
She gives me her brightest smile as she pulls me into the bookstore. “My favorite thing is the fact I’m absolutely not fucking with you.”
The doorbell rings above our heads, the smell of stale coffee and dust immediately assaulting me. The store is small, the same dim brownish glow throughout, but there’s plenty to choose from. I’m browsing the classics when Aurora’s nose scrunches at the old anthology I pull out. “I freaking hate poetry.”
“You’re an English major, how can you hate poetry?” I push the anthology back into its slot.
“Just get to the point, y’know? If you love someone, say it with your chest. It’s why I like contemporary romance; I know where I stand,” Aurora says, running her fingers along the spine as we walk between two rows of shelves. “I don’t trust poetry. You think you’re reading about an intense love story but then you find out it’s actually about a shoe.”
She stops in front of the mystery section and I move behind her to hold her waist, resting my chin on the crown of her head as she scans the spines of the books in front of her. She reaches for one, reading the blurb before putting it back. “There’s a girl in my major called Halle, she runs the book club at The Next Chapter bookstore in Maple Hills and she’s super sweet but she does wholeheartedly believe my indifference to Jane Austen should get me kicked out.”