“Time out,” I say, when I release her and pace away a few steps, rubbing the back of my neck, trying to settle my body and clear my head.
Get a grip, Will. It was just a kiss. Just practice.
“Was that okay?” Annie asks, self-consciously, and the very question is as absurd to me as the fact that she feels any reason to doubt her skill.
With my hand still hooked around my neck, I look over at her knowing she can plainly see on my face how absolutely wrecked I am by that kiss. I give her one scoffing laugh. “Yeah. It was great.”
Annie turns away a fraction and smiles to herself, and then does something so open, so honest it tears my cynical, terrified heart in half. She rests the tips of her fingers against her smiling mouth.
Before she has time to notice, I pull out my phone and snap a picture of her standing there in the warm overhead lights of her shop.
“Out of curiosity,” I ask later as she’s locking up and I’m walking her to her truck. “What is your favorite flower?”
She drops her gaze to her white Converses and smiles. “Magnolias.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Annie
I park my truck right next to my siblings’ trucks in the town’s communal parking lot. It’s a rainbow of burnt orange （Noah’s rusty old truck）， powder-blue and white （mine）， red and black （Emily’s）， and olive-green （Madison’s）。 It’s an unwritten rule in this town that if you share our zip code, you must drive a truck. Doesn’t matter if it’s new or an old dinosaur, you’ve just gotta have one.
As I walk toward The Pie Shop, where I’m meeting my siblings for our weekly Saturday night hearts tournament, everything feels so familiar and comforting. The hot summer night licking at my skin, the darkened town square empty of busybodies, and avoiding the same large sidewalk crack that’s been there for a decade.
It’s all the same, but somehow I’m the part that feels a little different. I feel a ghost of Will’s kisses on my mouth, and there’s a promise, a hum, a prickle of something new in the air around me. It’s making the world seem sharper. Sort of like the first day of your senior year of high school. You can sense the change around the corner, but it’s not in your grasp quite yet. Somehow it makes me appreciate the wave of comfort I feel while stepping under the blue-and-white-striped awning of The Pie Shop. How is it possible to crave change and relish familiarity at the same time?
My brother, however, despises change. Everything about The Pie Shop, which he inherited from my grandma, is exactly the same as it always has been since my great-grandparents started it in the sixties. When you step inside, a little bell, softer in sound than the one at my flower shop, jingles above the door. There’s a high top table in front of the single large front window, where Phil and Todd sit every Monday morning at eight thirty to share a slice of fudge pie before they open their hardware store. An antique pie case divides the front half of the shop from the back, and there’s a wooden countertop connecting the case to the wall. My favorite part is still the small section of the counter that lifts up so you can walk through to the back. Until the age of sixteen, I never lifted the counter—I always limboed under it while my grandma warned me that one day my back was going to break doing it. I’d give anything to hear her say that now （and to have the ability to limbo like a sixteen-year-old）。
There are only two things I can think of that Noah has changed about the shop since he took it over. One, the register, because even the starchiest of modernizing resisters doesn’t want to perform math on a piece of paper. Two, he added a large decal of a pie on the shop window. And by “he added” it, I mean that he let me place it on the window after I’d had too many beers and online-shopped my drunken heart out. But listen, I gave the Etsy shop their first sale, and I’ll never regret it.
Anyway, Noah doesn’t like change. So the day he told me he was having wifi installed in his house and at The Pie Shop so he could keep in touch with Amelia while she was on tour, I knew he was in love. And now when you look at his quaint country house, you see a big intimidating gate at the front of the driveway and a sign announcing the sensors all around the seven acres of his property line. And then there is the guard shack they’re building, which is worth mentioning because it’s bigger than the peanut shell me and my sisters live in together. All of this is direct evidence that my brother has absolutely devoted his life to Amelia Rose. Those two are in it to win it, and it makes my squishy, romantic heart wild with the double Js. Joy and jealousy.