Page 93 of The Pumpkin Bride

“Fritters at three a.m. seem like a gift, and I resent you for never having awoken me with them.” She tapped her finger on the corner of the portrait. “But Jask, this is . . . You’re so talented. I knew that before, but this is more proof. Running this farm, carving, furniture making, cooking, baking . . . is there anything you can’t do?”

“I’m sure there is, but I haven’t found it yet.”

“And humble.” She laughed. “Shall we carve?”

With awls in hand, they scored the designs into the rind. Hmph, this required more pressure than Marigold expected. Resilient things, pumpkins. With each stroke, the amber of the pumpkin’s flesh emerged. When they’d completed the design transfer, Jask handed her a shepherd’s blade.

“Now, we eviscerate the pumpkin. First, saw through the top, like so.” He jabbed the knife into the top and circled around the stem with rhythmic movements. “When your cuts make a circle, lift the top. But be careful not to break the stem.”

As he lifted, stringy pulp clung to the rind. The thick pumpkin scent, like a garden damp with fresh rain, flooded the kitchen. He grabbed a sturdy metal spoon, then scraped the fibrous strands free from the top’s underside.

“Now, it’s a lot of scooping. Dump the innards into the bowl.” He flung them into the largest mixing bowl from the kitchen. “We’ll sort the seeds for roasting and comfiting, then feed the pulp to the livestock.”

Marigold plunged her knife into the pumpkin and sawed a circle. “Do the animals turn orange if you give them too much?”

Jask scraped another pile of pumpkin guts into the bowl. “From the pumpkin? No, they’d need to eat a good deal of it before it would have that kind of impact.”

“I turned orange once.” She freed the cap of the pumpkin and yanked the stringy strands free. “Yuck. You didn’t say they were slimy.”

With a twist to his lips, he said, “I’d even say they’re moist.”

She pointed her spoon at him. “Say it again and suffer the consequences.”

After his chuckle died down, he asked, “When did you ever turn orange?”

“I was still in leading strings. According to my parents, my favorite foods were carrots, sweet potatoes, oranges, apricots. One day, I aggressively hugged Rowan, who was a shade of pinkish white, and seeing my skin against his they realized I had turned the color of the inside of a pumpkin shell. Though Bess fed me endless greens to counteract the effect, my father relished calling me pumpkin from that day onward.”

Bram roared with laughter. “How have I not heard this before?”

“We haven’t known each other all that long,” she said. “I’m sure you have stories you haven’t told me yet.”

He continued quaking with laughter.

“It’s not that funny,” she said. “My pumpkin’s empty. Now what?”

“You carve out the design,” he said. “Some like to hack at a pumpkin with bigger blades, but the smaller ones work best for me. Gentle, patient movements. Like so.”

Her heart shifted watching this titan delicately tease slivers of rind and flesh from the pumpkin. She followed suit.

“Where did you learn to do this?”

“Here as well. The nights can be very long. I’ve filled my solitude with lots of hobbies. I competed with myself to improve.”

Sadness laced his words—no, not sadness. Melancholy, with which she was too familiar.

“It must have gotten lonely.” She removed a large chunk to reveal the pumpkin version of Jask’s smiling mouth.

“I managed. The same could be said for you, right? You said you closed yourself in your tower for a long time.”

“I did.” She sighed. “But I mostly read. Old letters, books, especially fairy tales. The stories seemed closer to my real life than anything else I read. Bad things happening to people by chance. Not because they put themselves in harm’s way or because they deserve a comeuppance, like in fables. Nope. They just happened to piss off a fairy and, bloop, now you’re a hedgehog.”

Jask’s shoulders stiffened, and he dropped his knife.

“Is something wrong?” She sawed out the whites of one of his pumpkin eyes.

He shoved back from the table. “I need to take the pie out of the oven.”

Liar. If he was any more tense he’d snap a tusk. But she’d learned these moods of his blew out as fast as they blew in.