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Something broke open in his face. He kissed me, and his rhythm faltered, and then it wasn’t slow anymore. He drove into me, deep and hard. I wrapped my legs around his hips and held his hands and met him stroke for stroke, and the headboard knocked against the wall, and he was saying my name over and over against my mouth.

It shouldn’t have been possible. I was so sensitive I was shaking. But it built again, sharp and bright, rising with every stroke. When he angled his hips and hit that spot deep inside me, I cried out.

“Again?” he gasped, half in disbelief.

“Don’t stop. Please, don’t stop⁠—”

He didn’t. He drove into me at exactly that angle, again and again, and I shattered around him with a sob. He felt it. He groaned my name, buried himself deep one last time, and came with his face pressed into my neck and his whole body shuddering over mine.

For a long, long time, neither of us moved.

His weight pressed me into the mattress. His heart pounded against my chest. Our fingers were still laced together on the pillow. I could hear the woodstove ticking in the other room and the wind outside the window and his ragged breathing slowly evening out against my skin.

Eventually he rolled onto his back and pulled me with him. I ended up sprawled across his chest with my cheek over his heart and his arm heavy around my waist. The quilt was tangled around our legs. I’d never been so tired or so happy in my life.

His hand stroked slowly up and down my bare spine.

We lay there quietly. Through the window, I could see the faint glow of town far below in the hollow, and somewhere in the middle of it, I knew, there was a pumpkin on the courthouse lawn throwing light across the grass. Our pumpkin. With our names on it.

“Shepherd?”

“Mm.”

“What happens to our pumpkin? After the festival.” I traced a circle on his chest with my fingertip. “Does it go on the burn pile with the others?”

He was quiet for a long moment.

“No,” he said. “I’m keeping that one.”

Epilogue

Shepherd

Ridgewood Falls, NC, one year later…

“Still here, miss?”

Walt Pruett stood in the doorway of Hazel’s studio with his newspaper under his arm, the way he’d sat at Harper’s table by the window every Tuesday for years.

Hazel looked up from the counter, where she was wrapping a print in brown paper for a customer. She smiled at him like she’d been waiting all day for him to ask.

“Still here, Walt.”

“Huh.” He nodded once, satisfied, and walked on down Main Street toward the courthouse.

He’d asked her that same question every Tuesday she’d been in town. I’d stopped trying to figure out whether it was a joke. I was fairly sure it was his way of telling her that she belonged.

The studio sat two doors down from Lily’s bookstore, in a narrow brick building that had been a shoe repair shop back when I was a kid. Hazel had signed the lease the week after she graduated in May, and we’d spent the whole summer gutting it. The walls were white now, and the floor was the original heart pine, sanded down and oiled by hand. Her work hung everywhere. Paintings, prints, a mobile of cut-paper leaves that turned slowly over the front window. There were shelves of small pieces by artists from all over the county, because Hazel couldn’t meet somebody who made things without wanting to give them a place to hang.

Above the door, a hand-painted sign read Witch Hazel Studio.

She’d painted the bloom on it herself. Thin, spidery petals. Gold.

“You’re staring again,” she said, handing the customer her package.

“I’m allowed.”

“You’re blocking the door.”