Page 42 of Just (Fake) Married (Calloways vs. McGraws #1)

TWENTY-EIGHT

ETHAN

Carter: Calving season is coming. Seth? Can we count on you?

Seth: For what?

Carter: To help.

Seth: Isn’t that what hired hands are for?

Tag: Need all the free extra help we can get this year.

Ethan: It might be too soon for him to be on a horse. I had him send me his last X-rays.

Seth: Stop trying to doctor me, Ethan. I can sit a horse.

Carter: So? You coming home?

Seth: Fine. I’ll try.

Eli: I’ll be home. Maybe the fall.

Seth: Holy fucking shit, he lives!

Eli has left the group chat.

Something was off. We were off. Harmony and I. I wasn’t sure when it happened exactly, but as the weather got warmer and the days ticked down to the festival, things between us got tense when we were alone in the house.

Except in the bedroom. Never in the bedroom.

Every night she knocked, every night I answered.

Last night, I’d been particularly…demanding? Harsh?

But it felt like she was trying to pull away from me and the more she pulled away the more I wanted from her.

“You can’t say no to this, can you?”

I’d asked, fucking her across the bed until she’d had to brace herself against the headboard.

“Kiss me.”

I’d had my hand under her head, cradling her skull in my palm. I’d bent down to take her mouth, but she’d turned her head at the last second.

“Kiss me!”

“No, fuck me!”

And I had. I’d teased her until she’d begged. Until I’d made her come until she flopped against the bed in total surrender.

It wasn’t enough anymore.

I wasn’t sure when I started to realize that, but it was fast becoming the only thing I could think about. How did this end? How did we end?

What if we didn’t end?

“Dr. McGraw? Did you hear me?”

I snapped my head out of my confusing love life, back into my very simple professional life. In front of me was an anxious mother and a four-year-old who’d stuck a dried chickpea up her nose. I wore my glasses so I could attempt to get a clearer view up the little girl’s nose.

“Yes,” I said. “Sorry, just thinking how to best get this bean out of your daughter’s nose.”

Bullshit, I was thinking about the way I felt compelled to fuck Harmony like I was punishing her for attempting to keep up boundaries between us.

When really it was the smart thing to do for both of us.

I snapped on plastic gloves and tried a pair of hemostatic tweezers. But, that only made the chickpea, reconstituted by the little girl’s tears and snot, spin around in her nostril.

She wailed, her little face going pink, and it tugged at my heart that I couldn’t save her from this situation more quickly.

I used my straight wasp needles. But all that did was push it up her nose.

“Honey,” I said, looking her right in her red, teary eyes. “Breathe with me, okay? In through the mouth, out through the nose.”

We took a couple of long, slow breaths like this until she wasn’t crying anymore. Her serious eyes were locked on mine. They said quite unequivocally:

Solve this.

“Okay, this time, when you blow out, I want you to blow as hard as you can. See if you can just get snot all over the place.”

She smiled, a watery smile, but a pretty delighted smile.

What kid didn’t find snot funny? She pulled in a big, deep breath and when she went to blow it out through her nose, I pinched closed the empty nostril and that chickpea shot out of her nose like a rocket.

So did a bunch of snot, but that’s what the gloves and the scrubs were for.

I held up my arms and cheered like she’d won the Super Bowl.

“I tried that, but it didn’t work,” her mom said, apologetic and frustrated.

“It had gotten slippery in there with all the tears. It just needed some lubrication.”

Mom and daughter left, with the daughter clutching the lollipop I’d given her and making promises not to put things up her nose. As I put away my tools all I thought about was how Harmony was going to love that story.

It was shocking how much I wanted to get back to her at the end of each day.

How much I enjoyed that part of my life now. The life part. The not working part. Even though things were off between us lately.

I glanced at the clock and realized I was late for meeting Harmony at the museum.

Today was our costume fitting for the re-enactments. It was all starting to get real as the festival got closer.

Inside the museum, I found Harmony and Marion upstairs in the storage room where everything not on display downstairs was kept on long apparel racks, shelves and in boxes.

In the middle of the floor was the first Swinging D sign made out of branded wood. The bullet riddled bumper of the Model T that had been shot up by Sheriff McGraw before he killed Esther Calloway, and the hatchet Agatha Calloway used to cut off Thomas McGraw’s foot.

Bliss and Carter were there, too. But both Mac and Amity were missing.

“Which one of them is coming?” I asked the group, because one never showed up when the other was there.

“I asked them both to come,” Marion said. “This is really important and all feuds must be temporarily set aside.”

Carter and I exchanged a look that said good luck with that.

Except, there it was, the heavy clomping of two sets of footsteps coming up the attic steps.

“What happened to you not being in the same room as me?” I could hear Mac’s voice.

“What happened to you never wanting to eat my food again?” Amity replied.

They stepped through the door and immediately went to opposite corners of the room.

“Okay,” Marion clapped. “I have all of your costumes ready for you to try on. Harmony and Ethan, you should start us off with the original Widow Calloway and Duncan McGraw murder/murder.”

“Attempted murder/murder/hanging,” Harmony corrected her, pulling the old but familiar costume dress off the rack. These weren’t the original clothes, they were recreations made years ago during the festival’s heyday. “I love the dress, but do we have to stuff it with that itchy straw?”

“The straw comes from where she was pushed off the mountain,” Marion said. “It’s essential. Now, Mac and Amity, you can be Esther Calloway and Sheriff McGraw,” Marion directed them to pick up their costumes off the rack.

“Why do we have to be them?” Amity said.

Marion shrugged. “You two are the most likely to kill each other.” She slapped the cowboy hat and badge at Mac’s chest. “Now, are we certain Seth and Eli won’t be here for the festival?”

Bliss shook her head. “Eli is definitely not going to be at the festival.”

She said it with authority, and when she realized everyone was looking at her, she immediately backtracked.

“Because…he’s…like…in the army. Military. Or something. What about Seth?”

I shook my head. “I had a look at his most recent X-ray. Unfortunately, his leg is healed and he’s going back on the circuit. He’ll be in Texas when the festival happens.”

Marion expressed her displeasure with a heavy sigh, but kept moving us along. “This year, we’ve decided to switch up the Agatha Calloway/ Thomas McGraw frostbite amputation with something a little more in theme, which is the first Calloway/McGraw wedding.”

“Oooh, I get to be Mary Jane?” Bliss asked.

“I suppose that means I die in Normandy,” Carter drawled. He walked over to the costumes and pulled at the WWII Army uniform. He eyed it skeptically. “Is this thing going to fit?”

“Make it fit,” Marion told him.

I had to swallow a chuckle at Carter taking direction from a teenager.

“And finally, you two will need to change into your wedding reception outfits for the grand re-enactment. So, what are you thinking?” Marion asked, looking between me and Harmony.

When we didn’t answer immediately, she added, “To be historically accurate, you probably should wear what you wore on your wedding day.”

“I wore jeans and Harmony wore her sweater inside out,” I noted.

“Ethan,” she scolded me.

“It’s a regular occurrence, babe,” I pointed out. “You should own it.” I reached up to squeeze her shoulder and she carefully stepped sideways like she was making room for Marion, but I knew she was avoiding my touch.

“Jeans and a sweater won’t do,” Marion said, shaking her head. “This is like the big finale. What about an actual wedding dress? I talked to your mom and she has her old dress-”

Harmony sucked in a breath.

“Uh, Marion,” Amity interjected, trying to cover for Harmony’s reaction. “Mom’s dress was very ugly.”

“Agree,” Bliss added. “And wedding dresses are so…passe.”

“Since when?” Marion asked us.

But my eyes were pinned to Harmony. I took a step in her direction, not sure how I felt about any of this either. But I couldn’t deny the thought of seeing her in something white and puffy with me in a traditional black tux played at the edges of my imagination.

“Harm?” I asked, picking up her hands in mine, forcing her to meet my eyes. “We could go all out, no? For the festival. For the town.”

I was gutted when tears sprang to her eyes. She was shaking her head, her throat swallowing hard. I could feel her increased pulse under my thumbs along her wrists.

“I can’t,” she blurted out. “I’m sorry, I can’t.” She looked at Marion. “I can’t wear my mother’s dress. I’ll just…we should be historically accurate anyway. I’m sorry, I’m not feeling well. Is it stuffy in here? I need some air.”

With that, she pulled herself away from me and took off down the stairs. In the silence in her wake, everyone turned to look at me.

“I should go check on her,” I said.

Harmony

“Do you think I blew it?” I finally asked Ethan. “Do you think Marion suspects something?”

Ethan had found me sitting (hiding) under the gallows. He’d suggested a drive out of town might help clear my head, so we left the animals in the store and took his rental car north to Chuck’s BBQ.

“No,” he said, but he was lying. What a ridiculous thing to freak out over. A wedding dress. But it wasn’t really the dress. Or it wasn’t just the dress. “But, just so I’m clear, it was the dress, right? You don’t want to wear your mom’s dress for the festival reception? Because it’s ugly?”