Page 21 of Let’s Give ‘Em Pumpkin to Talk About

I won’t interrupt anything because you haven’t even gotten as far as removing all your sex toys from their packaging.

She wondered at how many people from Pea Blossom had seen him naked.

His body, sculpted by farmwork and horseback riding, occupied her mind uncomfortably often.

Now she imagined exploring those contours with her fingertips.

Or her tongue. Then she blinked hard, trying to get her mind out of the gutter.

She slid into the seat and let out an unintentional moan when she saw he’d ordered the corn nuggets, the little deep-fried balls with a corn filling that she’d been dreaming about ever since she moved away from Pea Blossom.

Whenever people asked her about living in Indiana, she would often offer that, on the whole, California’s food was better with the exception that they didn’t get creative enough with corn.

All credit to the Midwest in that regard.

“I take it you like the corn nuggets?” he asked.

She dipped one in the provided tub of ranch dressing and popped it in her mouth. Sweet and crispy, the perfect taste. “The one good thing in this godforsaken town.”

Sadie cracked open a beer and pulled a piece of pizza onto the plate in front of her and let herself bask, for a brief moment, in this feeling of being cared for.

She knew she was worn down by the stress of the day’s events, otherwise she’d be stubbornly back at her father’s house, sleeping in a room with a drafty roof and trying not to spark an electrical fire while charging her phone.

The single beer loosened her tongue. “Here’s an embarrassing relationship story for you,” she said.

“While we were still dating, an ex-girlfriend sent me a text asking how best to encourage me to buy a non-black dress to wear to her sister’s wedding.

She clearly meant to send it to her sister, but she accidentally sent it to a wedding group text that I was on.

The sister replied that she would think up some gentle suggestions because the last thing she wanted was Wednesday Addams lurking in her wedding photos.

Then she suggested simply breaking up with me, given that I was not forever and wedding photographs were. ”

“That’s not embarrassing, that’s cruel,” Josh said.

Other people got a sense of security from their romantic relationships, or so Sadie had been led to believe.

She’d yet to experience it. This particular incident was the last straw for her dating life.

A romantic partner might be nice, but peace was a necessity.

And Sadie could give herself peace through some combination of artistic expression and financial success.

Sadie took another swig of her beer. “The embarrassing thing was that I continued dating her after that. She never acknowledged it or apologized at all. Like they realized they’d included me, but took the chat to another channel and pretended it didn’t happen.”

“Did you go to the wedding?” Josh asked.

“Sure did.” She thought of that wedding, all sheer white fabric canopies at the beach, and her like a smudge.

“Wearing full widow’s weeds, black lipstick even, and I danced all night, making sure I was in as many photos as I could be.

It felt good at the time to be so spiteful, but I’m rather ashamed of myself now. ”

“Not as sweet as your revenge on Gir-aphne,” Josh said, then paused in thought. “Why’d you mention this? You don’t have to share embarrassing stories whenever I offer you food, you know.”

“So you would tell me why you have a whole damn sex store in your bathroom.”

Josh slumped in his seat, and kept slumping, until his face was level with the table itself. He kept sliding until he was almost fully underneath it before rolling onto the floor and making whimpering noises.

Sadie worried she’d made him a little too uncomfortable. In her defense, he had said to make herself at home, and going into a linen closet in the bathroom he assigned to her was hardly out of bounds.

“I wasn’t meaning to snoop,” she explained. “I needed a towel. You don’t have to tell me, obviously. You don’t have to say anything, even though I’m technically one embarrassing relationship story up on you.”

He got back into his chair and opened a second beer. “It’s actually kind of hilarious.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I have been trying to date since I moved here,” he admitted. “Like making a concerted effort, using the apps, keeping an open mind, putting myself out there, all that baloney.”

Sadie hissed like a cat.

“I’m not saying I recommend it. But there was a woman over in Columbus who seemed lovely. A florist. We enjoyed chatting, she was pretty and seemed like a lot of fun. We hadn’t met in person yet but the texts started getting a little racy.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “You sent her dick pics?”

“Only after she asked for them! It was kind of mortifying, honestly. Like, how do you know what your good angles are for these kinds of things? And you know, how to show scale?”

Sadie’s mind went back to their kiss, when their bodies were pressed together for that minute and she’d felt his hardness against her. She felt her ears growing hot again.

He sat upright again, grabbing fistfuls of hair. “It’s so embarrassing. This woman I never met has these compromising photos of me now! What if I get profiled in The New Yorker when Squash 2.0 comes out and she lets them loose on society?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she said. Josh scowled.

“Anyway, she was saying she was looking for an upgrade from her battery-operated boyfriend.”

No need to be so cutesy and heteronormative about sex toys. “I don’t like that kind of talk at all.”

“I can’t imagine you would, but like I said, I was keeping an open mind.

So I went onto one of those review sites, a feminist one, to see all the products ranked, and I bought everything in the top tier.

I laid it all out and sent her the photo.

I left everything in the packaging in case she felt uncomfortable with used goods.

I wanted her to know they were all for her. ”

“And she didn’t like the goods?” Sadie guessed.

“She most certainly did not!” Josh said. “She called me a pervert. She said if I needed all of that, then I must not be much of a lover.”

“Oh gross,” Sadie said. “I’m sorry.”

“I read the situation wrong. I did too much too soon. Story of my life. And I have been shy of the apps ever since. Plus I was too ashamed to look into the return policy on everything I’d bought.”

Sadie wasn’t going to say this out loud, but good luck finding a date in someplace like Pea Blossom without a little outside help.

It was a small town and regardless of how desirable a prospect he was—rich and nice to look at, so unfailingly kind—there simply weren’t a lot of single women.

Pea Blossom was where you settled with your high school sweetheart, not where you went in hopes of meeting someone.

“Anyway,” he said with a big sigh. “I talked to Stu.”

Sadie crossed her pointer fingers into an X. “I’m going to stop you right there. I need a full night of sleep before I can begin to contemplate what to do about the fact that his house got destroyed by a tornado. Can we pick that up tomorrow? Unless he had something urgent to say?”

Josh made a lip-zipping gesture, then closed the pizza box to begin cleaning up. He gestured to the corn nuggets, offering her the last one that had been sitting between them like temptation itself. She happily took it.

“I’m sorry I dredged up some painful memories,” she said.

“You know how if you have someone coming over, you ask yourself if there’s anything you need to clean up real fast?

I pull towels from that closet often and I think I’ve stopped noticing the sex toys.

You already know I have the same taste in music as a tween.

Now you’ve heard my most embarrassing relationship stories.

It’s like when I’m around you I completely forget to clean up my house at all. ”

Sadie shrugged. “Messy houses are more interesting anyway.”

That unguarded nature of his was sexy. Sadie was tempted to say she’d like to snoop some more.

Maybe under his clothes, to get a good look at that lean body.

But she needed sleep desperately. Before she said anything that might reignite that spark that had flared earlier in the day, she quickly bade Josh good-night and retreated to the garage.

This storm, violently ushering out the last summer air and letting in the cool of autumn, left the air oddly sticky, though Sadie didn’t mind.

She’d grown up in this weather, with a father who hated air-conditioning because it made people soft.

The box fan in the open window would create an ideal sleep environment for her.

Sometimes she found the nights in California too chilly, the way the ocean air swept the warmth of the day clean away.

She liked the day’s lingering, palpable like a gentle touch.

It was the least this air could do after it had wreaked such havoc in her life that day.

It was the trade-off, that this sumptuous air, so good for growing pumpkins, could whip itself into a deadly frenzy at a moment’s notice.

She tried to sleep, but her thoughts tumbled over and over. About whether she should return to California, how to work through the home repair process if she stayed, what to do if anyone from the weaving guild reached out with a loom.

On top of that, there was how to navigate the shift in her relationship, if she could call it that, with Josh.

The ideas tangled like vines, offering no flowers of clarity but thorn after thorn instead.

The closest thing to clarity was that nagging instinct telling her to run away, to protect herself and leave everyone else holding the bag.

She knew that instinct was born of fear. A fear that was keeping her awake.

Back in California, a potent gummy candy might have temporarily sanded the edges off such anxiety. Her other surefire method involved some of the implements she’d neglected to bring to Indiana, lovely devices she’d never call “battery-operated boyfriends.”

Her fingers would have to do. She slipped her hand into her underpants and thought of Josh.

He’d be so good with his hands. As she touched herself, she thought of his face, his curious gaze, his oversize smile.

She imagined her fingers were his, sliding over her, pushing into her, filling her up.

She could have gotten off on this train of thought, but it wasn’t enough.

She didn’t want to do this alone. Normally she didn’t like attention, but could she make an exception?

And then that flower of clarity bloomed full. Whether it was a good idea or not, she didn’t care. She wanted to clear her mind, and she saw a way.

She called Josh, who answered after a couple of rings.

“Everything okay?”

“Can’t sleep,” she said. “Can I borrow some of the toys in your bathroom closet?”