Page 38 of Let’s Give ‘Em Pumpkin to Talk About
Twenty-Three
Day of the SPICE Pumpkin Weigh-off
A s Josh’s lips met hers, Sadie began to regret all the time she spent doing anything other than kissing Joshua Thatcher.
His forearms rested against the wall behind her and she hung her hands from his biceps, relishing their strength.
He leaned ever closer, meeting her first with his chest, then with his stomach, and finally the fly of his jeans pressed into her like a jolt of electricity.
His kisses lingered with the sweetness of Dole Whip.
With every stroke of his tongue, she felt her breathing growing shallow.
She felt herself melting, into him, into the air, until she became boneless and relaxed.
She toyed with him, pulling his lip into her mouth to work it gently between her teeth.
He rotated one arm to cradle the back of her neck.
With that warm pressure, the desire to simply be his, to give herself over to his hands and mouth, crested.
She was all his, finally. His other hand dropped to graze her breast over her shirt, the black cotton hardly a barrier against the sensation of his fingers squeezing gently, pinching her nipple hard enough to elicit a gasp, which in turn made him grind against her more firmly.
He broke free of her mouth to trail kisses down her neck, his mouth hot against her skin, chilled by the autumn air.
With her lips untenanted, he was giving her the chance to tell him what she needed.
She had already told him she wanted to spend this day with him.
What else did she want? To have semipublic sex behind a building on the state fairgrounds? Not exactly.
Nor did she want this to end.
So she tipped his chin up with her fingers to bring him back to where she wanted him, kissing her with urgency, the last kiss before the culmination of this entire experience.
Kisses that celebrated his seed-spitting victory and her birthday.
She didn’t have to exist anywhere other than this minute.
She didn’t have to worry about anything other than the angle of her head that let him kiss her the deepest, the rotation of her hips that made each press of his hips into hers dizzying.
A loud honk made Josh jump back. It was another truck, this one with a horse trailer, the driver laughing at successfully startling them. Sadie looked back to Josh, his lips so pink and plush, but the moment was over. It had been perfect while it lasted.
Josh checked the time. “We could do the mini corn maze before the weigh-off.”
She cursed the truck for shattering the crystalline cocoon they’d spun for themselves.
“That sounds good,” she said meekly.
Josh’s brow furrowed. “Does it actually sound good? You can tell me what you want.”
She knew she couldn’t have what she wanted.
In some dreamworld, another ephemeral bubble, she and Josh could still be together after this day.
After SPICE, she was adrift on uncharted waters.
What would come next—another big commission?
A new gallery show? Send a loom to some cabin in the woods so she could create her next idea in peace and solitude?
That last one sounded awfully appealing.
It also sounded an awful lot like what she could easily have in Pea Blossom.
But the repairs on her father’s house would be complete eventually.
Her uncle would be healthy and ready to live alone again.
Then her father would be back, and they’d be ready to pick pointless fights with each other.
Her mother would still be haunting Pea Blossom like a malevolent folk creature.
Sadie had finally created breathing room for her creativity, and Josh or no Josh, Pea Blossom was not ideal.
“I don’t know what I want,” she said, and the statement applied as broadly as it possibly could.
Josh smiled, not the typical toothy grin, but a smaller gesture that conveyed understanding.
“If I’m honest, I’d skip the corn maze and stay right here kissing you and getting honked at by people chauffeuring livestock until it’s time for the pumpkin weigh-off.”
“That sounds good.”
Josh pulled his phone out of his pocket. “Let me set an alarm here to give us a little warning, and there’s the fried cheese stand and the hot apple cider stand on the other side of the building. I wanted to get those before the weigh-off begins.”
“You think of everything, don’t you?” she said.
“I mean, if I was really prepared? I’d dispatch a drone to fetch us food and drink so we wouldn’t have to waste time standing in line, and I could maximize the amount of time kissing you.”
This guy thought engineering was the solution to everything.
Sadie pulled her phone out of her pocket and dashed off a text.
“I asked Pawel from the Growers Guild if he wouldn’t mind showing up at the weigh-off with two orders of fried cheese and two large mulled ciders, and said that I would pay him back.
” Her eyes ticked down to her phone again when it buzzed in her hand. “He said yes.”
Admiration shone in Josh’s eyes.
“There are people who owe my dad favors going back decades, and they sometimes extend those favors to me, too.”
“You must like kissing me, using up one of these favors like that.”
Don’t make me tell you how much I like you. It would only make all this that much more difficult.
She grabbed Josh by the shoulders, spun him around so he was against the wall now, and leaned into him.
He let out a groan of pleasure as she pinned his wrists over his head with her hands.
She tangled her tongue with his, pressing her body into his in slow waves until it felt tantalizingly close to fucking, this closeness, his hot breath in her ear when she sank her teeth into his neck, the low thrum of desire deep in her belly that demanded more, more, more .
She released his wrists and his hands went to her ass, pulling her toward him, nearly lifting her off the ground.
He made her feel weak, in the best possible way.
When she tipped her head back and he kissed down her throat, the only thought in her head slipped from her lips. “I never, ever want this to stop.”
His mouth, his breath, his hands, his body, it was all perfect right now, and every atom in her felt like it was vibrating in a feedback loop that doubled the pleasure with every touch, every bite, every kiss.
“It doesn’t have to,” Josh whispered against her neck, painting a stripe of bliss up her body with his hand, grazing her belly and breasts and throat.
But that was a lie. Everything ended, if not for reasons of death and cataclysm, then for normal reasons like fundamental incompatibilities and most concerningly, the pumpkin weigh-off.
Somehow, in the lusty haze, several of her brain cells that were not absolutely overloaded managed to process the message over the PA system, broadcasting that the weigh-off was about to begin. She pulled away from Josh and told him it was time.
They walked around to the front of the building, where they ran into Pawel and his wife holding their food orders.
“Perfect timing,” Sadie said, relieving him of the cheese and cider and passing Josh his portions.
She had no particular memories of or fondness for the fair food, partially because she’d never had a chance to develop any.
Her father constantly griped about the outrageous prices the vendors charged, preferring to pack them each a PB&J and a baggie of carrots to eat at SPICE.
“Moment of truth,” Pawel said. “I’m sorry about your father’s troubles with his pumpkins.”
“Well, they’ve regrown since the incident,” she offered, “though I think pumpkins that are about the size of a beach ball won’t win any prizes.”
“They’ll still make good seeds if they can mature before the first hard frost,” Pawel offered.
Sadie flashed a quick look at Josh. “Yeah, things turned out all right in the end. I wish he could be here, though.”
To her own surprise, she meant it. Even if once in middle school she didn’t speak to him for weeks until he finally admitted that it didn’t actually take decades of training to tell a false morel from a real one and he should let her forage for them with her friends.
During the time she wasn’t speaking to him, she made a poster board presentation of all the obvious differences.
If he were here, he would no doubt criticize how she’d decided to orient her pumpkin to minimize stress on the stem (there had been no cracks).
He would point out patches of sunburn that might have compromised the whole fruit (there were none).
But he’d say the same about Josh’s pumpkin and everybody else’s, too, so all the competitors could have a good laugh at how they’d never be able to measure up to Stu’s platonic ideal of a pumpkin.
Because in the end, his opinions weren’t worth shit.
The proof came in the cold, hard numbers. Pounds and ounces.
Sadie recalled the year when the pumpkin she’d tended first outweighed Stu’s.
Despite his cataloging of its flaws, prematurely declaring his pumpkin the obvious victor, hers won.
And despite his grousing, he transferred his baseball cap, which Sadie once hand-embroidered with WORLD’S BEST PUMPKIN GROWER, onto her head with his trademark mischievous grin.
She gave it back the next year when he won again.
The woman who announced the weigh-off had barely changed since Sadie was a girl.
She still wore fringed cowgirl shirts, creased jeans, boots shiny enough to reflect a laser beam into space, and a perfect poodle hairstyle that would have made Lucille Ball proud.
Her lavalier microphone let her roam between the pumpkins, hidden under carpet-sized squares of burlap.