by Jen DeLuca
“We?”
“Yeah.” He took one more look around the bar and dance floor area as April came back with the receipt in her fist. “Nothing going on here tonight anyway.”
“How altruistic of you,” April said. “Giving up your valuable hookup time to help out a friend.”
“Hey, I’m a giver.” He stuck out an arm, ushering the two of us to walk in front of him. “Besides, I think I’ve hooked up with half of this bar.” He shook his head. “I need a new hangout.”
Twenty-Two
I didn’t text him.
I tried. More than once. But the right words weren’t coming, and I’d meant it when I’d said I was sick of screens, especially when it came to Daniel. He hadn’t fought for me, or done something romantic to win me back, because he thought he wasn’t good enough. That he didn’t have what I wanted. I realized now that I didn’t need a sweeping romantic gesture. Daniel did. So instead I plugged my phone in for the night, telling myself that if for some reason we missed him at the Maryland Ren Fest tomorrow, I’d text. I’d call. I’d do everything in the world to get to him. But until then I needed to find him in person. Do this face-to-face.
The next morning Mitch picked me up in his gargantuan pickup truck—a bright red monstrosity that was roughly the size of my apartment—and we stopped at April’s house before getting on the road.
“Thank you so much for coming along,” I said from the back of the extended cab as April opened the passenger door. “Mitch is great and all—”
“Glad to hear it.” Mitch’s voice was as dry as the Sahara as he adjusted his rearview mirror.
“No problem,” April said. “I figured you could use some moral support of the female . . .” Her voice trailed off as she plopped into her seat and closed the door. “You have got to be kidding me.”
“What?” Mitch put the truck in gear and backed out of April’s driveway.
She didn’t say anything for a second, just sat back against her seat and shook her head. “You had to wear the kilt, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
“It’s a Renaissance faire.” He said the words slowly, as though she’d have trouble understanding. “Of course I’m wearing the kilt. Question is . . .” He raised his voice and looked in the rearview mirror, clearly aiming his next words at me. “Why are you wearing civvies?”
I smoothed my hands nervously over the skirt of the sundress I’d worn today. It was still late August: way too hot to spend the day in jeans. Besides, I looked good in this dress. It was the same color as my bridesmaid dress, and Daniel had really liked me in that. The dusty rose shade warmed my skin, and the top of it was cut almost like a bodice, suggesting a period outfit without actually being one. “Because my costume is at the dry cleaners. I didn’t think I was going to need it before next summer.” I didn’t mention my old costume, clean and packed away in the bottom of my trunk. A different Stacey had worn that outfit, and I wasn’t that girl anymore.
He shook his head before directing his attention back to the road. “Play your cards right today, and you’ll be wearing it a lot sooner than that.”
“And a lot more often,” April chimed in. “You’ll need to get a couple more outfits. You know, if you end up doing this kind of thing full-time.”
“Let’s not worry about that right now.” I took a pull off my travel mug of coffee and regretted it almost immediately. I’d hardly slept the night before, so caffeine had been a must. But my stomach was already jumping around like crazy, and adding coffee just made it churn. I was a live wire. I was a raw nerve ending. How was I going to survive the drive to Annapolis?
It took less than two hours to get there, but it felt like two weeks. Eventually, Mitch’s pickup bounced us across the grassy field of the parking lot for the Maryland Renaissance Festival. Three car doors slammed in quick staccato as we got out. For a long moment we looked around at the lot, where we were just one in a massive sea of cars. Patrons who parked in the lot of the Willow Creek Faire could see the entrance when they got out of their cars: a two-dimensional castle façade that some volunteers had put together about five years ago. But not here. Our entire Faire could probably fit in this parking lot, and all we could see around us was row after row of cars. Like parking at Disney World, but without the trams or mouse ears.
“Holy shit.” April wasn’t part of our Faire, but even she sounded impressed. “Where’s the entrance?”
“Up that way.” I couldn’t see the gates I was pointing toward, but the stream of people told me I was indicating the right way.
“A little bit of a hike, then.” April looked behind us, where the grassy lot continued to fill slowly with cars. “Holy shit,” she said again. “This isn’t a Faire. This is a town.”
“Yeah.” Mitch had been here before—so had I; if you grew up around here you went to the Maryland Renaissance Festival at least once during your childhood—but even his eyes were a little wide at the vastness of it all. “This place is . . . It’s pretty big.” He paused. “That’s what she said.”
I was too nervous to snicker, but April elbowed him in the ribs, and that was good enough.
“Okay. We’re going in.” He reached over his head for the back of his T-shirt, pulling it off and tossing it into the back of the truck.
April sighed. “All right, Kilty. Naked enough?”
“Look on the bright side.” He wiggled his eyebrows at her as he stuck his keys into the sporran he wore attached to the kilt. “I’m not working this Faire. Which means I get to wear this kilt the way it’s meant to be worn.”
I coughed. I didn’t want to think about what Mitch was or was not wearing under there. Which was sad, because thinking about Mitch in a kilt used to be one of my favorite hobbies. The man was born to wear that green plaid, just long enough to brush his knees, leaving a glimpse of thigh when he walked. He wore boots strapped over his powerful calves, and now that he’d doffed his T-shirt that was the whole of his costume. Looking at Mitch in costume had been the best part of Faire for years. My priorities had changed a lot lately.
It took April a beat longer to follow Mitch’s innuendo, but I could see the moment when it clicked. She rolled her eyes, shook her head again at him, and then turned to me. “You ready for this?”
Why did she have to ask me that? My stomach rolled, and the butterflies in there took flight, wiggling their way through my bloodstream until everything tingled. I was in no way ready for this. But I sucked in a long, slow breath and wiped my damp palms on the skirt of my dress.
“Yeah.” I didn’t sound at all convincing. “I’m ready.”
* * *
• • •
Comparing our Faire to the Maryland Renaissance Festival was ridiculous. If Willow Creek’s Faire was a small town, then the Maryland Ren Fest was New York City. The Big . . . Turkey Leg? Whatever. You couldn’t compare the two was what I meant.
We joined the masses of people heading for the ticket booth and the entrance. The sounds of bagpipes and drums floated on the air, combining with voices in the distance. Excited expectation surged through my blood. I hadn’t been to this Faire since high school, but the sounds were as comfortable and familiar as my own heartbeat.
As we stepped through the gates April stopped in her tracks, her eyes round. “Oh, shit,” she breathed. “This is on a whole other level.”
“That it is.” Even Mitch seemed to need a moment to get his bearings, and I touched his arm to steady myself. We’d walked through a portal into another world. These weren’t stages and glorified tents put together by volunteers over a couple weekends. These were buildings. Actual, honest-to-God permanent structures that looked like they belonged in a medieval village. My first thought was What about winter? Even though there were crowds all around me and the whole scene bustled with life, I wondered what this place looked like in the dead of winter, covered with snow and empty of patrons. I
couldn’t get my head around the idea that this setting existed all year round, whether there was a faire going on or not.
At the same time, this place felt like home. I knew this place. Maybe not this physical place specifically, but I knew Renaissance faires. I knew the sounds of the people around me, the voices of vendors selling roses and flower crowns out of wagons near the entrance. I knew the sweet smell of deep-fried anything and the savory scent of every kind of meat on a stick, and the sound of our feet shuffling in the dirt of the lanes. Butterflies still swirled all through my body, but my soul felt calm. I knew this place, and I loved this place.
Now all I had to do was find the man I loved, somewhere in this medieval metropolis, and convince him to take me with him. Should be simple.
Beside me, April heaved out a long sigh, a hand on her hip. “So how do we find him? There’s so many people.”
Mitch leaned over and tapped the map that she’d picked up at the entrance. “This should help, dontcha think?”
She punched him in the arm, which he didn’t even register, and shook the map open. She squinted at it, turned it over, squinted at it again. “This thing is ridiculous. There are a million acts and they’re scattered all over.”
I took the map from her. “It’s not that bad. We just have to find their listing, and then figure out where their stage is.” I frowned at the map. “Hmm. I get your point.” The map only emphasized how huge this place was, and it was hard to figure out which stage was which. But my eyes zeroed in on the Dueling Kilts’ listing as if it were printed in bright red, with arrows pointing at it. Your man is here!
At least, I hoped he was still my man. And I hoped he was there. What if he’d already left? He could have set them up for the weekend and taken off already. He could be out of the state by now. He could . . .
Enough. There was only one way to find out.
We set off, past the “official” souvenir shop that sold T-shirts and hats, past the booth where people could make wax castings of their hands—why, that was always my question—and I regretted the sandals I’d worn almost immediately. Sure, they looked great with this dress, but how could I have not thought that through? I knew how uneven the terrain was, and how easy it was for minuscule rocks and little tiny sticks to find their way under your feet when you had open shoes on. But I gritted my teeth against the annoyance and soldiered on. The sun was already high in the sky, and it was shaping up to be a hot day. The sundress had been a good call, even though the cotton was already sticking to my back in an extremely unsexy way.
“Oooh.” April had taken control of the map again as we neared the stage where the Kilts performed. “There’s a bookstore here! I need to tell Emily about that. And look, there’s a maze. Near the jousting field. We should—”
“Stay on task, Mama.” Mitch plucked the map out of her hands.
She took it back again. “Fine. Their show starts in ten minutes. Do we want to go find him now?”
I shook my head. “No, they’re getting ready for the show. I don’t want to mess with that.”
“Makes sense. We’ll just go sit in the audience and watch it?”
“No, we should wait till after.” Mitch said. “That would be the professional thing to do, right? We don’t want to disrupt their show.”
“No,” I said. “We don’t want to go there after, either. The audience will be leaving, the guys will be selling merch, maybe getting tips . . . we don’t want to interrupt that either.”
“Okay.” April pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and pinched the bridge of her nose. “So we don’t want to go before the show, during it, or after. Should we just wait outside the gate till the end of the day?”
“Yes.” My nod felt loose, as though I were a bobblehead doll. “That’s an excellent idea.”
“Nice try.” Mitch’s hand clamped around my arm as I spun on my heel to go back the way we’d come. The man had a grip like a vise; there was no way I could squirm out. He propelled me forward, which was a good thing because my legs had stopped working.
“Okay, but seriously,” I said as he dragged me down the lane, April following behind us in case I made a run for it, “they’re about to start a show and we shouldn’t interrupt that.” Wow, my voice went really high when I babbled.
“It’s fine,” Mitch said. “We’ll sit in the back. They won’t notice us.”
But I wasn’t listening to reason, or anything, really, at that point. “They’re busy, you know? They’re working. I don’t even know where we’d find them. We can’t just—”
“Mitch? Hey, Mitch!” The three of us stopped walking and turned around. Mitch dropped my arm and smiled.
“Dex! Dude, how’s it going?” He went in for a fist bump, and after that they did that weirdly complicated handclasp thing that men did instead of just shaking hands like normal people. It was a cornucopia of kilted hotness, with Dex in his man bun and Mitch in his shirtlessness. Both with strong, broad backs and powerful legs, and I wasn’t interested in either one of them.
“Doing good, man, doing good. What are you doing here? This isn’t your Faire.” Dex laughed. “Couldn’t get enough this summer, right?”
“You know it.” Mitch’s laugh was a low and easy rumble, because what did that guy have to worry about? “No, we’re actually here to . . .” He glanced over his shoulder, and he raised his eyebrows at me. The message was clear: Should I ask?
But before I could use my own eyebrows to telegraph something back—like No, I’m chickening out, get us out of here immediately—Dex followed Mitch’s line of sight and spotted me. Dammit. “Hey, Stace.” He said my name easily, as though he hadn’t broken my heart outside a hotel room in Willow Creek a week ago, and sort-of apologized for it a couple days later.
“Hey.” The word came out as a wheeze, and I wasn’t even wearing a corset. I tried again, aiming for casual. “Hey. Dex. Hey. How’s it . . .”
“Seen Daniel around?” Mitch cut to the chase. God bless him.
“Oh, yeah.” Dex pointed at the stage. “He’s back there; just go around to the right to get to the backstage area. But you should go now. Show’s starting in a couple minutes.” He grinned at me. “About time you showed up. He said he’d never see you again, which is great because now he owes me twenty bucks.”
“There you go.” Mitch physically turned me around and sent me toward the stage with a little shove in the middle of my back. I walked away just as Dex turned toward April, his eyes alight with appreciation.
“Hey.” The word was pure speculation.
“Absolutely not.” I could practically hear April’s eye roll.
The Dueling Kilts were due to take the stage in four minutes, according to both my phone and the schedule on our map, and even though it was just the first show of the day, most of the benches were full of patrons, fanning themselves with their paper maps while they waited for the show to start. I skirted around the house right side of the audience, heading for a black-curtained doorway. I slipped through the curtain to find myself in a backstage area that was roughly the size of a broom closet. The curtain swung down behind me, obscuring me from the audience, and my breath stopped because there he was, half-bent over a cardboard box of Kilts merchandise. After heartbreak and farewell confessional emails and complete absence for days, Daniel was now barely five feet away from me. It was too sudden. It was too much.
He must have heard the choked sound my breath made, because he turned around and froze, looking as stunned as I felt. The stack of T-shirts in his arms fell back into the box. “Stacey,” he said. Or maybe he said. His voice seemed to be as strong as mine, which was to say, not very much at all.
“Hey.” My voice worked this time. Better than it had when I’d been talking to Dex, anyway. I should have known; everything about me was better with Daniel than it had ever been with Dex.
“What are you . . .” He shoo
k his head a little while his eyes roamed over me, drinking me in like . . . well, like I was a cold glass of water on a day as hot as today. “How are you here?” he finally asked, his voice filled with something that sounded like wonder. He looked as though he wanted to smile, but didn’t know if he could just yet.
Now that the shock of seeing him was over, and now that I knew he wasn’t going to throw me out immediately, much of my nervousness fell away. I shrugged, as though I drove across the state to intercept the man I loved before he walked out of my life forever on a daily basis. “Got a ride.”
He didn’t respond, he just kept looking at me as if I were a mirage that might disappear, and I remembered that I had more to say. I took a breath that was more shake than inhale, but it would have to do. “You were wrong about something.”
“I was?” His brow furrowed, and his expression became guarded. I could practically see his shoulders tense up as he braced himself for whatever onslaught I was going to throw his way.
“Yeah.” I tried for a smile, but it wasn’t coming yet. “You said you didn’t have anything to offer me. That I wouldn’t want a life on the road with you. But—”
“Look out, coming through!” Dex pushed through the curtain and bumped me in the back, driving me straight into Daniel. His hands went to my hips instinctively, steadying me, and I barely caught Dex’s smile as he walked past us and onto the stage. “Sorry,” he said over his shoulder at us. “Gotta start the show.”
I watched Dex go and then, as much as I hated to leave Daniel’s embrace, I took a step back and tugged on his arm. “Come on,” I said, nodding toward the black curtain he’d just come through. “Is there somewhere we can go? Someplace a little quieter, so we can . . .”
“No. We can’t.” He pulled me back toward him, and I wasn’t terribly unhappy about that, despite his words. “The show’s about to start. The audience will see us if we try to leave. We have to stay back here so we’re not a distraction.”
