Page 34 of Harvest Moon

My nerves were crackling something fierce. I heard Alexis take a breath on the other end of the line, but when he finally answered, it turned out everything was okay after all.

“You want to go apple picking... with me?” For a second, he sounded incredulous. I didn’t have the slightest clue how he could ever doubt a thing like that.

“I do.”

A few more quiet seconds ticked past before he said, “That sounds good, Ridge.”

“Great!” I flinched. Too loud. I didn’t want to startle the Hills or hurt Lex’s poor ear. “That sounds great. Sunday afternoon okay?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Perfect. Apple-picking season is just hitting its peak, so we should get plenty of good ones. I’m sure we can get baskets there and all.” For once, I was talking too much, too fast.

Maybe I was just trying to fill the space Alexis left hanging.

“Sounds right.”

“Yeah. Weather should be nice. I can bring sandwiches. This’ll be great.” And for once, I was going to do the right thing at the right time, and we were going to have the kind of fun we used to have.

“Lexis,” I muttered a second later, ducking my chin even though he couldn’t see me get all abashed. “I’m really looking forward to it.”

“Me too, Ridge. I’ll see you Sunday.”

My head bobbed. “Sure will. I’ll text you the exact time once I check in with Ford, see if he’ll need me for anything.”

I had a couple days to figure that out, even if Ford never came downstairs. I didn’t think taking a single Sunday afternoon off was going to hurt anything, but I still wanted to check in once he was feeling up to chatting about it.

“Okay.”

“Okay,” I parroted. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.” But I thought, by the time I’d said it, Alexis had already hung up.

Didn’t matter, because we were going to catch up on Sunday, and things were going to start getting back to how they should be between us. I’d make sure of it.

19

Alexis

Apple picking.

Okay, so yeah, I love apples. Who doesn’t? What was that old saying? An apple a day keeps the doctor away? Heck, maybe that was true. The Grove pack omegas were healthy, on the whole, and they had to be eating a lot of apples. Not to mention all the apple cider, and hard cider, and apple pie, and apple coffee cake, and apple danish, and... seriously, these people ate a lot of apples.

Was it normal to invite a friend apple picking? Like, a random old friend whom you had no particular romantic interest in?

It seemed like a date activity to me.

But no.

Ridge wasn’t interested in that. Ridge was just trying to pick up our friendship where we’d left it in high school. Well, where he’d left it. It had always been more than that for me, and I needed to figure out how to let that go. I’d thought it would be simple: let my whole past go entirely. Never see Ridge again, never worry about how he didn’t want to date me again.

But here, he was alone in a new place, and I was the only person he knew in the Grove pack. Or, um, I was Grove pack-adjacent. For now.

I, at least, had Birch and Claudia to fall back on when I felt alone, but Ridge didn’t have that. Not for the first time, I wondered why he’d left his family farm. It seemed so out of character. And his parents needed his help. The farm had fallen into disrepair without him, the fields fallow and silent.

That was so unlike Ridge.

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