Page 42 of Harvest Moon

And sure, maybe I’d been wrong.

Again.

Maybe he wasn’t interested in anything more than friendship. But dammit, did he have to act like I was a freaking plague carrier just because someone suggested maybe we could be together?

What was wrong with me?

24

Ridge

The whole day long, I hadn’t been able to tell whether Lexis was firmly happy, or firmly sad. It seemed like he didn’t entirely know himself.

But once we left the barn on the top of the hill, walking across the gravel parking lot back to my truck, I think I’d finally figured it out.

Alexis was miserable.

He marched ahead of me to the passenger door of the truck, and I wished more than anything I had one of those button locks so I could let him in from afar. Even if I’d wanted to follow him so fast, jogging with a basket full of apples and bruising them all up seemed like a terrible idea.

With a sinking feeling in my gut, I dragged my feet all the slower.

There’d been points that day that’d gone well, and there at the end, Alexis had slipped his hand into mine. For one single second, it’d felt like everything was as it ought to be—Alexis there at my side, everything as simple as a picnic on a hillside and a basket full of apples.

I couldn’t say why Ms. Grove calling him my boyfriend gave me such a start. For one thing, he and I hadn’t spoken about that. Sure, a lot of assumptions had been made back when we were teenagers, but those were made by people like my ma and Alexis’s—with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

We hadn’t acted on anything, even those funny times I’d wanted to pull him close and see how his lips tasted.

But more importantly, I had to get up the nerve to tell him the mess I found myself in before I let him go thinking of me like the kind of partner he needed. Last thing I wanted to do was make his life harder, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to do it before being honest with him about it.

My nerves were already on edge as I hefted the basket of apples into the bed of the truck and tucked the bag with apple butter in the corner.

I avoided his eyes as I opened the driver’s side door, then clicked the locks so he could get in too.

He pushed himself up into the cab with a huff, and as soon as I turned on the ignition, he leaned over to set the radio. He cranked the sound up loud enough I could barely think, and when I glanced over at him, he was staring straight ahead, a firm set to his jaw.

With a deep inhale, I steeled my nerves and leaned over to turn the volume dial down a bit.

“There anywhere else you want to go?”

He just kept glaring through the windshield. “Just home, thanks.”

“Yeah. I guess it is getting kind of late.” But the sun wasn’t even down yet, the light still filtering orange through an angle in the trees.

I backed the car out and rumbled down the curvy drive from the apple orchard to the main road. Grovetown wasn’t big enough to get lost in, and I’d always had a decent sense of direction.

Despite the awkward silence that hung heavy between us, the drive felt way too short. Before I’d even figured out what to say to him, I was pulling to a stop in front of Claudia and Birch’s house.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be between alphas and omegas. Everybody always talked about how omegas soothed our wild impulses, but I’d never had many of those. Instead, everything was backward. All I was doing was pissing him off—just more proof I was as lousy an alpha as they came.

Already, Alexis was reaching for his seatbelt, getting ready to throw himself out of the cab and away from me as fast as he could.

Before he could reach for the door handle, I blurted out, “I’m sorry.”

He froze, staring right at me for the first time since we’d left the grove shop. “What for?”

I had a problem—I wanted to stare into those big, luminous, green-flecked eyes forever, but I struggled to do that and come up with the words he needed to hear.

“I’m sorry I made you mad,” I said, throat so tight it came out in a rasp.

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