Page 44 of Harvest Moon

Islammed the basket of apples down on the kitchen counter, glaring at them like they were at fault for the crappy day.

Okay, no, fine. It had been a nice day.

We’d talked and picked apples and been Alexis and Ridge for a while, just like old times.

And then he’d been ashamed of the idea of me being his boyfriend.

Was I so awful?

Was it the fact that I didn’t have a proper job? Podcasting probably did look sketchy from the outside, especially to someone who’d grown up in a tiny place like Ridge and me. I’d thought it was weird at first, but then I’d realized how it could work. How I could use it to pay my, admittedly few, bills.

Maybe if I got a real job, he’d—

Who the hell was I kidding? Ridge wasn’t the kind of person who would judge someone on that. He’d deliberately gone into one of the most thankless, low-paying fields of work in the world.

I was looking for excuses that didn’t exist.

“Apples do you wrong?” Birch asked, sauntering into the kitchen with a colorful drawing in his hand, which he stuck atop the handful already on the fridge.

I looked at the drawing. “Another student planning your wedding?”

He buried his face in one hand, as though he’d forgotten the incident—or wished he had. “Thank goodness, no. This one’s me, my student, and two unicorns. As he informed me, we each have to ride our own unicorn, so it couldn’t be just one.”

“Seems reasonable to me,” I agreed, inspecting the picture. It wasn’t bad, considering the age of the kids Birch taught. Probably as well as I could do, anyway.

He leaned back against the kitchen island and looked at me, the amusement gone from his face. He glanced at the basket of apples, and the pie, and then at me. “You okay?”

I slumped against the counter. “I don’t—you were wrong. I was wrong. He’s not interested in me.”

“Sure,” he agreed easily. “I know I was always asking strange omegas to come pick apples with me.”

“Do people in Grovetown really think it’s—that it means—” It made me feel like an absolute child, but I couldn’t say it out loud. Not to a man who’d just pinned up a child’s drawing on his fridge. “You know.”

A wicked grin crossed his face, and he turned to inspect the apples. “Gala, huh? Making apple sauce?”

Seriously? Did everyone in town know the best uses for every kind of apple? “Yes,” I agreed, because what the heck else was I going to do? “It’ll be good for Claudia to have another healthy snack in the house.”

He nodded and opened a drawer, pulling out not one, but two vegetable peelers and sliding one across the counter to me. Then he went and pulled a Dutch oven out of a cupboard, half-filled it with water, squeezed in a little lemon juice, and then set it between us.

“No time like the present,” he announced with a bright smile, grabbing an apple out of the basket and taking the peeler to it. “Now tell me why a man who ‘isn’t interested in you’ asked you out on a date.”

“Apple picking isn’t automatically a date,” I denied, digging into the first apple with a little more vehemence than necessary. “He only thinks of me as a friend.”

“Back in high school, I asked my best friend’s boyfriend if he was going to join us apple picking on Saturday.” He started on his own apple, movements quick and efficient, like he peeled a dozen apples a day. “It was the only time in our friendship that Aspen and I almost got in a fight, because he thought I was flirting with Brook.”

“Wait, Brook? Brook Morgan? And... Aspen?”

“Aspen Grove,” Birch agreed, eyes going unfocused and sad. “They dated all through high school, up until Aspen left.”

I bit my lip and stared hard at my apple. “But they’re not together now?” Okay, not that Aspen had been flirting with me, but I liked Brook. I liked him a lot. I did not want to be the guy who flirted with his friend’s maybe-boyfriend.

Birch seemed to consider it for a moment, then shook his head. “When Aspen comes home, he’s going to have to do a lot of groveling if he wants Brook back. You don’t just disappear from someone’s life and then come back and act like nothing happened.”

“When?” I asked.

Meanwhile, Birch had finished peeling his first apple and expertly dissected it with a small knife, dropping the pieces in the pot and the core in the trash. “When,” he agreed. “Like I said, Asp was—is—my best friend. I know him. Now that Linden’s alpha, and there’s no chance Asp’ll be stuck with it, he’ll be along.”

“So he left just to avoid being alpha?” That seemed a little irresponsible, and that was odd. Sure, I hadn’t interviewed the guy or anything, but he hadn’t struck me as a guy who ran away from trouble. He’d come back, after all, even if he hadn’t come into town and made himself known yet.

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