Page 41 of Just (Fake) Married
“What…” she said, her hand clapped over her throat like I’d burned her.
“Force of habit,” I said, feeling heat climb my own neck. “Your heart beats there.” I pointed in the direction of her neck. “The jugular vein, I can tell the pressure in the right atrium of your heart.”
“Is it doing something weird?” she asked, feeling around her neck for the point. “Do I need to be worried?”
“No,” I chuckled. “It’s fine.”
I picked up her fingers and pressed them to my neck, so she could feel my pulse. She looked at me with wide eyes, but she didn’t jerk her hand back right away. Her cold fingers against my hot neck were shocking, and I wanted more. I wanted her to slide her cold hand deep into my coat and press all her fingers to my hot skin.
She pulled her hand back and when we started walking again, she was weaving down the icy sidewalk without any idea which car was mine. I was forced to quick step to put her arm back around mine.
“Don’t pretend you’re a gentleman,” she said.
“I don’t think I’m pretending.”
She scoffed and I smiled. Drunk, grumpy Harmony was pretty adorable.
I tended to like straight forward women. Women who made things easy and didn’t ask me to work too hard to understand them. Yeah, I know that made me sound like an asshole, but I was a busy man who had limited time to date.
Harmony was none of that. She was secrets and mysteries and thoughts in her head I didn’t have a clue about.
A bitter wind blew down Main Street, which had been affectionately named Hangman’s Lane, to honor the town’s tradition of…well, hanging people. The Last Stand was on the north side of the square, but I’d had to park further south. All thelocal businesses faced the square, the center of which was home to some interesting and completely morbid bronze statuary.
As we walked, we passed Harmony’s Last Chance Goods and Provisions store and The Last Meal café, which Amity owned. The Calloway businesses were really the town’s local economy.
“Why don’t you live above your store?” I asked her. “There’s got to be an apartment there, too.”
“I don’t live above the store because it’s full of stuff from the bar and the café. It’s on my New Year’s resolution list, though.”
“What is?”
“Cleaning it out.”
“You have a list? I thought resolutions were singular.”
“Most years I only have one, but this year I have two.”
“What’s the other one?”
She didn’t answer me and our eyes met briefly in the dark.
“None of your beeswax,” she said primly.
“Beeswax? Really. Well, now it feels like my beeswax.”
“Why are you really on a hiatus from work?” she asked.
“Touché,” I said. Because she knew I wasn’t going to answer that.
“Obviously, just because we’re getting fake married, doesn’t mean we have to tell each other everything.”
“Obviously,” I said, and kept walking.
We passed the health clinic where most folks received their healthcare. The big animal vet, who was probably more sought after than the doctors in this town.
The K-12 school house where my brothers and I had all been educated, was just off the square. The Methodist church right next to that.
On the west corner of the square there was an old Victorian house that used to belong to the Calloways, but they had to sell it at some point. For as long as I could remember, it was a B&B run by Ida Strunk, the local knower of all town gossip. Her onlycompetition in the hospitality and busy-body business was her sister, Irma Strunk, who ran the B&B on the opposite corner of the square. Two women, who had to be in their seventies by now, were never married and had no kids. They claimed their only aim in life was to crush one another’s business.
