Cinnamon Roll Set Up (Cinnamon Rolls and Pumpkin Spice)

10. Georgia

Chapter 10

Georgia

Whoever is in charge of decorating Magnolia Ridge’s Harvest Festival is the exact right amount of extra. Every booth is covered in hay bales and corn husks, pumpkins and mums. Even though it’s in the high seventies today, it looks like a perfect autumn day, and in Texas, that’s close enough.

Miles and I wander through the booths to our station for the afternoon, deftly avoiding the little children running up and down the aisles. There must be some kind of decoration scavenger hunt going on because most of them have paper and crayons, checking things off before they run away again.

In the center pavilion, men in variously colored flannel shirts file across the stage, vying for the day’s trophy. It’s basically a thinly veiled beefcake parade, although a few women are in the lineup, too.

“Aw. If I’d known about the flannel competition, I would have told you to wear one.”

“I don’t need to destroy their egos all at once.” He tosses me the tiniest smirk.

I loop my hand around his arm. “You’re right. Better to humiliate them individually. ”

“What’s going on at the community center?”

I follow his gaze. A bunch of Abandoned signs are boarded up across the building’s front doors.

“They make it look more run down every week in September, and by October, it will be a haunted house. Wait—you’ve never seen the progression of the Abandoned Manor?”

“I don’t usually come to the Harvest Festival. I didn’t realize the farmers market was this big.”

“They get more vendors every year.” Sam’s sister-in-law, Eliza, is a big advocate for the market. “And next year, they’ll finally add the bicycle bookmobile. Bookcycle?”

He chuckles. “The fabled Dogeared bookmobile. How are things going with that?”

“Really good. Grandpa and Sam worked through the hardest parts of putting the shelves in. Now we just need to add the doors and find a way to strap in the books when it’s in transit. It’ll be ready for the spring market, don’t worry.”

He smiles down at me. “I never doubted you.”

I’ve had two bosses in my adult life: myself and Miles. And of those, Miles is the more supportive one. I can fret over my cover ideas until I’m practically ready to give up illustrating altogether. My negative self-talk game is strong. But Miles always acts like it would be impossible for me to fail.

Is it any surprise I’ve stayed at Dogeared this long?

I give us a wide berth past a stall with grinning scarecrows on either side, shuddering as I go.

“Still a no from you, huh?” he says.

“They’re creepy.”

“They’re smiling.”

“With stitched-on mouths . That’s horror movie stuff. Scarecrows were literally created to be frightening, and now we’ve collectively decided they’re benign good guys we should put all over our house and yard every fall? No, thank you. ”

He turns his head to get a better view of the ones I avoided. “They’ve got Raggedy Ann faces with cherry red cheeks.”

“And straw stuffing falling out of their arms and legs. That’s morbid. Haven’t you seen the movies? Scarecrows are evil, the end.”

His eyebrows hitch up like he can’t possibly reconcile my evil brand with the cutesy versions we just passed. “I feel like you and I watched different movies growing up.”

“Sam might have let me watch an especially scary show when I was little.” I normally don’t throw my brother under the bus, but the trauma is real. “I still sometimes have nightmares about getting chased through cornfields.”

I know scarecrows are meant to scare away birds, but they’ve really done a number on me .

He puts his hand over mine on his arm. “I promise to protect you from any scarecrows we encounter, good or evil.”

“You’d better.”

As if there’s even a way to defeat spooky possessed scarecrows, but I don’t want to ruin the offer.

“Here we are. Stall seventeen.” Miles stops short. “Huh. We actually got apple bobbing.”

The morning volunteers give us a quick rundown of how the stall works before they leave us to it. Looks pretty easy: the apples go in the barrels. But in the name of good hygiene, instead of using their mouths to grab the apples, kids have to use sets of chopsticks.

“Kind of anti-climactic, isn’t it?” Sure, this version eliminates kids running around with wet heads covered in shared germs, but where’s the chipped teeth and near-drowning?

“I don’t know.” Miles watches the row of children fumbling around at the four big wooden barrels. “It might be harder than the original version.”

We sit down on the closest hay bales so we can supervise. There’s not a lot more for us to do. We don’t even get to give out cool prizes—the apples are the prizes. Kind of a wah-wah moment when the kids realize it, but we can’t all be the cool booths that give out Jolly Ranchers.

Miles leans his shoulder against mine. “I like your sweater.”

I beam at him. “Aww. Thanks for noticing.”

It would be pretty impossible not to notice my sweater. It’s covered in red, yellow, and gold appliqué leaves. Some of them, inexplicably, have faces on them. The eighties must have been wild times.

“The shimmery ones are an interesting addition.”

He runs one finger along a gold lamé maple leaf on my forearm. It’s a soft, almost-nothing touch, but it still spreads a flush of warmth across my skin.

I exhale a shaky laugh. “Its previous owner must have really wowed the other ladies at her Tupperware parties.”

“She probably had matching leg warmers to go with it.”

“Ooh. Now I kind want to make a pair.”

“If anyone could pull it off, it’d be you.”

I’m not even sure looking good in hideous leg warmers is a valid compliment, but it makes me stupidly happy.

We monitor apple bobbing—well, apple chopsticking—and replenish the fruit supplies whenever it looks like the barrels are running low. All in all, not a bad way to volunteer a little time for the community.

“Now,” I say softly so none of the kids hear me. “About your date.”

Miles blows out a breath. “It’s not looking good for your matchmaking plans.”

“I’m not worried. It’s good data to help me narrow down my next pick.”

He side-eyes me. “Since when do you care about data? ”

“Since it’s going to help me find the woman of your dreams.”

His mouth pulls into a frown. “We were just going for date .”

I wave off his concerns. “Sure, sure. But it would be nice if she was everything you’re looking for, right?”

He goes on staring at me. “Yes. It would.”

His voice hits an especially low note that makes my insides weirdly fluttery. He’s got a really nice voice, steady and rich. You don’t expect it when you first see him standing there in his fitted cardigan and dress shirt. He has the perfect voice for reading a book out loud to someone.

Which is definitely a thing I’ll remember to mention to whoever I find for his next date.

“If I’m unsuccessful—and I will be successful—there’s always the Kissing Corn Maze,” I say before I get too distracted thinking about his voice. But the longer I think about it, the less I like that idea. I’d rather have a hand in choosing his dates than just leave it up to whoever races to him first.

One of the little girls at the barrels has given up trying to catch an apple between her chopsticks and is now attempting to skewer one with them. She brutally stabs at the water, completely soaking her arm and splashing half the kids.

“Whoa, whoa,” I tell her. “We don’t want to get everyone wet. It’s best to do it gently.”

She smacks her fist into the water again. “I don’t like apples.”

I lift my hands in front of my face to avoid as much of the spray as I can. “All we have here are apples.”

“I like candy.”

I’m trying to come up with a polite way to tell her she doesn’t have to play the game if she doesn’t want an apple when her father intervenes and pulls her away. The children who were splashed the most have already run off, leaving us momentarily on our own.

“I feel like there might be complaints about the lax supervision at the apple bobbing station,” Miles says.

“Yeah, right. Mixing kids and huge barrels of water has one conclusion, and it’s not staying dry.”

Despite the inevitable splashing, more kids fill in the gaps left by the ones who just escaped and get to wrangling apples.

“At least we’re not working the dunk tank.” Miles coughs into his fist. “This week.”

“Are we really doing that?”

“I didn’t rule it out. But there are more stations than weeks we’re volunteering, so you might get lucky.”

“I might get real lucky and opt to let you and Arlo work the tank together.”

“I can just imagine him and his morose face begging people to put him out of his misery and dunk him already.”

I laugh at the image of our once-happy coworker languishing on the dunk tank bench like a sick Victorian child. “Poor Arlo. He’s taking the breakup so hard.”

I haven’t witnessed the fallout of very many failed relationships, but they all seem to go out in spectacular fashion when they do.

“At least he’s eating regularly again.”

I pass out chopsticks to newcomers. “If you can call those cheese-filled beef jerky tubes food. I have to air out the bookstore whenever he’s on shift so it doesn’t smell like a meat market.”

“He’ll get through this stage, too.”

“Is this a normal post-breakup stage? What’s the vegetarian version of jerky tubes?”

“Doritos. ”

“Nothing says ‘I miss you’ like scarfing down tasty corn chips.”

He looks at me like he’s reevaluating something. “You haven’t been through a breakup? Ever?”

I’m aware it’s at least slightly unusual to be a twenty-eight-year-old woman who’s never been in an actual relationship, but I’m fine with it. I dated a teensy bit in college, and no part of me has regrets that those relationships didn’t work out. The longer my no-dating streak goes on, the easier it is to turn down the random guys who ask for my number at work. It’s automatic now.

“Nope. Better safe than sorry, right?”

“You can’t succeed if you don’t try.”

“But you can’t fail if you don’t try, either. It’s a pretty solid system.” I laugh, but he doesn’t join in. “Not that I think you’re going to fail on your dates. We’re definitely going to find someone right for you.”

Which is less reassuring than I thought it would be when I said it.

“I’m not worried about that.”

Oh. “Don’t worry about me. Someday, AI will advance so much I’ll be able to order one of my special ops guys right off the pages of my favorite book.”

He frowns harder. “I’m against AI for most uses, but especially that.”

“Do you have a better solution for turning fiction into reality?”

“Does it have to be fiction?”

We’re just joking around, but he sounds so serious, I go completely still. Sam likes to give me a hard time about my book boyfriend obsession, but this is something different. Like Miles genuinely wants to know if pretend is all I want.

Pretend is all I’ve ever let myself have .

“What if he’s not a special ops guy?” he asks softly. My gaze drops to his mouth so I won’t miss a word. “What if he’s not out of the pages of a book? What if he’s?—”

“Hey, mister!”

I jolt so hard I almost fall off my hay bale. My heart’s racing so fast, you’d think Miles and I were caught doing something naughty in front of the kids. But like I told Willa, we’re just friends, and friends don’t do that.

I don’t think.

We turn to see an older boy leaning over one of the barrels with both arms inside while some of the other kids watch him warily. “My apple’s stuck.”

Miles tilts his head, examining the situation. “Stuck how?”

“I don’t know, but it won’t come out. Can you help me?”

He stands and leans over the barrel, obviously trying to figure out what the problem is. “I don’t see?—”

The boy does something with his hands under the water, and suddenly an apple launches out of the barrel into the air.

And hits Miles square in the face.