There’s Pumpkin About You

by Athena Carstairs

A fall theme would allow for Oakleigh to incorporate certain spooky elements from The Nightmare Before Christmas, whilst still displaying the class, mystery and beauty that the season has to offer—the warm colors, the slight chill, the pumpkins and the freshly fallen leaves. It’s exactly why fall is my favorite time of year.

Being the naive, love-struck woman I was at the time, I thought that giving up my choices was the same as compromising.

Facial expressions and social cues are my biggest downfall, and yet I can read her so easily, like a book written in my language. I see the way she leans forward slightly with every sentence, how her voice rises in both pitch and volume. I see the excitement in her eyes, and the ability to give any other response slips away.

Either way, I know it’s better to be prepared for a man with whom I’m never going to get along with no matter how hard I try.

I’ve always known I’d have been perfectly content living a life like this—a life filled with a complex simplicity. It’s quiet here, comforting and frugal all on its own. I love it. I admire it.

It looks natural on him—this level of confidence that others have to spend decades begging for. Every speck of dust, every atom in the air follows him and so does my gaze.

Now, I spend half of my time wondering if that swell of pride was nothing more than a bloom of happiness for the first time because I was needed by something.

When she feels, it always looks so complex, you would never think it could be something so ordinary, because she isn’t ordinary.

“Do I make you nervous, sweetheart?” His lips press against each other, as if taking a second to see if he likes the taste the new nickname leaves on his tongue. My own form a gap when I let out yet another short breath, my lungs desperately searching for any kind of oxygen in the room. “Do I?” he repeats. “I…” I gulp. “I’m not sure.” The edge of his lips twitch, but he keeps his smile in check. “Good enough for me.”

“With any guys you dated, did you never get that feeling? That intense need to hide all the things that made you insecure so that he’d see only the best in you?” “No? I was just myself.” He looked at the ground as he softly chuckled to himself. His hands slipped from my shoulders. “Then you’ve never been in love.”

He groans once more, as if what he’s saying should be obvious. “There’s nothing to understand. I don’t regret you breaking into my barn and bugging me to work with you.” “But why not, August? So far, you’ve gained nothing from it.” “Not true,” he argues. “Oh, really? Tell me one thing so far that has worked in your favor. You’re still behind on the harvest and the paperwork and you have an incomplete barn. What the hell could you have gained?” “I gained you, idiot.”

I know now that I haven’t stopped thinking about it because she tries her hardest not to. And what a sin it is to ignore such beauty.

The problem with that is she doesn’t just make me want her body. I want all of her. Her mind, her body, hell, her goddamn soul. I’ve never been so attracted to someone that it could resemble exactly what Bash told me about. The way he loved that girl so intensely. He didn’t think about each part of her as separate entities; he just wanted her. I just want Wren.

“I hate the way you make me feel, but I could never hate you. Like I said last week, I don’t regret anything because it gave me you, sweetheart.”

The feeling of being so overwhelmed that your brain cannot even begin to comprehend half of the things your senses are experiencing in that moment.

I look around the store, trying to see if there are any flowers which might be useful for Wren. “Looking for something for a special party planner, perhaps?” I scoff nervously. “No offense, Nigel, but there’s nothing beautiful enough for her here.” “No offense taken, son. I feel the same way about my Simone. Everything in the world seems dim compared to her.”

I can hear Bash hollering in the background, making me smile against Gus, and he smiles, too. I don’t even need to be dating Gus for long to know that he’s about to treat me better than Adam ever did. What’s more … he’s going to make me treat myself as I deserve. With respect.

“Now, I know not just what I need, but what I deserve. Sweetheart, I want you. I think I have since the first moment I met you. I want to wake up to you, sleep next to you. I want to kiss you whenever I get the urge, I want to see a smile on your face every day. The reason I needed the time wasn’t to realize that, but to think about how to navigate this.

Even after this short time together, I have this overwhelming desire to tell you not just that I love you, but that I’m devastatingly obsessed with you, and I have no idea if that’s a normal amount of time or if that’s too fast and if that will scare you off.

“You want to be with me?” I ask. Brown eyes flick to my lips quickly. “Desperately.” “Then be with me,” I say simply. “Love me. Want me. Do it all. I’m ready for it. I want it, because I love you, too, August.”

I wanted to tell them that the idea of being so far from my home makes me feel uneasy, even if I’m only gone for a week or two. And when I say my home, Gus, I mean you. I mean Oakleigh, Finn, Jamie and your brothers. I love all of you guys, but you? I will never love anyone the way I love you.”

Things are right. Things are good. They’re exactly where they need to be and now, more than ever, I’m grateful to Wren. I’m grateful that I’ve spent the time learning to open myself up to people knowing that, yes, you can get hurt. But when people like Wren come around, you take that risk and jump into the deep end. What can I say, there’s just something about her.