What Mel Wants

Mel Rasmussen was thirty-three years old, and she had been sweating through coveralls at county fairs long enough to estimate how many flies lived in the Mid-Summer Harvest livestock barn. The number was large. Very large.

The equine demonstration had gone well that afternoon. Her bay gelding, Duke, had done his whole routine without so much as a snort of complaint, and the crowd of maybe forty fairgoers had actually applauded. Mel had taken a bow of sorts, which mostly meant tipping her hat and pretending her face wasn't the color of a beet.

Now she stood by Duke's stall, wiping sweat off her forehead with the back of her wrist, and that was when she saw him.

Leo Williams. Veterinarian. Thirty-five years old, built from lifting hay bales for fun, and currently leaning against the stall divider like it was a bar stool. He was talking to the strawberry seller, the pretty one with the braid down her back, and he was laughing. Mel could hear the laugh from thirty feet away, that warm easy laugh that made half the women at the fair lose their minds.

She did not care. She wanted it noted, for the record, that she did not care.

"Whoa there, Duke," she muttered, grabbing a curry comb and attacking the horse with more force than the job required. Duke turned his big head and gave her a look, the one that said you are brushing me like I owe you money.

"Sorry, boy," she said, softer.

The strawberry seller giggled at something Leo said, slapped his arm, and wandered off with her basket. Mel's grip on the curry comb tightened until her knuckles went white.

She stomped out of the barn and over to the water trough by the fence line. It was one of those big stock tanks with a spigot, and she cranked it on and stuck her whole head practically under the stream, letting cold water run down the back of her neck. Somewhere behind her, the midway was screaming with delight over something, a ring toss game probably, and the Ferris wheel lights were just starting to flicker on against the early dusk.

She was shaking water off her hands when she heard her name.

"Mel!"

Oh no. Oh no no no. She knew that voice. She could pretend she hadn't heard it. She could keep walking toward the tractor shed like a woman with important tractor business.

"Mel Rasmussen! I know you heard me, you've got the best ears at this whole fair, you spend all day listening to horses!"

She stopped. Her shoulders sagged. She turned around.

Leo was jogging across the dirt lane, vet jacket tied around his waist, grinning like the cat that got the cream and the canary and the whole dairy farm. "There she is! I was starting to think you were avoiding me."

"Was I?" Mel asked, all innocence, scrubbing at her forearm with a towel she had absolutely needed to scrub at right that second. "Guess I just had a lot on my mind. Water troughs don't fill themselves."

"Sure, sure." He leaned against the fence, way too comfortable, the way he always did. "Great demo today, by the way. Duke looked fantastic. That flying change in the third pattern? Textbook. I clapped. Did you see me clapping?"

"I saw a lot of clapping," Mel said flatly. "Hard to say whose."

That made him laugh again, and she hated how much she liked hearing it. She hated it a lot. She hated it so much she wanted to throw her towel at him.

"You know," Leo said, tilting his head at her, "you get awfully territorial over those horses. Anyone else gives Duke a pat and you materialize out of thin air like a ghost with a pitchfork."

"I do not!" She said it too fast and too loud, and she knew it, and he knew it, because his grin got even worse.

"You kind of do. Maribel at the cotton candy stand asked me last week if you were the horse's mother."

"Maribel asks everyone if they're somebody's mother," Mel snapped. "She asked the mayor if he was the cotton candy machine's mother."

"Fair point," Leo admitted, holding up both hands. "But you know what I mean. Somebody touches your horses, somebody looks at them sideways, and suddenly you're hovering. Very protective. It's actually kind of sweet."

"Sweet," Mel repeated, in a voice that could have curdled milk in the next county over.

"Sweet!" he repeated back, cheerful as anything.

"Leo, you want to talk about hovering? You're the one who can't keep his hands off people." She flung a hand toward the direction the strawberry seller had gone. "I just watched you giggle with that woman for ten minutes. Ten! I counted! You were leaning on that stall like it was going to buy you dinner!"

Leo blinked at her. For the first time all day, maybe for the first time all summer, the grin actually wavered. "I was... talking to her. About strawberries."

"Nobody talks about strawberries for ten minutes, Leo! What was there to say? They're red! They cost four dollars a basket! The end!"

He was staring at her now, and she realized, with a horrible lurch in her stomach, that she had said considerably more than a person says about strawberries. Her face went hot, hotter than the demonstration ring had made it, and she grabbed her towel and her hat and her dignity, or whatever was left of them.

"I have to go," she announced.

"Mel, wait."

"I have tractor things! Important ones! Behind the shed!"

"That's not a real job and you know it," he called after her, but he was following, which was the problem. He was always following. Three summers of following, of showing up at her ring with coffee, of finding reasons to be near her without being asked, of laughing with strawberry sellers right where she could see him, and she could not for the life of her figure out what game he was playing.

The lane between the livestock barn and the tractor shed was all dust and late gold light. The Ferris wheel had come fully on now, a big amber wheel glowing over the treetops, and the fair noise fell away behind them until it was just their boots on the dirt and Mel's heart doing something embarrassing in her chest.

She rounded the corner of the shed and stopped. It was quiet back there. Quiet and private and absolutely not where she should have led him, if she had been thinking at all, which she hadn't been.

"So," Leo said, catching up, slightly out of breath, "ten minutes, huh?"

"Don't."

"You counted."

"Leo, I swear to goodness, if you say one more word about strawberries I will feed you to Duke."

He laughed, but quieter this time. He came around in front of her, and the shed put them both in shadow, and suddenly it was very hard for Mel to remember any of the exit strategies she had been mentally drafting. He was close. He was always close lately and never as close as this.

"Mel." His voice had gone down a register, the teasing drained out of it. "Talk to me. Please. You've been snapping at me since June and glaring at me since, well, I think since before June, and I keep trying to figure out what I did, and I genuinely can't. So tell me. What does it take to get you to look at me without murder in your eyes?"

"Nothing did anything," Mel said, staring at a fascinating patch of gravel. "You didn't do anything. It's not about you."

"Then who's it about?"

"Nobody!"

"The strawberry lady?"

"The strawberry lady!" Mel threw both hands up. "Fine! Yes! Listen, Leo, and then I'm leaving and we never speak of it again, okay? Here's the thing."

She took a breath. It came out shaky, which was not the confident tone she had planned.

"Three summers. Three! I have watched you flirt your way through three summers of fairs and auctions and 4-H potlucks, and every single time, I stand there in my stupid coveralls holding my stupid clipboard and I feel like I swallowed a hot coal. And I don't even know why I'm telling you this, except that you asked, and you looked at me with those concerned vet eyes, and I am apparently a complete idiot!"

Leo had gone very still. His mouth was open a little.

"So there," Mel finished, breathless, her voice cracking on the last word. "That's the thing. Are you happy? Do you want me to show you what I mean? Because I don't know how else to say it!"

* * *

The silence back there lasted about four seconds. Then Leo stepped forward and put a hand flat on the shed wall, right beside Mel's head, and she discovered she was suddenly against the wood with no memory of how she'd gotten there. He hadn't shoved her. He'd just sort of guided her, the way he moved nervous yearlings, and it had exactly the same effect.

"Okay," he said, low. "So this whole time, this is what's been going on."

"Leo..."

"You've been watching me flirt with people you think I'm flirting with."

"Weren't you?" Her voice came out thin. "You were! You flirt with everybody, it's your whole personality!"

"Is it?"

"Yes! It is! I have receipts, Leo!"

He laughed once, a short huff of air against her ear, and she felt it all down her spine. "Well. Here's the thing. I flirt with everybody because one particular everybody refuses to look at me like a person instead of a clipboard."

Mel's mouth opened. Nothing came out.

"So no," he said, "I wasn't talking to the strawberry woman about anything except her grandkid's 4-H pig, which had colic, by the way, and I was being nice, because I'm a professional. What I wanted to do was come find you and figure out why you look at me like I owe you money."

"You don't owe me money."

"I know I don't owe you money."

"You owe me for the taillights, actually, I kept meaning to..."

"Mel." His hand came off the wall and landed on her hip, warm and heavy through the coveralls. "Stop talking for one second. Can you do that? For me?"

She nodded. It was all she could manage. The word "for me" was still ringing in her ears like a struck bell.

"Good." His thumb moved, a small idle circle at her hipbone. "Now. You said something back there that I want to hear again, but slower, and without the part where you sprint away afterward. You want me. Is that right? Just tonight, or...?"

"Every damn fair," Mel blurted, because apparently her mouth had gone rogue and would not be taking further instruction from her brain. "Every fair, every auction, every stupid potluck, since the first one, when we fixed my trailer lights