Page 49 of Once Upon a Fall

“Like this,” I say through the forced grin.

Dean pulls his lips back and attempts to copy me. It’s . . . unsettling.

“Oh no,” I say, already laughing. “You may stop that immediately.”

He tries again. Somehow, it’s worse.

“No. Oh, gosh.” I laugh harder. “Please put that away. You look like a serial killer trying to seem approachable.”

That does it. He laughs. Not one of his quiet little chuckles, but a deep, unguarded laugh that finally gives me the full smile—teeth, crinkled eyes, and all.

There’s no dimple. But somehow that makes it even better. Because it’s not the smile I invented for him. It’s the real one.

“There!” I say, pointing at his face. “Now, that’s a smile. Why don’t you do that more often?”

He shrugs, still chuckling. “I guess you’d have to be funnier.”

“I’m funny. All the time. It’s your lack of humor that’s the problem.”

“I’ll work on that.”

He gives me the half smile again, but it isn’t the smug one from ten seconds ago. It’s the other one. The one from before, when he told me I didn’t seem to mind.

My stomach flips, and my face goes hot. Now that I have all the facts, I think this one is my favorite.

We say good night, and Dean goes back to the Sleeping Beauty room. The room he’s been staying in every night except for one. Which I need to stop thinking about.

I get in my own bed, and it isn’t until I’m lying there in the dark that I realize I never changed my sheets today. I stripped the Hendersons’ bed and remade it and never once thought about mine.

I roll toward the center, not hating this mattress as much as I usually do. Just hating that I’m in the middle of it by myself. No legs tangled. No arms wrapped tight around me.

It still smells like him.

Dean

The prince went to his kingdom looking for answers. He found indigestion.

The air is getting chillier as we get closer to October, and I feel it on my morning run.

A run that’s become rare now that I apparently have an unpaid job at an inn. But Rosie’s at church with her family right now, and I need the fresh air.

Thirteen days left. The orchard is still burned, the barn is still damaged, and the raccoons are still in residence. The last company I contacted never showed, and the earliest appointment I could get with anyone else is still a week away. Meanwhile, I’ve become genuinely good at caulking somebody else’s bathroom. Which sounds like a terrible metaphor, but I have literally been caulking the Rapunzel bathroom.

The cold isn’t the only thing slowing me down this morning. I haven’t slept well all week. It could be the bed. It could also be that I can’t stop thinking about being in Rosie’s.

Which is . . . ridiculous.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been that close to anyone. Maybe that’s all this is. Or maybe it’s that it was her. I’m not sure I want to think too hard about that.

I pulled her back in when she tried to leave, though. I knew I was doing it. I wanted her there, so I pulled her back. But also, I was half asleep. And gravity’s force toward the center of that mattress was hard to fight.

And there I go, thinking about it again.

Rosie is . . . something else. Now that the Cinderella room is fixed and dry, she still has three rooms to finish, a festival to run, and a truck in her garage that belongs to someone else. She’s building rooms so strangers can be comfortable and keeping the worst space in the building for herself.

I’m sure there are others like her, but I haven’t met one.

My feet take me to the same place they always do when I actually go on my run: the farm.