Page 76 of While the Sun Shines

He clears his throat. It’s hard to look at her. “Do you want to talk about last night?” he asks, and that’s better; his words are clearer this time and his voice firmer. He smooths his hands over the wheel. “Pen…we can ignore it. If you want.”

“Ignore it?” Penny says.

“Or not? I—I don’t know, but if that’d be better for you—” He sucks in a deep breath. “You know how I—how I feel about you.”

“You can say it, Drew. I’m not going to launch myself out of the car window.”

“I love you. I’m in love with you.” He pulls in a deep breath. Tries to smile. “I mean, you can just duck and roll if you want to. Good thing we’re not on the highway, I guess, right?”

“Good thing.”

Drew’s face is burning. Keep going, he thinks. Don’t stop now, when there’s the chance that on the other side of this hesitant, hard conversation there might be some relief. That the knot of tension that’s grown tighter and tighter might finally break.

Will that be better, though? Fuck it, maybe. And besides, there’s no going back, no undoing the last couple days and the shift between Penny and him, the puzzle pieces of their lives and their relationship in a disordered jumble now, and no matter how they fit together again, the picture will be different this time around.

“Pen, is there…is there any chance for us?” Drew asks. “Now or someday in the future—or was there already, and I missed it?”

“I don’t want to get hurt,” Penny says easily, smoothly, the answer clearly thought out.

“I don’t want you to get hurt. Ever. I promise, okay?”

“There’s not not a chance,” she says. She tips her head toward the house, staring at it, then takes a breath and turns to face him. “It’s not me versus the farm, Drew. It’s me and the farm. But that’s going to be up to you, okay?”

“Yeah.” Drew nods and then nods again. “Yeah, okay. That makes sense.”

“It’s gotta do more than just make sense. It has to be how you live your life here, if you want us to be anything more than friends.”

“I would be so stupidly happy being friends with you, you know.”

“I know.” She touches his cheek, her fingers soft. “So fucking do something about it, okay?”

Penny gets out and shuts the car door gently. Drew pulls in a breath. Then another one. Then he leans forward, scrubbing at his eyes. That wasn’t a no. Not a yes either, but…he laughs. Sets his forehead on the steering wheel, and the chuckle that wells up inside his chest startles him by how easily it comes.

It wasn’t a yes but it wasn’t a fuck no, get out of my life. He can…yeah, he can work with Penny’s answer. And fucking hell, he’ll do anything, anything at all, to grasp at however slim a chance he’s got with her that never, not once, did he think he’d get.

The breeze across the barnyard is already warm, the smells of summer in the air, of cut grass and early flowers, and the rustle of new leaves on the maple trees. He can change. Do everything differently. Whatever the hell that means, he can figure it out.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Drew finds Whit flushing the last of the sanitizer through the milk lines in the back of the barn.

“The milk pump broke,” Whit says before Drew can even get out good morning. “Welcome back.”

“Okay.” Drew’s brain feels like it’s humming. His hands too, his whole body on edge with a buzz of energy. “Yeah, thanks, and thanks for handling the farm last night and this morning.”

“Like really broke,” Whit says. “The pressure regulator gave out and Cooper got drenched, which would’ve been funny but we lost all of this morning’s milk.”

Penny, Drew thinks above the blare of worry Whit’s words stir in him. “Okay,” Drew says again.

Whit eyes him. “Okay?”

“No, not okay. I’m going to have a fucking heart attack, but we’ll make it work.”

“We will,” Whit says slowly.

With no milk, it’s less cheese he can make, which means even more of a scramble to finish Brad’s order, the cost to fix the pump—

No.