Page 2 of Her Wicker Temptation

My friend Rachel spots me almost as soon as I come through the door. “You eating?”

“If pie counts as eating.”

“It absolutely does.”

“Then yes.”

She gestures toward a booth near the window. “Apple?”

“Please.”

I slide into the booth and set my purse beside me. The dinner rush hasn’t really started yet, and the Blue Plate has that pleasant in-between hum of silverware, low conversation, and the kitchen bell sounding every few minutes.

Rachel brings my coffee first. “You look tired.”

“I mediated irresponsible adult behavior all day.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

“The adults are always the difficult part.”

Rachel heads back to the kitchen for my pie. Locke is sitting at the far end of the counter. A year after he came to life, a man made of living willow can still make the ordinary world tilt slightly out of place.

I was in Rachel’s yard that night. Five of us had spent weeks building a wicker bear for the Harvest Festival, and we’d done such an unfortunate job of it that Blair called the thing a diseased woodland cryptid.

The day before, Rachel’s divorce from an emotionally abusive husband had become final. That night, with all of us gathered around the bonfire, she threw her wedding ring into the flames and made a wish.

Somehow… the wicker bear became a living man. Locke.

Warm living willow. A mind, a will, and a growing collection of opinions. A man who built a life of his own and still chose Rachel.

Now he’s in jeans and a dark green shirt, drinking water while he talks to young Ben Calhoun from the hardware store.

Rachel sets my pie down. “They’ve been debating cordless drills for twenty minutes.”

“Who’s winning?”

“Neither. That would require one of them to admit the other has a point.”

Locke looks over, and his attention goes straight to Rachel. She responds wordlessly: her shoulders drop a fraction, and the corners of her eyes crease before she looks back at me. It’s the kind of exchange I might have missed if I hadn’t already been watching them.

Locke has work he likes, people he spends time with, money of his own, and places he goes without Rachel. He has built a life here that belongs to him.

I take a bite of pie and barely taste it. Watching Rachel and Locke pulls up a memory I haven’t thought about in years: Dave reading beside me while I answered email, his ankle crossed over the opposite knee, perfectly content to share a room without needing anything from me. Sometimes he’d pass my chair on the way to the kitchen and rest a hand on my shoulder for a moment.

There was nothing dramatic about most of our marriage. That was one of the things I loved about it.

Dave died of a heart attack four years ago. I missed him terribly, but I never fell apart without him. I went back to work. I learned how to sleep alone. I made decisions without asking what he thought first, rearranged the house when I felt like it, traveled with friends, and built a life that is genuinely good.

Somewhere along the way, I confused being good at living alone with being happy that way. Rachel passes behind Locke on her way to another table and touches two fingers briefly to his shoulder. He glances up at her, and she keeps walking.

I miss that. I miss having another person woven through the ordinary parts of my day, someone whose stories I already know and who knows mine. Someone in the next room. Someone to reach for in bed. Being perfectly capable of living without that doesn’t mean I stopped wanting it. Rachel passes with the coffeepot, and I lower my fork.

“What?” she asks.

“I’m thinking.”

“That seems dangerous.”