Nobody at the wedding said it out loud, but the whole table knew: Wren was off-limits. Not by blood — by something the family treated as more binding than blood. Her mother had married his uncle eleven months ago, which made Wren and Caleb, technically, nothing at all. The family had voted otherwise at the reception: steps should not, apparently, be caught under the mistletoe together.
They obeyed for almost a year. Casseroles, birthdays, one unbearable Christmas where their knees touched under the table and neither moved for a full seven minutes.
The thing broke on a Saturday, in the greenhouse.
Caleb's uncle had a greenhouse — his wife's now, technically — and a habit of forgetting his reading glasses in it. Caleb had been sent to fetch them. Wren had been sent for the same reason, by a different emissary, and they arrived at the door at the same moment and stood there, one hand each on the handle, close enough that he could smell her shampoo through the cold.
"You go," she said.
"You were sent too."
"I was sent for glasses. You were sent to supervise me, probably. Keep the family's newest disgrace from stealing orchids."
"Nobody thinks you'd steal orchids."
"Nobody thinks I'd do half the things I think about doing." She looked at him while she said it, which was the whole problem, and the whole beginning.
The greenhouse was warm and wet-smelling, tomatoes and damp earth, the glass gone pearly with condensation so the house behind them was just a smear of yellow light. His uncle's glasses were on the potting bench, exactly where they always were.
Neither of them picked them up.
"If I kiss you," Caleb said, "it ruins about six Christmases."
"I've done the math." Wren took a step. The bench was behind her; the tomatoes brushed her hair. "It ruins six Christmases, two Thanksgivings, and my mother's book club, because Carol from book club has a nephew who works at the probate office and finds out everything. I've accepted the losses."
"You've accepted —"
"Kiss me before I talk myself out of it, Caleb. I'm nearly thirty, I don't have all day."
He kissed her against the potting bench with tomato leaves in her hair and her fingers hooked in his belt like she was claiming luggage. The whole time, half his mind was doing the family math — my uncle's wife's daughter, my uncle's wife's daughter — and the other half had stopped caring entirely, because her mouth had done the thing where it softened and opened, and arithmetic loses to that every time.
She got his shirt untucked. He got her sweater off over her head and one pot of basil very nearly paid for it. Her skin in the greenhouse light was green-gold and ridiculous, and when he bent to her breast she made a small startled sound, as if she hadn't expected it to feel like that in a building where her mother grew cherry tomatoes.
"We're going to hell," she said, delighted.
"We're going to be a footnote at Thanksgiving."
"Worse. We're going to be a legend at Thanksgiving."
He turned her gently to face the bench, both hands full of her hips, her laugh going low and shapeless as he pressed against her and the bench took their weight. The condensation on the glass above them shivered. Somewhere behind the smeared yellow light of the house, the family was arranging cheese boards and suspecting nothing.
They were quiet, mostly, which made it worse, which made it better. Every small sound — her breath catching, the bench, the wet whisper of the leaves against her back — felt like testimony. When he finally pushed into her, slow and deep, she reached back and gripped his thigh hard enough to leave marks, holding him inside her, holding him still, as if she could keep the moment from being a mistake by making it last.
It didn't last, in the end. Neither did the second time, on the floor, on his discarded shirt, her knees in the potting soil and her mouth against his ear saying his name like it was evidence.
Afterward they sat with their backs against the warm bench wall, sharing the last of the shame and a tomato, which Wren ate like an apple, juice running down her wrist, in a way Caleb found himself unable to stop watching.
"The glasses," she said finally.
He handed them over. She polished them on her sweater — her bra, actually, since the sweater was somewhere in the chives — and set them exactly where they'd been.
"Nobody finds out," Caleb said, "if we're careful."
Wren looked at him the way she had at the mistletoe, a year of patience in it.
"Caleb. I don't want to be careful." She stood, pulled her sweater on, and offered him her hand, dirty-kneed and luminous. "I want to be at Christmas with you sitting next to me, and let them all do the math."
