He shrugged. “Sure.”
“What about a pirate?” I wiggled my eyebrows suggestively. “Does the Captain need a first mate?”
That earned me a laugh, and my heart thrilled. Simon didn’t hand out laughs freely. “Very possibly.”
“Oh! I know!” I grinned up at him. “I can be Shakespeare.”
His laugh vanished, followed by a scowl, but his eyes still shone in amusement. “No. You can’t. Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.”
“But what if he didn’t?” I poked him in the side. “What if it was Wilhelmina Shakespeare?”
“No.” More insistent this time, he dragged me to the side of the path until my back rested against a tree. “It wasn’t.” His lips grazed mine, a kiss for each word. “Shakespeare. Wrote. Shakespeare.”
He had his Teacher Voice on again, but when I looked up into his golden-green eyes I recognized the glimmer in them. The pirate was still in there. Those two parts of his personality weren’t as disparate as he thought they were.
I kissed him again and decided not to argue. I had a year and a day. I could talk him into it.
Epilogue
One Year and One Day Later
I was not able to talk him into it.
While Simon had relinquished control of many aspects of Faire, he remained firm on the topic of faux Shakespeares, no matter how many times I brought it up. Some stupid crap about not wanting to fill the kids’ heads with conspiracy theories before they went to college. Fine. Instead, I spent part of the spring recruiting high school students from Simon’s English classes, along with a few drama kids. We gathered on Wednesday afternoons at the bookstore, where we read Romeo and Juliet together and had roundtable discussions about themes, context, and the best way to bring the words to life. Then we put together a selection of scenes from the play, which they performed on one of the stages at Faire that summer. Caitlin abandoned her fancy lady-in-waiting dress and joined us; she made an excellent Nurse.
The rising seniors in the group had already decided that, even without a show to put on, we would continue the Shakespeare readings in the fall as a kind of book club. We picked Twelfth Night to read next, and I ordered copies, which the kids agreed to buy from me instead of downloading elsewhere. Even though Cait was only a junior she was very much part of the group, and already looking forward to smugly sharing her knowledge of the play since she’d already read it.
Although my official job at Faire was “Keep Simon From Twitching Too Much Because Things Were Changing,” I was more involved than ever. In addition to directing the kids through their Romeo and Juliet scenes, I found myself in charge of the wenches, a job Stacey was happy to give up. It was an easy task, now that I had some advance notice and prep time. Over the winter I talked to the manager of Jackson’s, and the bar agreed to sponsor the taverns at the Faire. Yes, taverns, plural. I proposed a second tent near the food vendors, since plenty of people would want beer to go with their turkey legs, and once we set it up it quickly became much busier than the tent I had worked the summer before. Waitresses from Jackson’s volunteered a day or two at a time, some in busty corsets and some in red T-shirts, and everything ran much more smoothly with professional servers in place. There were no more jokes about beer being forgotten.
Stacey and I were still dressed as tavern wenches, but we were able to roam, floating from one tavern to the other, stopping to curtsy to other characters, engaging in conversation, and all in all having much more fun than we’d had the summer before. I spent a lot of time on the sidelines of a certain chess match, catching kisses from my black-clad pirate. Those leather pants were just as compelling the second summer as they had been the first.
I was proud of Simon. He had a hard time when we first started making changes, but as others made suggestions and we put them in place, he started to understand Sean’s impact in his community wouldn’t be erased. He even made the biggest suggestion of all: cutting the run of Faire from six weeks to four. I’d mentioned to him what Stacey had said to me about those last two, hottest weeks of the summer being the least busy, and after we spent an evening crunching the numbers at his kitchen table, he realized we were right. Those two extra weeks were like a weight lifted from the whole town. Families with kids in Faire could take vacations at the end of summer; we could hire fewer acts over the course of Faire, which meant more money retained for the schools.
Over the winter I’d found a small apartment on the edge of the downtown area, so I finally got out of April’s guest room. Simon had made some noises about me moving in with him, but I loved being close enough to walk to work. Besides, I couldn’t picture living in his parents’ house, a feeling that only intensified when they came back to town for Christmas and I met them. They were wonderful people—though I retained a little resentment toward them for leaving Simon alone in his grief—but I felt like more of a guest at the Graham home than ever, and I didn’t see that changing if I moved my stuff in there. He didn’t push, which I appreciated, and we alternated time between our two places. I kept a toothbrush at his house, and he kept one at my apartment.
With Faire over again and the rest of August stretched out lazily before us, I went back to work. Chris and I alternated days at the bookstore for the rest of the summer to give us both a break. Simon dropped by sometimes to work on his laptop in the café, and if we made out in the classics section more than once after closing, the books never said anything.
So life had settled into a nice routine by late August, about two weeks after Faire had ended. I was at the bookstore on a Monday, even though it was closed, catching up on online orders, ordering the books for April’s next book club meeting, and other miscellaneous paperwork. I looked up in surprise when the door chimed, but it was Chris, letting herself in with her key.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” I said. “Aren’t you taking your mom to the doctor today?”
“Already did. Everything’s good, and she’s cleared to go back to Florida in October. Knowing Mom, she’ll be packed up in a week.” She moved past me to the back room.
“She loves it down there, huh?” I grinned at the spreadsheet I was working on, giving it only half my attention.
Chris groaned. She was not a fan of Florida. “Goddamn hot, buggy state with giant alligators waiting to eat your face. I don’t know what she sees in it.”
I snorted, and the door chimed again. I turned in surprise; Chris must have left the door unlocked. “I’m sorry, we’re not open . . . oh, hey.” I smiled to see Simon. Now that Faire was over he’d shaved off his beard, but I’d talked him into keeping his hair longer. Though truthfully, it hadn’t taken much convincing. He liked the way I ran my fingers through it.
That wasn’t the only piece of the pirate he’d retained going into the fall. The silver hoop earring stayed in his ear, even though his pirate days were over for the year. He’d have to take it out during the week at school, of course, but otherwise that small piece of jewelry seemed to be a touchstone for him, reminding him that Simon the English Teacher could have a little swagger too, could smile a little more freely. Captain Blackthorne the Pirate didn’t need to hoard it all.