Coffee and Spice | Harvey | Stardew Valley

-3-

The next morning, the cat is up with the sun, yowling at the bedroom door until I finally accept that falling back to sleep is out of the question. I fling off the covers, irritated with the premature wake-up call, by the slant of light that's angled perfectly through the blinds to hit my face, and that my first conscious thought when the haze of sleep fades is of Harvey.

It's maddening to me, especially considering I had barely known the man at all. So what if we had messed around by a trash can in the dead of night? There's certainly nothing special or romantic about that. But there had been something in the way he had looked at me, even before he had kissed me. Maybe it was just lust, but I was sure that there was something else buried beneath it.

Then again, I had always had a tendency of romanticizing these types of situations. Eyes meeting across a crowded room, split-second interactions, the brush of a hand. All small, oftentimes innocent things that my mind inevitably evolves into some heart-shattering moment. I was the most hopeless of romantics despite never having experienced much romance myself.

My father - a big-wig CEO in the city that never passed up the opportunity to impart his disappointment in my choice to abandon his ideal version of success - used to tell me, "you can either sink or swim in life, Caira."

I don't think he meant for his idiom to apply to my love life, or lack thereof, but the one explicit trait he passed down to me was stubbornness. I feel it now, as if his energy is somehow channeling through me across the many pastures and farms and cities that separate us.

I would not allow myself the option of thinking of Harvey. I would not swim in the moment of false happiness over and over again, and I would not sink in the misery of that moment being gone like a popped bubble. Instead, I would push Harvey out of my mind completely because all he was and would ever be is a stranger.

Not wanting to remain a prisoner to my thoughts, I throw myself into the usual morning tasks despite the exhaustion that still creaks in my limbs. I'm driven by determination and - alright, yes - stubbornness. I work until my muscles ache and I can barely unclench my first from around my ax due to the lingering cold. Even with this diversion, flashes of images invade my mind incessantly: a muscled thigh parting my own, the half rolled-up sleeves of a dress shirt with the tie askew, eyes the color of freshly-brewed coffee locked onto mine.

So much for my plan of distraction.

My thoughts are so hyper-focused on the memories that I'm not paying attention to what I'm doing. I raise my ax over my head and swing it downwards to cleave a piece of wood in half. Instead, as I remember feeling the hard muscles of Harvey's chest beneath my hands (and another kind of hardness somewhere else), my trajectory shifts slightly and the ax head slams into the snow-covered ground so hard that the wooden handle rattles my arms.

    "Son of a bitch," I mutter to nobody in particular as I attempt to yank the thing out of the ground.

    "I didn't know you thought so poorly of me," Mayor Lewis quips from behind me.

    I turn to find him standing on my porch next to the cat, who blinks at me with an unimpressed expression. Mayor Lewis, however, puts his hands on his hips and squints out at a field in the distance with a huge grin on his face that pushes the apples of his cheeks up into his eyes.

    "Did you till all that by yourself?" He asks, looking at me up and down as though he had misjudged me when I first arrived and was now reconsidering his initial presumptions. "I was just here - what was it, two days ago? - and you barely had a dent in that field then."

    I abandon the ax in the ground and stand by the porch. "I sure did. I think I sacrificed every muscle in my body for it though."

    "Nothing wrong with a little bit of hard work," he states.