The car was really jiggling around, though, and Vivian folded her arms across her breasts, afraid they’d jump right out of her dress and the coat, and she wanted to keep a little mystery where Edward was concerned. Mystery was an important part of romance, if you believed everything you read in McClure’s. Still, she hadn’t thought the car would be so small. She could smell his hair pomade, they were sitting so close. Something sweet, but she couldn’t place the smell. A deep flush bloomed up and over her neck and face, and goose bumps popped up everywhere else. She cast a few shy glances from his hands on the steering wheel up to his profile, and the straight nose that tapered off to an adorable point, as he faced forward, keeping his eyes trained on the road in front of them.

A slight smile had crept into the corners of Edward’s mouth as he steered the car with casual confidence over the uneven bricks of Henrietta Street. At one point he began to whistle, and Vivian stifled a giggle as she turned her head away from him and looked out the window, the brim of her hat shielding her face. She tried to focus her attention on the houses they passed, the Gerbers’ and the Sawyers’ and a few she didn’t know, and then later the clusters of bare trees and bushes now dripping with melting snow. It was just perfect, the things that created the scenery of their own little private world inside the traveling tin can, sitting pretty on that tufted bench seat and breathing the shared air together as Vivian grew more and more aware of the tingling in her skin. She hummed “Pennies from Heaven” lightly under her breath.

By the time Edward pulled the car up to the curb in front of the McGintys’ house the temperature had dropped back down into the numbers more usual for the month of December.

“They don’t make heaters for cars,” he said with an apologetic shrug. “But they should, shouldn’t they?”

Although her parts had stopped jiggling and bouncing, she was starting to shiver and her teeth had begun to chatter. Edward cranked the gears into the park position.

“Go on, get in there,” he urged, still with that big grin on his face. “I don’t want you to freeze to death out here. They’d try me for murdering the prettiest girl in Ohio.”

Vivian might’ve rolled her eyes if it’d just been cheap flattering, but her eyes were dancing as she looked down at her gloved hands in her lap and then out the fogging windshield in front of her. Cold as she was, she’d rather stay there in the car with Edward than go back into the McGinty house with all the noise and all the people. She wondered what it would be like to freeze to death right there next to him. The chill had crept in through the secondhand coat, and was working toward the top layer of skin, but her heart and the rest of her insides stayed glowing warm.