by D. Lieber
“He knows me well.” Evergreen smiled and sat at the opposite side of the table from Sawyer.
As they settled into their meal, Evergreen glanced up at Sawyer only for a second before looking back at the whipped cream in her cup.
Why did I do that? she wondered. That was just stupid. I should have had better control. But…
She pictured Sawyer’s face again, looking up at her from the ground, snow clumped to his hat and scarf.
I’ve never seen his face so close before. The closest I’ve ever gotten to seeing him in detail was photos. And it’s different in person. He was…real. Warm and real, and I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to kiss him.
Evergreen paused in her chewing, shaking her head.
It’s a good thing he said my name and jolted me out of it. I might have done something I shouldn’t have.
His voice echoed in her mind. “Eeva…” There was no mistaking the heat in that word. It had been thick and heavy and was all too like the whispers she’d heard countless times in her dreams.
Yes, in the feverish dreams of a lovesick teenager. Not the dreams of a grown woman who is too smart to go down that road again. Nope, there’s no place for Sawyer Collins in my life anymore. I mean…he clearly wanted to kiss me. A moment longer and it would have happened. But then what? He has a whole life I’m not a part of. He has a job, which is gods know where. For all I know he has a girlfriend, too. No, we’re so far past that point. I can’t allow someone who had so much control over my heart in again. It’s better to keep my distance. I need to have control of the situation.
Evergreen glanced at him again, glad he wasn’t looking at her. Okay, it’s clear I’m still attracted to him. But so what? That’s not a problem. I was attracted to him before, and I managed just fine.
A small voice in her head countered her point. But you were only fighting your own desire last time, not his.
Evergreen took a deep drink from her mug, the hot liquid burning her throat on the way down.
It’s not a problem, she assured herself. It was only a fleeting thing on his part and a momentary lapse on mine. I mean, I’m not unattractive. Why wouldn’t a man want to kiss me? That doesn’t really mean anything. No, no, next time I won’t let it get that far. Next time... Wait…no, there won’t be a next time. After Yule, it won’t be likely that I’ll see him again, not unless the coven gets together for another sabbat. And that isn’t likely anytime soon. No, we probably won’t see each other for a long time after this.
Evergreen’s heart squeezed, and she couldn’t ignore it. See? This is a problem. Already, after just a few days, I’m upset about not seeing him again. I definitely need to keep my distance. I won’t go through that heartbreak again.
Evergreen and Sawyer ate their lunch in silence, the isolation cabin hollow with only the sounds of quiet chewing and the occasional slurp of cocoa drinking. After they were finished, Evergreen washed the extra mug and put it away.
“We should head back soon,” Evergreen murmured.
Sawyer nodded. “It should have been enough time that the birds and squirrels have found our offerings.”
“Right. Well then, let’s see if you can get the pictures you want.” Evergreen shut and locked the door of the isolation cabin and put the key back in its place.
The pair walked in silence through the woods. Their pace was slow, and they told themselves that it was not to scare any animals away. But it took them a lot longer to reach the clearing than it should have.
They crouched down, peeking over the hill to see if they had any visitors.
“Anything?” Evergreen whispered, unable to see that far. She squinted, trying to make out movement.
“There’s a squirrel,” Sawyer murmured back as he took the lens cap from his camera lens.
After a few snaps of the shutter, he looked down at the screen then turned the camera to her. She squinted at the screen, holding it close to her face. There was a grey squirrel with a big fluffy tail. He held a chestnut between his little paws.
“Aww, look at him. He’s so cute,” she said, grinning at the picture. “Are there any birds?”
Sawyer looked over the hill again and shook his head.
“Do you want to wait and see what we can get?” she asked.
“Do you mind? You’re not too cold, are you?”
“I’m fine for a while,” she assured.
After over an hour, their only reward was a few shots of a finch and a couple of blurry sparrows.
Sawyer glanced over at her as the sparrows flew away. “Let’s call it a day, huh?”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
He nodded. “Yeah, it’s getting cold out here. And besides, if your nose gets any redder, it might fall off.”
Evergreen held her glove to her nose, and Sawyer chuckled. The sound was rich and warm. Eeva... he whispered in her mind, desire coloring his voice with heat.
“Yeah, let’s head in,” she agreed.
Chapter 22
After dinner had been cleared from the table and Cassandra and Tara were doing the dishes, Sawyer and Eeva brought the supplies they’d gathered to the dining room. Wes set out some crafting paper.
“You found some really good stuff this time,” Ria complimented, carefully removing the boughs and pinecones from the basket and setting them on the paper.
Wes nodded. “I’ll go get the wreath ring and the twine.”
With well-practiced hands, Ria and Wes assembled the bits of greenery into a beautiful Yule wreath in less than an hour. As they worked, Sawyer and Eeva used the other side of the table to help Sol make his suncatcher.
When the wreath was complete, Sawyer took it to the front porch and hung it on the prepared hook. He walked down the front steps and turned around to better appreciate it from a distance. He nodded with a satisfied smile.
Everyone else was just settling down to the evening knitting when he returned. He took up residence beside Sol in his customary place.
“Eeva,” Ria said. “I’m going to need you to move your things from the attic down to the meditation room first thing in the morning. Everyone will be arriving tomorrow, and I have to make sure the room is clean.”
“What? Why?”
“Evergreen Pendre, you know we only have so much space. I warned you that you might have to sleep on the floor. And Devan and Piper need the single rooms. You know Devan has a CPAP machine, and Piper’s snoring could wake the dead.”
“But…” Eeva’s protests trailed off.
Sawyer studiously kept his eyes on his work and tried to maintain a smooth expression. But he strained his ears to hear over the beating of his heart.
“What are you worried about?” Wes asked. “You, Cassandra, and Sawyer used to share a tent all the time.”
“Maybe she’s worried one of us will walk in on them,” Cassandra suggested.
Sawyer glanced at Eeva out of the corner of his eye. Her cheeks were pink as she squinted at her cousin.
“Oh, don’t worry about that, honey,” Ria said. “Just lock the door.”
“Mom!” Eeva moaned, her face completely flushed.
“What?” Ria asked. “There’s nothing wrong with it. You’re both adults. As long as it’s consensual, there’s no problem.”
“Stop…talking…” Eeva mumbled, covering her face with her hands.
“Eeva, we didn’t teach you to be ashamed of these types of discussions,” Wes said. “Your mother is right. Sex is a natural act. There’s no reason to behave like this.”
“Okay, it’s a natural act. That doesn’t mean I want to talk about it with my parents in front of everybody. And anyways, it’s not right for you to suggest something like that would happen between Sawyer and I without taking our feelings into consideration.”
Silence answered her.
“I’m sorry,” Cassandra said finally. “I was just teasing, but I didn’t mean for you to get this upset. We always used to joke about you and Sawyer getting together.
I thought it would be okay.”
Eeva sighed. “Things are…different now,” she said.
How are they different? Sawyer wondered. Why was it okay then but not now? Is it because now she’s attracted to me? Now there is some semblance of a chance that it could happen?
“In any case,” Ria continued. “You still need to move your things to the meditation room.”
“Fine,” Eeva muttered.
The rest of the evening was fairly quiet, giving Sawyer’s active thoughts no distraction.
As he lay on the floor in his sleeping bag, he stared at the clear night sky through the glass roof of the meditation room. The low whir of the space heater barely even registered.
“Things are different now,” he murmured to himself, repeating Eeva’s words from earlier that evening.
He had to agree with her. Before, things hadn’t felt so real. He’d never been in a relationship before. He’d been a virgin. All of his ideas of what could happen with Eeva had been juvenile and, in some cases, downright inaccurate.
But now, they had both learned and experienced things. There wasn’t the same shyness that came with stepping cautiously into the unknown.
The jokes about them being together from their teenage years felt far away, truly fantastical. And though he had wanted them to become reality, he knew now that he hadn’t the courage to make it so back then.
Sawyer’s dream that night was a complex mixture of memory and fantasy, the kind where his conscious mind somehow marked the deviations from the past but wasn’t aware enough to change the course of the dream.
The spring night was warm, and the window to Sawyer’s dorm room was open. A hard knock sounded on his door, and he called that it was unlocked.
His friend Felicity walked in at his beckon.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “You really aren’t going to go?”
He glanced up from his phone as he lounged on his bed. “I said I wasn’t.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t believe you.”
“I didn’t go last year either.”
“What is your deal with Beltaine anyway? You go to all the other rituals with no problem.” Felicity climbed up on the bed, shooing his feet so she could sit down.
Sawyer didn’t answer but glanced back at his phone. He stared at a picture of Eeva, a wreath of spring flowers in her hair. It had been posted a half hour ago.
Felicity crawled up beside him on the bed, peeking at his phone. She groaned. “Oh, come on, dude. Not this again.”
“Leave me alone, Flick,” he said, turning the phone away from her.
“It has been what? Like a year and a half since you even talked to her? When are you going to give up?”
He didn’t respond. He didn’t even know the answer himself.
“You know, there are a lot of women trying to get your attention if you would just get your head out of your ass long enough to see them.”
Sawyer snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“Dude, I’m serious. Shelby is practically begging for it.”
Sawyer glanced over at his friend. There was no trace of joking on her face.
“I’m not really in a place where I can be with anyone. It wouldn’t be right with my head all full of…Eeva.”
“Ugh, you’re so honorable. It’s disgusting,” Felicity moaned sarcastically.
“Well, excuse me for being a decent human being.”
“You are not excused.”
Sawyer laughed. Felicity always had a way of making him laugh.
“Maybe you just need to, I don’t know, get her out of your system. You know?”
“Yeah? How am I going to do that?”
“You’re way too fixated. Loosen up, branch out, get to know some other people. You might like Shelby if you gave her a chance.”
“Yeah, and I might get intimate with her and call out someone else’s name. How fucked up would that be?”
Felicity paused for a long time before she asked, “Is that what you need to do?”
“What?”
“Do you need to be with someone else and pretend it’s her?”
“That’s just wrong.”
“It’s not if the other person consents to it… I’d do it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, dude, I don’t want you to think I’m, like, into you or anything. But I’m your friend, and I don’t like seeing you like this. We could do it on Beltaine and just go on with our lives tomorrow. I wouldn’t want your first time to be all emotionally complicated or whatever anyway.”
Sawyer’s heart pounded, and his mouth went dry. He stared at Felicity, wondering if she was serious.
Then the memory shifted from reality. He wasn’t in his dorm room; he was in the clearing at the retreat center. The Beltaine fire was built high; it would burn through the night.
Eeva was in Felicity’s place. But it wasn’t Eeva from his memories. It was the Eeva from the present. She did all the things Felicity had done. And it wasn’t the purely physical release it had been; it was everything he’d wanted. He didn’t have to pretend, and love shone in her eyes.
Chapter 23
The next morning, as Evergreen packed her things to move them downstairs, she wondered if Sawyer knew why she didn’t want to share a room with him.
I have a hard enough time maintaining balance with him around when I have my own space to retreat to, she thought. It’s fine. I can do this. I’m in complete control over my actions.
She pushed aside the thought that it was her emotions she had no control over.
She carried her things downstairs, hesitating at the door to the meditation room. She could hear her dad already puttering around in the kitchen. And Cassandra was curled up on the couch watching cartoons with Sol.
She knocked gently to be sure Sawyer wasn’t in there. Her knock received no reply, so she opened the door.
On the floor, Sawyer still lay asleep in his sleeping bag. As Sol’s laughter filtered in from the other room, Evergreen gently shut the door behind her.
She crept to one side and carefully placed her suitcase and Muir’s litter box on the floor.
Just as she turned to leave, Sawyer groaned in his sleep. She halted and went back, looking down at him.
Is he sick? she wondered. Is he having a nightmare?
Evergreen knelt down beside him. Sawyer’s face was moist with sweat, his hair stuck to his forehead. He squeezed his eyes shut. His breathing was heavy and uneven. She reached out her hand and placed the back gingerly on his cheek. He didn’t seem to be running a fever. A nightmare then?
“Eeva…” he whispered, his voice breathless and moaning.
She pulled her hand back with a start, certain she had awoken him. But his eyes remained closed.
He called her name again, and a shiver ran up her spine. It sounded too much like how he’d said it the day before, too much like how he’d said it in her dreams the previous night.
Feelings from her dreams, feelings she’d thought she had successfully washed away with cool water, surfaced in her mind. Eeva didn’t dream like other people. She didn’t see images like they did in the movies in any case. She always thought that it was because she didn’t see very well. But in her dreams, she didn’t see at all. She didn’t even really hear. She just felt and knew. She knew people by their presence rather than their faces or the sound of their voices.
It wasn’t really strange for her when she started to dream about her first time. She often did when she was sexually flustered. What was strange was the love she’d felt for Tyler in the dream. Oh, she liked him okay enough, and she had certainly been attracted to him. But she hadn’t loved him, which is why they broke up in the end.
The dream started out as usual, Tyler and her making out in the woods behind the humanities building. But just as Tyler had steadied her weight against the trunk of a particularly thick oak, the dream shifted. The lust she’d felt was overshadowed by the feeling that this is what she’d always wanted. And as Tyler had smiled down at her, and sh
e met the outpouring of his love with hers, she realized it wasn’t Tyler at all. It was Sawyer. And he whispered her name in a low moan, just as he was doing now.
As the feeling resurfaced, Evergreen reminded herself that it was just a dream. She had had many sexual dreams about her guy friends over the years. And once she was fully awake and in the light of day, the feelings in those dreams always faded out of existence.
Maybe it has been too long, she thought, trying to count how long it had been since she’d broken up with Dean. She hadn’t even gotten that far with Marty. Yeah, too long. This Yuletide reunion couldn’t have happened at a worse time.
She looked down at Sawyer again. His breathing had evened out, and he no longer seemed to be dreaming. As quietly as she could, she rose and left the room.
“Is Sawyer awake?” Ria asked as Evergreen entered the living room.
“No.”
“Will you go wake him, please? It’s time for breakfast.”
“I’ll do it!” Sol said, running off in that direction.
A few seconds later, Sol’s voice sounded from the other room. “Sawyer, it’s time to get up!”
There was a shout and a thud.
Shortly after, Sol emerged. “He’s awake,” he declared brightly, clearly proud of the job he’d done.
Sawyer entered after the boy. Even Evergreen could see his hair was mussed as his socked feet shuffled on the floor.
“Well, good morning, son,” Tara said. “You look wrung out. Didn’t you sleep well?”
Sawyer paused for a while. “It was fine,” he murmured, his voice still thick with sleep.
His mother sounded unconvinced. “Uh-huh. Well, get some food in you so you can shower before people start arriving. You look like you just escaped from being held hostage.”
At breakfast, Sawyer sat across from Evergreen as Sol insisted that it was his turn to sit beside her. Sawyer didn’t tease the boy. Didn’t say much of anything, in fact. And as they all tucked into their French toast, Evergreen glanced over at him.
He was eating, slow and deliberate.
