Growing and Kissing

by Helena Newbury

  He swept his hands under me and scooped me up, then marched over to the back door and out into the sunlight.

  I drew in a huge gulp of warm, clean air, then another and another. The fear eased along with my breathing. And then he was setting me down on my back on the warm, sun-drenched grass.

  He knelt beside me and took my cheek in one palm, using his thumb to rub away some of the dust. “Jesus, I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—” He looked off into the distance and his hands curled into fists. I could see the anger rising in him again, this time at himself.

  I reached up and took his hands in mine, curling my fingers around his fists. “It’s okay,” I said. “You just scared me a little.”

  He suddenly looked down into my eyes and I saw the fear and shame there. As if scaring me was the last thing he wanted. Then he jumped up and started to walk away, slapping the dust from his clothes.

  I got to my feet and ran after him. “It’s just a job,” I said. “I mean, I get it. You have to be scary. Scaring people’s what you do. I just hadn’t seen it before.”

  He didn’t turn around, but he shook his head. “It’s not just a job,” he muttered. “You know that.” He glanced over his shoulder at me. “You saw that.”

  I swallowed and nodded. It was quiet, in the long grass behind the houses, and the air was thick with the smell of wildflowers. No kids played on the street and few people had a reason to drive through the neighborhood so there was almost no traffic. If we closed our eyes, we could have been in a meadow somewhere. “Maybe you don’t have to be like that,” I said.

  He turned and spread his arms wide, showing me his huge, dust-caked body. “This is what I am!” he snapped. “This is who I am! I break stuff. I scare people. I don’t know how to do anything else.” He stalked away.

  “Maybe you could learn,” I offered to his retreating back. But I had no idea if he even heard me.

  ***

  I gave him some time to cool off before I went back inside the house. Now that the dust had settled—literally—I saw how cavernous the space was. You walked in the door and did a double-take at how far away the opposite walls were.

  We needed supplies, so we drove to the nearest hardware store, still covered in dust. We barely talked on the way, Sean keeping his eyes on the road and me chewing nervously on my lip. Nearly hitting me had changed things: I was at arm’s length again...maybe for good.

  At the store, we filled three shopping carts with stuff: the security doors I understood, but Sean bought wood, wallpaper, even window blinds. I didn’t get it: were we going to redecorate?

  Back at the house, Sean went to work and I spent the rest of the day planning out the rows of plants: how could we pack the most in without overcrowding them? I got so absorbed in it, it was evening before I looked up and saw what he’d done.

  Each of the house’s windows was now covered by a floor-to-ceiling box of false walls, like a tiny room only a few feet wide. I frowned, not understanding at first. Then I saw that the wallpaper he’d bought was gone. “Wait,” I said, pointing, “from the outside, does it look…?”

  He turned to look at me and I saw that the brooding anger had faded away. I even got a hint of a smile. “Let’s go see.”

  We went outside and looked in through the nearest window. It looked great: through the half-closed blinds we could see the wallpapered wall a few feet beyond...and nothing else. There was no hint that the house was now just an empty shell inside, and there would be no way anyone could see a plant. “That’s brilliant!” I told him.

  He shrugged self-consciously but I could tell he was proud. “Ah, it’s not.”

  I threw an arm around his shoulders and pulled him close to my side. “Are you kidding? It’s so much better than just papering over the windows. That’d look suspicious. This looks...normal.”

  He shrugged again, but he allowed himself a tiny smile. It looked great on him...but, at the same time, it made my chest crush inwards: I got the haunting impression that it was the first time anyone had ever praised him for anything.

  I wanted to say: See? You can build stuff, not just smash it. But I didn’t know how to put it into words. It didn’t help that I was suddenly distracted. Now that I’d pulled him up against me, I was very aware of the hard press of his body, all the way from shoulder to ankle, and how it would only take the smallest twist of our bodies to be pressed thigh to thigh, chest to breast, lips to lips. He didn’t say anything, but his shoulder tensed under my hand. I felt him turn his head and my scalp prickled as I felt him looking down at me. If I lifted my head and looked up into his eyes, would something happen? Would he grab me and—

  It was all too much, too fast. I dropped my hand from his shoulder and stepped quickly away. “We should get on,” I croaked. I walked back into the house and forced myself not to look back. If I looked back and he was looking at me...I wasn’t totally sure I’d be able to control myself.

  Back inside, he swept up the piles of dust and debris and I pretended to be measuring for the tables. Inside, I was going over and over what had just happened. Had we been seconds away from a kiss? I was simultaneously giddy with the thought of it and berating myself for even thinking of getting involved with someone like him.

  When I’d got myself together, Sean was installing heavy metal security doors to replace the existing ones. “Do we really need those?” I asked, worried.

  He looked at me seriously and nodded. My stomach flipped over. It was a reminder of what we were getting into. People were going to want to break in. Steal stuff. Hurt us.

  And he understood those people because he was one of them. Jesus, and I’m standing here fantasizing about him. I crushed the feelings down inside. Get it together!

  Another hour and the house was ready: one big, empty, secure space. It was perfect...but with the windows boxed off, all the light was artificial. And with the security doors in place, it felt more industrial than homely.

  That’s what this is, I reminded myself. A factory. A factory for making money. I’d be hunkered down in here for most of the next six months. I glanced around, suddenly claustrophobic despite the space. Then I looked down at my dust-covered, sweaty body. “I wish we’d kept the bathroom,” I muttered, thinking out loud.

  Sean looked up. “We did.”

  He led me down to the end of the house, where he’d made another of the tiny rooms to cover the bathroom window. He’d almost halved the bathroom’s size, but he’d managed to keep the toilet, shower stall and sink. There was no door, so he had to move aside one of the wood panels to let me in. “Thought you’d want somewhere to wash,” he told me.

  I looked from the shower to him in astonishment, then delight. Having a bathroom would make the place a lot more comfortable. And I needed a shower right now—my hair was matted with dust and it was caked on my skin and even inside my clothes. But... “There aren’t any towels,” I realized.

  “There are curtains,” said Sean. “From the lounge.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “The...drapes,” he said, having to grope for the American word. “From the living room.” He unfolded one of the big, scarlet drapes and threw it to me.

  I didn’t need telling twice. I got inside the tiny room and waited while he propped the wood panel back in place. There was almost no floor space: I had to undress in the shower stall and hang my clothes on the sink. But it didn’t matter: sluicing the dust from my body felt amazing. The water turned gray for a while, there was so much dirt, but soon I was clean and luxuriating under the spray, letting it beat on my tired shoulders.

  I started to think about Sean. I’d already had to rework my opinion of him countless times. Just days ago, he’d been the scary guy in the elevator, the notorious thug everyone avoided. I’d seen too much to believe that’s all he was. I’d caught glimpses of who he used to be...or maybe who he had the potential to be. And I liked that person.

  But none of that changed who he was. Seeing that cold, deadly an
ger in full force as he’d torn the house apart really had shaken me. It didn’t feel as if he’d ever hurt me...the horror in his eyes when he’d nearly clipped me with the hammer told me that. But he hurt other people...plenty of them. And he was a criminal, part of a world I barely knew.

  I froze. That isn’t true anymore, is it? I’d leapt right into that world. Technically, now, I was the criminal. I was the one growing half a million dollars worth of weed. He was just hired help.

  Was that why I was drawn to him? Was I just trying to find support, or prove to myself that his world wasn’t all bad? But even before deciding to grow, I’d been attracted to him. I’d lain in bed, imagining our bodies twisting together. I’d thought about how it would feel to kiss my way across the broad expanse of his hard, solid chest, to run my hand down his pecs, sliding down over his side and then over his abs, a slalom course that ended at his cock. I’d thought about how he’d grunt at the touch of my hand and shove me savagely back on the bed. Those powerful thighs of his, hard with muscle, levering my legs apart. His body pushing between them, God, no chance of fighting back at all, even if I wanted to. His hands on my shoulders, pressing me down into the bed, as he—

  I registered a strange sighing sound and a change in the light, but it wasn’t until I heard the crash that I turned around.

  The wood panel Sean had propped in place had toppled over and was now lying on the floor. That meant one whole side of the bathroom was missing, and Sean and I were standing facing each other, both of us gaping at the other one.

  Except he was dressed. And I was naked and dripping wet and—

  Oh Jesus, my hand was between my thighs.

  We both stared, our mouths open and our lips moving soundlessly. And then Sean’s eyes narrowed. The look he gave me made every inch of my exposed skin blaze, as if I was standing naked in front of a furnace. And as it soaked into me, I reacted: I felt my nipples tighten and a deep, hot ache explode in my groin, turning instantly to slick wetness. I couldn’t move. Two, three seconds ticked past, and with every shuddering breath I took, I could feel him drinking me in, burning my image into his mind forever.

  And I liked it. I’d never been looked at that way before: like I was a painting or a statue, like I was something he could look at forever and still never get enough.

  Then I suddenly came to my senses and twisted away from him. Covering myself wasn’t so easy: my makeshift towel was on the sink and there was barely room to open the shower door to get it. For a few seconds I had to stand there with my naked ass towards him, one arm hooked around the door, flailing for the drape, while the other clutched at the dial to turn off the water. Only when I finally had the scarlet drape wrapped around me did I turn around. I wanted to see if he’d averted his eyes.

  He hadn’t. He was staring at me transfixed. I gulped, aware that the drape was clinging to my body as tightly as any Hollywood red carpet dress.

  Sean walked slowly towards me, lifted the panel and slotted it back into place. His eyes never left mine, not until the false wall finally separated us again.

  I let out a long, shaky breath and slumped against the wall of the shower stall. I knew I had to dry myself, put my clothes on and get out of there. I knew I had to walk out there as if nothing had happened so we could get back to being business partners. I knew I had to dunk all these feelings back under the black waters of my mind and hold them there.

  I knew all that. But for long minutes, I just stood there staring at the panel Sean had put back in place...and wishing it would fall again.

  When I finally got myself under control, I threw on my clothes, said goodbye to Sean and almost ran to my car, then sat behind the wheel shaky and weak. That was just the first day in the grow house, I thought. How the hell am I going to manage six months?

  Sean

  I woke up and frowned.

  Most of the time, I don’t remember my dreams and that’s a blessing. There’s bad shit down in the depths of my memory, rooted in too firmly to ever extract. When I’m awake, I can mostly keep it contained, bricking it up behind sheer willpower. A little of it always escapes, a toxic drip, drip, drip of blackness that sours my mind and feeds my anger, trying to lure me into losing control completely. But mostly, by day, I’m its master. At night, things reverse. It lurks in the dark places, waiting for me to drop into sleep so it can grab the other me. The scared kid.

  At four AM in the darkness, we’re all scared kids.

  I don’t remember what happens, but sometimes I wake up in sweaty, twisted sheets and that wall I built is lying in ruins, my past so close that I can reach out and touch it. And it takes an hour of wailing away on the guitar or smashing someone’s place to pieces before I feel like me again.

  This time, though, I wanted to remember. This dream had been great.

  This time, I’d dreamt of her.

  There were after-images of her in my mind, the sort you think will be clearer if you close your eyes and focus on them, but the more you concentrate the more they break up and blow away. I could still feel sunshine on my skin...yeah, there’d been lots of sunshine, streaming through that red hair of hers. And her legs...long, graceful legs, bare under a long skirt. She’d been barefoot. Barefoot in a fucking meadow, that’s where we were. And I’d been...we’d been…

  I screwed my eyes shut, but it was gone. I cursed hard enough to strip the paint from the walls.

  It wasn’t like I should need dream-Louise. I had plenty of images of real-Louise filed away in my head: her in that green scoop-neck top, for one, all that soft, pale cleavage and her bewildered by all my staring. Her lying in the grass, beautiful even covered in dust, my heart in my throat because I’d come so close to killing her.

  But mainly, her in the shower.

  I’d seen just a taste of her and it was maddening. Smooth skin, milky-white and gleaming with water. Her breasts, the ones I’d hungered after so badly, were just perfect. The water had slid down over the soft globes like it was caressing them, making them shine and glisten, dripping from her rosebud nipples. I’ve never wanted to fill my hands with a woman’s breasts so much. I could already feel them, wet and heavy and soft under my palms, the nipples rubbing across my fingertips.

  Her stomach, soft and smooth and with that cute little navel I wanted to kiss and lick until she squirmed against me. She had that gorgeous womanly shape: tight on the waist, flaring out at the hips. And between her thighs….

  I’d been imagining what lay between her thighs ever since I first caught sight of her. Every man wonders, when they see a redhead. When that board had dropped and I’d seen her, my eyes had dropped to her groin in less time than it takes to blink...but my view had been hidden. By her hand.

  I still wasn’t sure what to make of that part. There was a chunk of my ego that wanted her to have been playing with herself, thinking about me. But I knew it was more likely she’d just clapped her hand there to hide herself.

  It didn’t matter. Getting so close to seeing every part of her, even that most secret one, just made my cock even harder for her. I needed her naked and under me like I needed to breathe...and yet I had to keep fighting that urge.

  That was why I tried to hang on to those images of dream-Louise. Because my dreams were the only place I could be with her.

  ***

  We spent the day setting up the banks of lights. I’d told Louise to spend the extra money to get low-energy LED bulbs: I’d known plenty of growers get caught when the power company got suspicious about the huge amount of power they were drawing. We hung them from the ceiling so they pointed down at the tables. When we switched them on, the tabletops became desert-sun bright.

  That evening, the plants arrived. Louise had very carefully reached out over the internet and struck up a friendship with some guys from the Netherlands, talking about gene lines and heritage and cloning and other shit that made them all sound like they were evil scientists in a sci-fi movie. They’d hooked her up with their guy in the US and he’d agreed to sell
her a batch of seedlings. He pulled his van into our garage, opened the doors and we were staring our future in the face.

  “That’s it?” I asked. “They’re tiny.”

  “They’re tiny now,” Louise told me. “Wait till they’re near the ceiling. This place’ll be a jungle.”

  I had my hammer ready in case the deal turned bad, but as soon as the two of them got talking, I knew we had nothing to worry about. This guy was like her: a plant nerd. This was the science end of the business, where everything was happy and fun. It was down at the other end, the selling, where things got ugly. Some time soon, I was going to have to introduce Louise to that part of it, too, and the thought of that made my stomach twist into knots.

  I helped Louise carry the trays of tiny plants, each one only the size of my finger, through to the house. Louise carefully lifted the first plant from the tray, set it down on a table and hunkered down to look at it. “So fragile,” she said. She was so close to it that the words made the leaves tremble.

  I squatted down on the other side of the table, because I figured I should get a look at the core of our new business. Our faces were maybe a foot apart, the tiny seedling rustling in the breeze whenever one of us talked. We had to practically whisper, or we’d knock the damn thing over. “That’s going to be worth thousands of dollars?” I asked.

  “That guy’s stuff is the best. Trust me, he’s an undiscovered talent. I did my homework and this strain has so much potential to just pump out THC.” Her gaze flicked to me. “THC’s the stuff that—”

  “—gets you high. I’m not a complete fuckwit.”

  She blinked. “I didn’t think you were. Sorry, I just—”

  I had to interrupt her again, because if she kept being nice to me I was going to lean across and do something I regretted. “If it’s such hot shit, how come we can afford it?”

  She grinned: a slow, satisfied smile that I really really hoped was the same one she got after she’d just come her brains out. “Because it’s so tough to grow. You need to treat it really carefully and get everything just right...but, if we do, I think it can be great. Like, off-the-charts great.”