by Staci Hart
He laughed. “Laney thinks it’s possible to land a feature, depending on how the window displays go.”
“No pressure,” I joked.
“If anyone can do it, it’s you,” he said, stripping me of the last of my armor. “Just say the word, and we can do whatever you want. Your wish is my command.”
I wish I hated you. I wish you’d be an ass. I wish you remembered kissing me.
I rolled my eyes at myself. I’d had a dozen boyfriends and a thousand kisses in the last ten years, but I couldn’t seem to remember a single one, except the one he didn’t.
Maybe the torch still burned because my wound had festered for so long, buried in my heart. Maybe it was because it had happened in a moment when I was vulnerable and lost. Or because I’d trusted him with words too raw and real to utter aloud. Or because he’d promised me something he never acknowledged again, leaving me feeling nothing but betrayal and pain in a time when I was already shattered.
I hadn’t been lying when I told Ivy I hadn’t thought about it in years. But the second I’d seen his face, I’d been transported back to that day when I’d stood almost exactly in that spot, waiting for him. And he’d promptly ignored me, making his way to Ivy for a kiss right there, right in front of me.
Ten years. Really, I needed to let it go. But the wound was the sort that never healed, the kind that flared when the seasons changed or a storm blew in. And the season was changing.
I wondered if it already had.
Luke lived by laws that offended the very foundation of what I believed in. He spoke of adventure like it was nirvana. My nirvana was security. And security was not found in risk, but in consistency.
But we could be different, and just because he was different didn’t mean he was wrong, no matter how much it felt like it was. The truth was that Luke was leading the charge in revamping the store, lending his generous muscles to the task. Even today, he’d come prepared, and that earned my respect even if it was tarnished a bit by my terrible attitude.
All you can control is your reaction, I told myself, an adage my mother had imposed on me.
And so I spent the next hours appreciating the view and reminding myself that good manners were made of small sacrifices.
By the time I finished caulking the second wall, Luke was right behind me, touching up my work, which was both annoying and thorough, the feelings negating each other.
I climbed off the ladder and stretched my back out, twisting against the ache. “All right, ready to prime?”
“Can’t prime, not until tomorrow. Brick’s gotta dry. But we should definitely have the whole space painted tomorrow.”
“Oh, good. I can help again, if you want.” I shuddered to think what I’d wear after the dramatics this morning and mourned the use of my cutest painting outfit on caulk.
“Hey, I’ll take all the help I can get,” he said with a sidelong smile, setting his caulk gun on a ladder step. “Come on—let me show you what I found in storage.”
Luke looked like a kid on his birthday, full of possibility and excitement, and when he passed, he snagged my hand as if it were the most natural thing, towing me toward the greenhouse.
My hand disappeared in his fist, and his wide back obstructed my view, but I followed him like I had the option not to, nearly two of my steps to his one. He pushed open the swinging double doors to the greenhouse and turned to head down the main aisle.
The greenhouse inhabited the space behind five buildings, an oasis teeming with flowers begging to be cut. Every morning, I walked into this place empty-handed and walked out with my arms full of an almost unimaginable bounty of fresh-cut flowers.
This was my happy place. The smell of soil and leaves and blooming flowers. The blanket of humidity. The sunlight filtering in through the glass roof and walls, bathing everything it touched. Mr. Bennet’s head popped up between vertical planters of lavender delphinium, offering a knowing smile and a flick of his eyes to where Luke had a hold of me. Kash jerked his chin at us in greeting as he pushed a wheelbarrow full of dirt down one of the side aisles, a similar smile on his face, though his was less innocent.
Under their scrutiny, I fought the urge to jerk my hand away, not sure I could get it out of the vise if I wanted to. Which I otherwise didn’t.
Luke towed me around the corner and down the ramp to the basement, chattering on about vegetable storage containers and old ladders, wire baskets and stands with baskets and more. By the time we reached the foot of the ramp and flicked on the lights, he was practically giddy.
Tin lights sparked to life, and I caught sight of a blur with a tail—Brutus, hot on the trail of a rat, I was sure. And there Luke stood, next to his bounty, with all the pride Brutus would display when he dumped said rat at my feet.
I gasped, smiling as I made my way toward the goods he’d arranged in the center of the long, crowded space, surrounded by the chaos of a hundred seventy years of discarded supplies. And just like he’d said, there was a small organizer made of wooden shelves and angled wired baskets, so you could reach right in and grab whatever suited you. There were several ladders, coils of rope, piles of ancient, salvaged wood. Sideboards, an apothecary cabinet, washboards and washtubs, pails of every shape and size. I imagined them all full of flowers and sitting proudly on the big farmhouse table and thought for a second that my heart might burst.
“Luke … I can’t believe all this stuff,” I breathed as I stepped into the mix, running a hand over one of the sideboards. “When was the last time your mom came down here?”
“I dunno, but it must have been forever. No one’s updated the shop since my grandma in the seventies. To be honest, she was probably the last person to come down here for anything other than fertilizer or hoses.”
My eyes widened, my smile wondrous. “I just had an idea.” I moved for the haphazardly stacked wooden crates. “We could make planters out of these, hang them vertically. Half of them with succulents, the other half with leafy greens—ivy, spider plants, baby rubber plants, oooh, or some coleus … their leaves have that purple in the middle. Do you know what I mean?”
“I do,” he said, still smiling. “They’d go well with Persian shield.”
I brightened up another dozen watts. “Genius. I think that should be our first installment. And what if…” My wheels turned, zipping through the catalog of riches Luke had uncovered. “I could make a flower cloud … pampas grass and heather, wheat, maybe…” I said to myself, thoughts clicking together behind every blink.
“Flower cloud?” he asked with skepticism written all over his face.
“It’s a thing,” I said absently. “An arrangement, usually monochromatic, shaped like a cloud.” I wandered toward some shelves, spotting crates of glassware I couldn’t make out from the ground. “What about these?” I pulled the ladder over and ascended. “Are these milk bottles?”
“Careful, Tess,” Luke warned, approaching as I climbed.
“Oh, I’m fine,” I assured him, reaching for one of the crates. The ladder wasn’t quite tall enough, and I flexed my feet to get me a little taller. I stretched for the crate with singular focus on grabbing it without breaking my neck.
“Seriously, this ladder is old—”
“I’ve almost got it,” I insisted, reaching.
My fingers brushed the very edge of the crate before gravity shifted, the round-legged ladder slipping out from under me. My weight pulled me sideways, down, and my only thought was that for the safety of the clinking milk bottles.
Luke caught me with an oof and a small bounce, the landing easy and gentle even though my limbs had flailed, wheeling as I fell. Somehow, he hooked me almost perfectly, though I managed to crack him across the face with my forearm.
He shook his head, blinking and wincing as he tried to clear it, and I didn’t think, just grabbed his face, wide-eyed as I inspected it.
“Oh my God, are you okay?” I breathed, tilting his face so I could look at his nose, wondering if it would bleed. I’d
felt his teeth through his lips, so I checked those next, moving his face around with my hands so I could examine it.
When he laughed, I noted a slight swelling on the plump part of his upper lip but nothing more. “You almost broke your neck, and you’re worried about me?”
A smaller, more nervous laugh left me. “You caught me like a sack of flour. How’d you manage that? I must have looked like a windmill.”
He shrugged, his cheeks high under my palms and scruff tickling my skin. “Just lucky, I guess. And you looked more like an octopus than a windmill.”
Another laugh, this one easier, lighter. And when it was gone, I took a breath that locked in my lungs.
His face was close to mine, his arms holding me like a crucible. And I melted in them like metal, an amalgamation of emotion. Surprise and desire, need and want. No logic was present, only the creases of his lips and the sweet puff of his breath. Only his jaw, hard in my hands. The heat of his skin, his chest bare and pressed against me. His eyes, blue as a cornflower. His lashes like raven feathers.
There was a kiss waiting on those lips, waiting for time to start again.
There was a kiss on those lips, one I wanted.
The realization was a snowball in the face of my desire, and I jerked my hands away, laughing like a crazy person while my brain chemicals went ballistic.
Those lips of his ticked down, but he took the hint, hinging to set my feet on the ground.
“Thank God you were there to catch me,” I rambled, putting a few feet between us. My face was on fire. “That’ll teach me not to listen to you.”
“I’ll remember you said that.”
I kept laughing to cover my confusion and discomfort, the sound strange, my cheeks hot. I bumped into the table, catching the tobacco baskets before they toppled over and onto the ground.
“You all right, Tess?” he asked with that smile on his face and his chest on full display.
I set the baskets to rights and straightened up, putting my own smile on. “Yeah. Uh-huh. Just the adrenaline, I think. I mean, I did almost just die.”
“That would make me a hero.”
I rolled my eyes. “Let’s not get crazy.”
“And that would make you the damsel.”
That earned him a mocking laugh and a flash of annoyance that I’d actually needed saving.
“I mean, I did catch you in a princess hold after you fell dramatically from that ladder.”
I ignored my curiosity over how he knew what a princess hold was in favor of, “And what, you’re the prince?”
He narrowed his eyes like it was a real pickle. “I’d say more of a knight.”
“More like a pirate.”
“With a heart of gold,” he added.
“Well, thanks,” I said. “For catching me.”
“Saving you,” he corrected.
“Saving me,” I amended, rolling my eyes hard enough to almost hurt.
He stepped to the crates, inspecting one. “Is there anything specific you need me to do for the planters, or can I just go nuts?”
“Go nuts—as long as you don’t get mad if I make you redo them.”
A smirk cast down the line of his shoulder, straight at me. “Impress Tess or else. Got it. Meet me back here tomorrow at eight, if you want to help paint the shop.”
“I’ll be here,” I promised.
“Thanks,” he said. “For the help.”
The echo of my own thank you brought an unbidden smile to my lips. “You’re welcome. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Until then, Tess.”
I turned, needing out of the room. Out of the building. Off of this block. And even then, I didn’t know if the space between Luke and me would be enough.
The mixture of emotions was like cheap concrete—everything from the smooth sand of almost kissing him to the gravel of the fact that him was Luke Bennet. I wanted to like him. I really did. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was, on some level, being manipulated by force of his will and charm. It felt disingenuous somehow.
I had no reason to believe him to be anything but sincere, but I didn’t trust him as far as I could throw him, and he weighed as much as a baby elephant.
A thought struck me as I hurried out of the greenhouse: I had been operating under the assumption that he wanted to sleep with me, a presumption that had no merit or foundation. He’d kissed me once, drunk on whiskey and full of teenage hormones. That didn’t mean he still wanted to kiss me a decade later. He’d been married since, for God’s sake.
Maybe he just wanted to be friends.
The thought gave me both a thrill and an aversion. A thrill because I found that part of me did want to be friends with him, and if I wiped away the notion that he wanted something other than that, my claws retracted. And an aversion because sixteen-year-old Tess wanted him to kiss her again and wanted him to regret forgetting. She wanted vengeance, I figured, and who could blame her?
Certainly not twenty-six-year-old Tess.
Friends. I tested the thought, rolled it around in my brain. And I smiled to myself, stepping out of the shop and into the summer heat.
I could be friends with Luke Bennet, so long as he never wanted to kiss me again.
8
RHYMES WITH YES
LUKE
I wanted to kiss Tess Monroe.
I’d wanted to kiss her the second she walked into the shop yesterday, wearing overalls and a Cure T-shirt. I’d wanted to kiss her as I watched her scrub the wall with her little face wrinkled up in concentration. I’d wanted to kiss her when she fell off the ladder and into my arms. And all day today while we painted the shop, I only thought about one thing.
I wanted to kiss her. And I was accustomed to getting what I wanted.
“Did you hear me?” Kash asked impatiently.
“Hmm?”
He rolled his eyes, his long body stretched out on the bottom bunk in our old room. “Man, what’s with you?”
“I’ve been scrubbing and painting the shop for two days. I’m tired.”
“Right,” he said. “And the redhead in the overall shorts has nothing to do with it.”
I leaned back in the wooden desk chair I’d taken up residence in, the hinge squeaking. “As if Tess Monroe would willingly give me the time of day.”
He shrugged. “Seems to me like she’s given you the time every hour, on the hour, for two days. What’s with her? She was different today.”
It was true. This morning, she’d walked into the shop, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ready to work with a smile on her face. She’d only insulted me seven times, and one of those was a backhanded compliment. My stats were down: the day before, it’d been twenty-three insults and a jab with a broom handle that I couldn’t be sure was accidental.
Not that I was counting.
“I dunno what’s gotten into her, but I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth. I’m just taking the boon and moving on.”
“Man, she looked so cute with that bandana in her hair and paint on her nose. And her ass in those overalls…” He whistled up at my old bunk.
I fought the urge to chuck my Batman paperweight at him.
“So are you going after her or what?” Kash asked, smirking.
“I just got her to quit treating me like a dog. Pretty sure anything more is off the table.”
“Maybe I’ll go after her then. Think I’ve got a shot?”
I snorted to cover my immediate fury at the thought. “She’s a girl with standards, Kash. If I don’t have a shot, you’ve got none in hell.”
“Maybe she just needs somebody older. More mature.”
“We were born in the same year, asshole.”
“I’m just saying. Maybe she’s looking for stability. Everybody knows you’re about as stable as uranium.”
“And you’re running your mouth like you want a foot in Uranus.”
Kash laughed. “I’d love to see you try.”
I eyed him. “You don’t actually like her
, do you?”
“Nah,” he said, smiling. “I just want you to admit you do.”
A sigh of concession blew out of me, the pause filled with my thoughts. “We almost kissed yesterday,” I admitted.
Kash sat up so fast, he thunked his head on the bottom bunk. “Goddammit—” He rubbed at his forehead “—Warn a guy before you go saying things like, I almost kissed Tess.”
I laughed openly at his misfortune, hoping it left a mark. “She fell off a ladder in storage, and I caught her. Topless.”
His eyes bulged, hand still pressed to his forehead. “Tess was topless in storage?”
“No, I was.”
He rolled his eyes, chucking a pillow at me. I caught it midair and chucked it right back at him.
“I’m surprised she didn’t deck you,” he said, fluffing the pillow before leaning back again.
“Me too, if I’m being honest. She hates me. Hated me. Maybe still hates me a little.”
“What’d you do to her?” he asked. At this point, the question was rhetorical—neither of us knew, no matter how many times we’d asked.
“Who knows? But I think the last couple of days have helped my case. All I had to do was show up and not fuck up.”
“Don’t worry. There’s still time,” he reassured me.
“Trust me, I’m aware. I’ve been working on the installation for her in the back, and I’m both convinced I’m going to disappoint her and that I’ll knock her socks off.”
“Or her bra. Think you can knock that off?”
“If she were anybody else, I’d guarantee it. But Tess?” I made a resigned noise.
He watched me for a second in that way he had about him, the quiet assessment that ran under his outward charm. It was a mask—that much I knew for a fact—armor to protect his soft spots. Everyone thought he was nothing but a girl-crazy flirt, just like me. But that was just how we liked it. Let them think we were empty.
There was comfort in being underestimated. We were constantly set to impress everyone.
Something in his expression shifted, and I knew what he was going to say before he said it.
