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.”
“And you can get it just right.” A statement, not a question.
She nodded. Then blushed. “I mean, you know, the stuff I did in college gives me a big advantage. Most of the growers don’t have that background—they’re just fumbling around in the dark. It’s not me. I’m nothing special.”
I just stared at her. She honestly believed that. She flushed again under my gaze, but I couldn’t look away.
“I should start planting,” she said at last. “I’ve got a lot to do.”
I moved back a little from the table and watched as she took the first pot, filled it with a carefully-measured mix of soils and fertilizers, and transferred the seedling into it.
There was something incredibly restful about watching her work: the seriousness of her expression as she measured, the total joy in her face as she sunk her pale fingers into the dark earth.
I could tell she was completely absorbed—I’d ceased to exist. And that meant I could watch her as much as I wanted.
I could take in the hanging curls of her copper-colored hair as they bounced against her cheeks and the smudge of dirt she left on her nose as she brushed them out of the way.
I could watch her creamy breasts bounce and sway in her scoop-neck top as she leaned over the plant and imagine running my hands over her ripe, curving ass through the tight denim of her jeans.
I would have happily watched her all night but, after the fifth plant, she suddenly remembered I was there and said, “You don’t have to stay. I’ll be here for hours.”
I nodded and headed for the door. I knew the smart thing to do was to leave—I was too into her, too close to losing control and doing something stupid. I put my hand on the door handle. And then, out of nowhere, I heard myself say: “Or...you could show me what to do and I could help.”